The American South
terrasig | November 5, 2009
Some readers may be aware that Rebecca Skloot is about to release her much-anticipated book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a story that is about much more than the black Southern woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to the most famous human cancer cell line. (Crown, 2 Feb 2010, preorder here).
HeLa cells, as they are known, have played a role in the development of vaccines for polio and cervical cancer, the part of last year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Harald zur Hausen, and the PhD thesis 20 years ago of a certain natural products pharmacology blogger.
Having been…
terrasig | October 26, 2009While working on a science-rich post and writing an exam, something came across Twitter that is, well, too good to just be seen only on Twitter.
Fullsteam is the name of the plow-to-pint Southern microbrewery in Durham, NC, no-longer-in-planning-but-not-quite-done and I have written about the tweeter several times. The imagination behind brewing a beer with sweet potatoes (it's awesome, btw) or kudzu comes from the very same mind that burped into his iPhone for the benefit of shared education with his daughters.
The result:
I use Google voice search all the time and have been very…
terrasig | June 13, 2009WordCampRDU is a community oriented one-day conference on all things related to the blogging and website platform WordPress. There are tracks for beginner and advanced WordPress users with presentations and useful information. WordCampRDU will be highlighted by a much anticipated keynote speech by WordPress Founder, Matt Mullenweg. http://wordcamprdu.com/2009/
This is my first "camp" conference after having gone exclusively to science-related blogger gatherings. I'm also very excited that this conference is being hosted at the School of Education at North Carolina Central University in…
terrasig | June 11, 2009
The heavy blanket of moisture across the City-That-Tobacco-Built is being broken this morning on the 69th wedding anniversary of the late civil rights scholar, Dr John Hope Franklin, and his late wife, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, with a high-profile memorial and celebration of their lives. Leading the dignitaries in speaking will be former President William Jefferson Clinton and attorney Vernon Jordan, Jr.
The memorial will be held today, 11 am - 1 pm EDT, on the campus of the University-That-Tobacco-Built in the conservatively-named Duke Chapel, more appropriately described as a Gothic…
terrasig | June 7, 2009
Since last December, we've been involved with a number of good friends in Key West, Florida, on a green initiative that includes the investigations of medicinal plants of the Florida Keys and northern Caribbean. Following from these interactions with students and colleagues at Duke University and in Key West itself, I had the good fortune of being interviewed last week together with conservation biologist Stuart Pimm on KONK-1630AM community radio by Erika Biddle for her biweekly Eco-Centric World program.
Raised in Germany, she participated in the formations of the first political Green…
terrasig | May 24, 2009Award-winning investigative journalist friend, Barry Yeoman, passes along this morning a fantastic post from awesome local Durham, NC, blog, Bull City Rising.
Heh. Rising.
Now Men's Health magazine has given Durham another trumpeting tribute, having taken a long, hard look at one of the rankings that only such a periodical could bring.
Durham found itself in stiff competition -- one hundred other cities and metro areas, to be precise -- but stood tall to prevail, ranking sixth in the U.S. among...
...cities that don't need Viagra.
Just what we need: another reason for the University-That-…
terrasig | May 10, 2009
This is for all of my peeps in SW Florida and all who love folk music. I received a lovely e-mail last week from Robin Leach, wife of mandolin player Dan Leach (and mother of bassist Andy Leach), who came upon my posts about a very special musician. Dan played with a gentleman named Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58.
Yesterday, my friends celebrated Steve's life and…
terrasig | May 9, 2009I'm having trouble writing today for various reasons. However, let me leave you with two signs I've encountered today. I like signs.
terrasig | May 3, 2009If you follow me on Twitter (@abelpharmboy) or looked at this post Thursday, you'd know that I was going to a meetup of area Twitter users. I honestly had no idea what to expect and have to say that it was a rather enriching experience. It gave me a chance to press the flesh with a crowd very different and higher energy than some (but not all) scientific gatherings.
The group was different because the people I met were more in the tech and communications biz and the higher energy might have come from that I was probably one standard deviation away from the mean age. Click through the photo…
terrasig | April 29, 2009Word around town and just tweeted by local hero, Ayse, is that the great Ernie Barnes passed away yesterday at the age of 70.
From the biography at Mr Barnes' website:
Born Ernest Barnes, Jr. on July 15, 1938 to Ernest Sr. and Fannie Mae Geer Barnes during the Jim Crow era in Durham, North Carolina, his mother worked as a domestic for a prominent attorney. As a child, young Ernest would accompany her to work and was allowed to peruse the extensive collection of art books. One day in junior high school, a teacher found the self-admitted fat, introverted young Barnes drawing in a notebook while…
terrasig | April 27, 2009
I just learned of this great post from Southern Fried Science via a tweet from Southern Fried Scientist that was retweeted from Rick MacPherson (Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets). I mention this because my RSS reader is so full of unread posts that Twitter is serving me far better these days by quickly pointing me in the direction of blog posts and articles that would most likely interest me.
The blog is written by Andrew and David - both Southern, both fried, and both smelling of a combination of smoked pork and spiced Low Country shrimp. The blog is characterized as, "The new look…
terrasig | March 28, 2009
Dr John Hope Franklin was a 1935 A.B. graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, TN, then earned his M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1939) from Harvard University. [For reference, W.E.B. DuBois also graduated from Fisk (1888) and was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895).] Franklin's doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, planted the seed for his classic 1947 work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (subtitle later changed to "A History of African-Americans"). This book, now in its eighth edition, was written originally during his four-…
terrasig | March 25, 2009My colleague, DrugMonkey, recently wrote an absolutely fantastic post on bigotry in sports and the pioneers other than Jackie Robinson in breaking the so-called color barrier. I had actually forgotten that in the 1970s, Warren Moon spent much of his career in the Canadian Football League because NFL teams wanted him to convert to some other position, you know, because Black players couldn't be quarterbacks. The post is much deeper than that and I encourage you strongly to read it.
But Brother Drug triggered my longstanding intention to write about a related topic; between his post and the…
Fullsteam Brewery founder and local-ag guru, Sean Wilson, to appear on WUNC-FM's The State of Things
terrasig | March 18, 2009The local food movement is not local here in the sprawling US. Hence why am posting this note here.
North Carolina beer saint and local-ag brewer, Sean Lily Wilson, will be on the radio in about an hour. We featured Sean back in January when the state's flagship newspaper named him Tar Heel of the Week for his efforts to modify our draconian beer laws to allow high-gravity beers, especially many of our European favorites, to be sold statewide.
Sean's a good man, a great dad, and epitomizes community on so many levels. If you're not local, you can listen to him together with two other…
terrasig | March 14, 2009Well, the living nightmare that is my home office refuses to clean itself completely. So , I am left with all the best intentions but no pie to contribute to the Pi Day competition.
I had intended to bake PharmGirl's great-grandmother's old Southern traditional coconut pie. Alas, it was not to be.
From PharmGirl's Facebook page today:
This is my husband's favorite -- a recipe passed down from my great grandmother.
Coconut Pie
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut
1 cup milk
1/2 stick butter
1 t. vanilla
3/4 cups sugar (decrease to 1/2 cup if using sweetened shredded coconut)
1 unbaked pie…
terrasig | March 8, 2009I used to keep a separate blog for items of local interest but I can't even keep up with one. So, you'll occasionally have to bear with me posting about issues of import from the area in and around Terra Sigillata World Headquarters.
But here's a local bit of info for our NC Triangle readers that should also remind the rest of you around the world to see what you can do in your own communities, especially during the global economic downturn.
This came across a tag in my Facebook from my far-better half, PharmGirl. I said, "Wow, this is great - where did you get it? Did you write it?" The…
terrasig | March 4, 2009I just wanted to send out congratulations to my friends and colleagues in Charleston at the Medical College of South Carolina (MUSC) on the 2 March announcement of their receipt of NCI Cancer Center designation:
The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Hollings Cancer Center has attained National Cancer Institute (NCI) designation, a distinction held by only 63 other cancer centers in the U.S. The Hollings Cancer Center (HCC) is the only institution in South Carolina with this prestigious status.
Andrew S. Kraft, MD, Director of the Hollings Cancer Center (HCC), said being named one of…
terrasig | January 20, 2009
It'll be a few days before I can get together posts on this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 conference in frigid North Carolina. The Friday Fermentable Live! was a terrific success and it already looks like there are seven posts out there (for example, Eva Amsen on her Nature Networks blog, Expression Patterns, put up an account with vasectomy-like precision).
I had the honor of participating in two sessions: one on gender and allies in STEM, online and off, with the youthful Alice Pawley and Zuska and another on pseudonymity/anonymity and building online reputation with PalMD. Speaking…
terrasig | January 12, 2009
Bora/Coturnix has a nice post up this morning on science and nature things to do around the Research Triangle area for those of you coming to the area and staying before and/or after.
While Bora resides in Chapel Hill, I take personal pride in singing the praises of Durham, the sometimes-maligned apex of the scalene triangle that comprises, well, the Research Triangle (the third point being Raleigh, the state capital).
Since the unconference is being held at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park (80% of which is actually in Durham), here are two of the most valuable resources I use:…