Announcements
oracknows | December 7, 2006Those of you who have been kind enough to submit your skeptical blogging to this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle may have been puzzled by the replies you received. It appears that DoC relied upon a certain medium to transmit the entries telepathically or by distant reading to DoC.
Well, now that the Circle is here, it would appear that DoC is AWOL. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), the Medium has taken a hand and channeled the entries to a certain very famous deceased skeptic named Harry, who is as we speak transmitting them from the other side to…
oracknows | December 1, 2006The next Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching, and, if you haven't already done so, if you're a blogger you should be thinking about which one of your pièce de résistances of skepticism you want to submit. Guidelines are here. Next week's host, Dad of Cameron at Autism Street has decided to employ a most unusual means of soliciting entries:
I know the holiday season is upon us, and for many us, including myself (aka Do'C), that can mean scarce free time. In an effort to avoid delays or mixups, I have arranged for the services of a psychic medium over the next week or so.…
oracknows | November 30, 2006More carnival-ly goodness! The History Carnival XLIV has been posted over at Barista. Enjoy!
sporte | November 30, 2006The EMBL graduate students have organized an ingenious conference titled: Life Sciences - Shaping the Future. Learn about Omics and Systems Biology from speakers like Leroy Hood, Stuart Kim, and Ronald Krause (and more). Explore options for career development, and learn how you can join the Web 2.0 science revolution in the session on scientific communication.
The conference will take place Dec. 4th-8th, 2006. Don't worry if you don't have a plane ticket or a place to stay, you're virtually there. How? It's all on-line.
Some of you might be wondering how a virtual conference works.
1…
oracknows | November 23, 2006Here's wishing everyone who celebrates it a Happy Thanksgiving. As you might expect, our blog mascot is joining in the fun, preparing the turkey, and loading up on tryptophan!
And one more below the fold.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
sporte | November 22, 2006Random remembrance #1. December 1st is world AIDS day. On December 1st, I will mourn for my former colleagues, students and acquaintances who've died from AIDS.
Random random reminder #2. Bloggers, Ron Hudson from the International Carnival of Pozivities will be putting together stories about AIDS and HIV. The next carnival isn't until Dec. 10th, but you can still submit.
Random blog comment #3: After the last International Carnival of Pozivities, I had a very odd comment on my article.
One commenter wrote:
Uhhhhh. Can you name a society that doesn't acknowledge that STD's spread…
oracknows | November 17, 2006It's almost here. In fact, it's closer than you would think, because of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S.
Yes, the Skeptics' Circle is due to land at this session's host (decorabilia) one day early, on Wednesday, November 22. So this time around the deadline will be Tuesday, November 21. decorabilia provides instructions on how to submit your blog posts here, and a more general description of what the Circle is looking for, along with a hosting schedule can be found here.
And, as always, if you're interested in hosting, drop me a line at oracknows@gmail.com. I've heard rumblings that…
retrospectacle | November 6, 2006Great news! I won $1000 in the Blogging Scholarship!
Although Stephen Yellin of DailyKos took first place (and $5000), me and Paul Stamatiou both won $1000, and the rest of the bloggers won $100. What a great surprise, as I had completely written off winning anything. Thank you all for voting, no matter who you voted for (but especially if you voted for me!). :D
In other news, I contacted Dr. Irene Pepperberg about the interview she agreed to do (oh so long ago!) for Grey Matters and she said send over some questions. So, if you readers have any questions to contribute, I'd love to hear them…
sporte | November 6, 2006How does biomedical research impact you? Have you (or has someone in your family) benefited from vaccinations, pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, surgery, or transplants? How does biomedical research affect the health of your dog, cat, or other pet? How might biomedical research touch your life in the future?
Do you know any middle school students who are interested in the life sciences? If they can write an essay, they might be able to win a prize.
If you know any middle school students or teachers in Washington, Idaho, Montana, or Oregon, let them know about the NWABR middle school…
retrospectacle | November 5, 2006Looks like a lost cause, but I always was a sucker for a lost cause.
Voting for the Student Blogging Scholarship ends tonight at midnight, eastern time.
So, its your last chance to vote for me to get $5000 to help pay for my PhD.
And thanks to all that have already voted!
oracknows | November 5, 2006October was a very good month for Respectful Insolence, a very good month indeed. In fact, traffic for this blog reached an all-time high, edging out the previous best month (May 2006) by about 1,000 visits on Sitemeter. It just goes to show that, although traffic has more or less leveled off and is fluctuating around a mean, there's still room for bringing that Respectful Insolence to more of the blogosphere.
It's not as though I'm ever likely to catch PZ or Ed in traffic. (I'd need my traffic to go up nearly an order of magnitude ever to catch PZ; even I'm not deluded enough to see that…
oracknows | November 4, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger and author of The Republican War on Science Chris Mooney was interviewed for one of my favorite podcasts, Point of Inquiry, the official podcast for The Center for Inquiry, this week. It's well worth checking out. I don't agree with everything in Mooney's book (which I finally finished reading about a month ago), but there's enough there that is hard to refute to make it nonetheless a rather disturbing piece of work
In fact, while I'm on the topic, I will also mention that Point of Inquiry is a consistently excellent podcast. I highly recommend adding it to your podcast…
retrospectacle | October 31, 2006Vote for Pedro, oops I mean ME!
Yes, for some odd reason I've been selected as a finalist in the College Blogging Scholarship, but now I need some votes.
Please, I'm a poor broke college student and could really use the scholarship! Vote for me, would ya???
And if you're a blogger, and blog for people to vote for me, I promise that Pepper will personally send you some karma.
Thank you!
retrospectacle | October 30, 2006More shameless self-promoting!
Go check out some of my poetry, based on the Fibonacci sequence, now published in the Science Creative Quarterly (SCQ)!
SCQ is an amalgam of science, creativity, spontaneity, beauty, and absurdity reflected in the written word, operated under the auspices of our very own David Ng of the World's Fair.
retrospectacle | October 26, 2006In a shameless act of self promotion, I direct you all to this week's ScienceBlogger interview on Page 3.14, which features meeeeeee!
sporte | October 16, 2006I don't write about politics very often nor do I intend to do so in the future. But, time is running out for the Tripoli Six. Imprisoned in 1999, five nurses and one doctor were tortured until they confessed to a horrific crime; infecting over 400 children with the virus that causes AIDS. They later protested that they were innocent and the scientific data backed them up. Now, they may be executed for a crime they didn't commit.
I know some of you are thinking, "What does this have to do with me?"
Nature magazine, reminds us what can happen when we fail to speak up on another's behalf, in…
retrospectacle | October 12, 2006I'm headed to Atlanta, for the Society for Neuroscience meeting. I don't have a poster (just presented one in France!) so I'll just be a tourist. And, hoping to run into a few neuro-bloggers like Evil Monkey, Jake of Pure Pedantry, and the Neurocontrarian.
Here's how the UM Neuroscience PhD students are representing, though. If you're going, check them out.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Talks
1:00 pm - 4:30 pm Slide 14. Sleep Georgia World Congress Center: Room C301
1:00 pm - 1:15 pm 14.1. Sleep and fatigue during chronic viral infection M. D. OLIVADOTI, M. R. OPP
Posters
2:00 pm - 3:…
sporte | October 9, 2006Mendel's garden in Bruno, CZ, may be too far for physical travel, but you can still imagine what Mendel might have thought if he'd gotten a look at this version of his vision.
Maybe I'm taking alliteration a little too far, but that doesn't mean that you have to show any restraint. All you have to do is submit to me by late Saturday afternoon and sometime on Sunday, you can see the fruits of your labor posted here in technicolor.
Send 'em in everyone - I want to see GENETICS at it's best: digitalbio at gmail dot com
UPDATE: Just to be absolutely clear, Mendel's Garden is a carnival of…
sporte | October 4, 2006This may seem strange to anyone who hasn't lived in Minnesota, but when I was a child, kids in my elementary school used to have fist fights when it came to the question of which famous European discovered America.
To most children in the U.S., this is probably a very silly question indeed. Not so, to the kids I knew. Some kids were convinced that it was Leif Erickson and were ready to fight to defend the point.
Since I now live on the West Coast, it's probably safe for me to say that the first white people on the continent might NOT have been the Vikings.
NOVA's series for teachers has…