Geekalicious
thusspakezuska | October 18, 2007You may have noticed on the main Scienceblogs page that the major categories have been reduced in number and renamed; we now have eight, each with its own spiffy landing page. For example, here's the one for Education & Careers. Each landing page has a photo at the top; these photos will be rotating and guess what? You can contribute yours if you like!
More info on how to contribute your photos is below the fold.
It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. You should send your photos to
photos AT scienceblogs DOT com
and be sure to send only photos that you…
thusspakezuska | October 17, 2007Primate Diaries passed this meme on to me. It was started by Scibling PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
First, the rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The…
thusspakezuska | October 16, 2007By way of the Chronicle News Blog...researchers are using a brain-computer interface to allow physically-impaired people move an avatar around in Second Life.
The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user's imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life,…
thusspakezuska | October 12, 2007By now you've no doubt heard that Al Gore and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I must confess that this announcement gives me no small degree of schadenfreude when I think of how the denizens of the White House must be feeling about this.
The LA Times notes:
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to an environmental concern is regarded by many as a symbolic rebuke of the Bush administration's reluctance to join a U.N.-led process to reduce global greenhouse gases. The prize often reflects the aspirations of the Nobel committee as much…
thusspakezuska | September 19, 2007From the Chronicle News Blog...
...it will be 25 years ago tomorrow that Mr. Fahlman, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, invented the digital smiley face.
After a colleague joked about a contaminated elevator on an electronic bulletin board, Mr. Fahlman had his eureka moment: He recommended that future quipsters mark their jokes with ":-)" to make sure no one misconstrued their comments.
What great blessings the emoticon has brought to our society! Although I do think the Abraham Lincoln emoticon is just a little too much:
-- "==):-)=" --
Happy birthday, little…
thusspakezuska | September 16, 2007Posting will be sparse to non-existent over the next week, as it has been the past few days. This is because I'm hanging with Mom for a week or so. Actually, I'm hanging with my mom and my sister at the beach at Cape Hatteras. Sister and I have spent months planning this undertaking. Cape Hatteras is a place very special to my mom; it was a beloved vacation spot for her and my dad, and it is more special to her since he passed. She hasn't been back there in years, and her failing health has made it questionable whether she might be able to undertake such a trip at all. So it's very…
thusspakezuska | September 11, 2007I found the link to this video over at She's Such a Geek! - thanks, Charlie! Listen to one female geek's response to reading the book. I particular loved her saying that the "she" in "She's Such a Geek!" should not make men feel excluded - they should just "ignore the s in front of the he as we have been ignoring its absence" for lo these many years. Hee! Enjoy!
thusspakezuska | September 6, 2007Diane Rhoten writes in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about the concept of networked science. The Manhattan Project, she says, brought us the era of Big Science: ambitious projects, organized in a "top-down, hierarchical, vertical" manner, requiring lots of cash, fancy equipment, dedicated facilities, and a long-term outlook.
Next we got Team Science, fueled mostly by the life sciences. Big Science was shaped by instrumentation - what kind we do with this nifty supercollider? - while Team Science is "tailored to the parameters of the specific investigation" - hey, let's…
thusspakezuska | September 3, 2007Here's the problem:
I've got migraines. So I take topamax. Topamax helps decrease the occurrence of daily headache and decrease the frequency of migraine. But topamax has side effects. A really bad one is cognitive confusion. This manifests itself in several ways. One is during speaking - I'll be just on the verge of pronouncing a noun and will suddenly feel as if I've been choked - the word is gone. This is not your usual "oh, I can't think of the word I want". The word is there, it's about to be pronounced, and I have the mental sensation of having it ripped out of my brain. It…
thusspakezuska | July 23, 2007Chris Smither did a show last night as part of the Upper Merion Concert Under the Stars series. If you aren't familiar with Chris Smither's music, you should be. He's great. The pictures I took of him on stage all came out crappy but I like this one I caught of him just before the show. His feet are mic'd during his performance and if you listened with your eyes shut, you'd swear he was accompanied by someone on percussion. But you wouldn't want to listen with your eyes shut because it's so fabulous to watch.
During the show he talked about a recent tour of Australia. He said…
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2007As seen in the Chronicle of Higher Education!
It all started innocently enough, with a protector acquired for a couple of bucks at the 2001 meeting of the American Chemical Society. After that he ordered some for his department. From there, the addiction -- er, collection -- grew.
And grew - to 465 and counting. Beware the ACS meetings, my children!
"I am not a weirdo," he says. "I just collect pocket protectors."
Or so he told the Chronicle...but see what he says on his own website...
"I'm not just a collector, I am also a wearer."
John A. Pojman is one bad-ass pocket-protector wearin'…
thusspakezuska | July 19, 2007Sandra at Omni Brain has posted a collection of interesting websites with cool science games for kids, most of them related to brain science. There are also resources for K-12 educators.
I especially like the Brains Rule web site. You just gotta check it out, and pass on the info to a curious kid of your acquaintance. I love the "Meet a Brain Whiz" feature, and especially the fact that the Brain Whiz talks about her hobbies and home life as well as her work. In my experience, young girls especially want to know the ways in which a scientist or engineer has a "normal" life in addition to…
thusspakezuska | July 18, 2007So I'm on the computer, trying to figure out how to go to the Caribbean in the winter cheaply, cursing the airline blackout dates and only half listening to the evening news when suddenly I hear something about the new Harry Potter book...hot dang! There it is! In the flesh! or would that be in the pulp?
Channel 6 ABC Action News had a story about a local family who received a package in the mail. The post office called them before they had even opened the package and asked them if they had received the Harry Potter book. "I don't know" said mom. She opened the package and sure…
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2007I recently got a notice from the AWIS - Philadelphia chapter about a film in production here in Philadelphia, called "Future Weather". The filmmakers, independent and mostly women, wrote to AWIS as follows:
We...are dedicated to bringing the stories of real women and girls to the big (and small) screen, one little story, one strong-willed girl at a time. We hope you will join us... I'm sure you are aware of the lack of positive female role models in the media, especially those with any interest, much less commitment, to science. We are hoping to change that.
Future Weather is the story of…
thusspakezuska | June 21, 2007I can't tell if this Chronicle piece is behind a paywall or not, because I already logged into my account today so everything opens up in my browser right away...I hope it's not, because I'd love for you to see the picture of Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, on a skateboard. It's how she commutes from her home to her office! If you can get to the article, then there's a link to an audio slide show, too. From the article:
A video-game enthusiast, marathon runner, juggler, and painter, Ms. Klawe, 55, is a self-described klutz who credits her talents to intense practice. The…
thusspakezuska | June 21, 2007The Chronicle of Higher Education had a great piece this week about A. Van Jordan and his new book of poetry, Quantum Lyrics. Unfortunately, I think you need a subscription to read the article online. It's the June 22, 2007 issue, p. A48, if you have access to the print version.
"Physicists talk in metaphor all the time," says Mr. Jordan, 41, who weaves theories and theorems into his latest poetic examinations of history, race relations, memory, and grief. The centerpiece of Quantum Lyrics is a lengthy cycle of poems about Albert Einstein, but the book is alive with a wide array of…
thusspakezuska | June 20, 2007Thanks to Scienceblogs, I have access to Google Analytics for my blog, which means I can obsess over a wealth of information and statistics. It's amazing what Google knows about my blog. Let's hope Google always and only decides to use its power for good...
Anyhoo, one of the things I can look at is where you, my fabulous blog readers, are situated. I can look by city, region, country, sub-continent region, and continent. Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd take a peek at what countries y'all are hanging out in. I thought I might get a nice handful of countries - surely Canada,…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2007I recently received a copy of Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies in the mail from the Seed offices. Although I can't say I was particularly dying to read this, free books are always a nice thing.
So I opened it up to take a look. Chapter 1 starts out this way:
For thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about them and asked the great questions of existence: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it the way it is?
and I might not have gotten the giggles there except that the next sentence goes on
For all of…
thusspakezuska | May 14, 2007I have to admit, I am an avid reader of comic strips in the daily newspaper. There's a lot of social commentary in the daily comics. Over the past year or two, I've watched as a few of the more conservative strips have slyly (or not so slyly) introduced references to intelligent design into a panel here and there. Here's an example I commented on in September 2005.
You will also find reflected in many comic stips stereotypical attitudes about gender. You don't have to look very hard most of the time. So when you find something different, it's really a pleasure.
Today's Baldo strip…
thusspakezuska | March 20, 2007It's been so long since I blogged, I almost forgot how to log in. I am going to ease myself back into some sort of blogging routine this week and hope that the computer time does not bring on the migraines again. So much has happened while I've been gone. Have any of you been following the Science Spring Showdown 2007? Here's a taste of the coverage of the second round in the Mortar and Pestle region (reported over at Adventures in Ethics and Science):
Welcome to coverage of the 2007 Science Spring Showdown second round play in the Chemistry region. The fans in Chemical Arena resorted to…