History
grrlscientist | June 20, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
drorzel | June 15, 2010Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing.
I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…
grrlscientist | June 8, 2010tags: The Worst Oil Spill in US History, oil drilling, oil spill, oil wells, petroleum, Kern County gusher, Lakeview Gusher Number One, Lakeview Oil Company, environment, history, streaming video
This video discusses the worst oil spill in US history, the Lakeview Gusher Number One that occurred 100 years ago in Kern County, California. The gusher, drilled by the Lakeview Oil Company, blew on March 14, 1910, when the drill reached the 2,440-foot level. This gusher shot oil more than 200 feet into the air for an astonishing 544 days, spewing more than 9 million barrels (378 million gallons/1.…
cagapakis | June 8, 2010Another day, another article about how women are biologically inferior to men when it comes to high-level math and science. The fact that this one comes from the New York Times Science section, a newspaper I typically respect very highly, is all the more tragic and frustrating. I don't have time today to write with as much depth and ferocity as I would like to, but I want to just say that I find it outrageous that the New York Times would publish something so obviously sexist and one-sided about such a complex, nuanced, and important topic under the headline "Daring to Discuss Women in…
cagapakis | June 8, 2010
In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology would lead to bacteria that could eat the oil spilling into the gulf of mexico even as I type this right now. Of course, the "technology" for oil eating bacteria already exists and have already been used for clean up in previous oil spills--many naturally occurring species of bacteria can already break down the hydrocarbons in crude oil. The natural oil eaters…
sastyk | June 7, 2010You learn pretty quickly to adjust for what any mainstream media says about peak oil and anyone who does any kind of preparation. Consider the case of my friend Kathie Breault who has appeared in various newspaper and television accounts. Kathie is grandmother, a midwife and a permaculturist, and about the least "survivalist" person you can imagine. She knits stuff for her grandkids and teaches them to garden, rides her bike everywhere and is starting up a homebirth midwifery practice, helping women with little access to good health care give birth safely. And yet in an ABC Nightline…
clock | June 7, 2010To get disclaimers out of the way, first, Vanessa Woods (on Twitter) is a friend. I first met her online, reading her blog Bonobo Handshake where she documented her day-to-day life and work with bonobos in the Congo. We met in person shortly after her arrival to North Carolina, at a blogger meetup in Durham, after which she came to three editions of ScienceOnline conference.
I interviewed Vanessa after the 2008 event and blogged (scroll down to the second half of the post) about her 2009 session 'Blogging adventure: how to post from strange locations'. At the 2010 conference, she was one of…
oracknows | June 3, 2010It occurs to me that I haven't written about this topic in quite a while, but a recent event makes me think that maybe now's the time to revisit this topic. I'm referring to Holocaust denial. Newer readers may not know that part of what got me involved in online discussions back in the late 1990s was Holocaust denial. Indeed, a lengthy post about how I discovered Holocaust denial was one of the earliest substantive posts on this blog, popping up a mere month after I started blogging, which just so happened to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. That post…
aardvarchaeology | June 3, 2010What's the most dangerous find an archaeologist can make? Some fear anthrax spores in sealed burial caskets. Others the asbestos used to temper certain types of North Scandinavian pottery. But German construction workers are on a whole other level than us. They regularly find Allied bombs from WW2.
One weighing 500 kg was recently found six metres below ground level in Göttingen, Germany, during work on a sports arena. And when the bomb squad set to work on it two days ago, the bomb exploded, killing three and injuring six. They're civilian casualties in a war once fought by their…
terrasig | June 2, 2010Just the other day, I wrote about how DrugMonkey and I have experienced unprecedented and sustained blog traffic for posts we wrote in February on K2 Spice, one of a couple of marijuana-like "incense" products still sold legally in the United States.
Every morning, I dial up my SiteMeter blog statistics and take a look at what posts readers first land upon when coming to visit the humble world headquarters of Terra Sigillata.
Last week, 2,700 to 2,800 of the 4,000 most recent hits were landing on our February K2 Spice post. (You will also note below the sad state of my readership in that…
cagapakis | May 29, 2010I had the pleasure of chatting with John Hawks about the two big science news stories of the past few months, the synthetic genome and the Neandertal genome, for Science Saturday at bloggingheads.tv.
John is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin who studies population genetics of ancient humans, as well as a terrific teacher. I learned a lot of really fascinating things about how people study fossils and trace human evolution and it was interesting to find some connections between the two stories! As he mentions on his blog, we didn't once mention synthetic Neandertals…
cagapakis | May 20, 2010The J. Craig Venter Institute has just announced the creation of the first bacterial cell controlled by a genome that is entirely chemically synthesized (PDF). The group has been working towards this goal for several years now, first working out how to synthesize and assemble such large pieces of DNA and how to transplant a genome from one organism to another. This result puts it all together, a synthetic version of the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum cell. This synthetic cell is almost identical to a natural M. mycoides, but also…
laelaps | May 18, 2010A restoration of Megatherium from H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters.
For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground sloth Megatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the "great beast" represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its history…
terrasig | May 10, 2010This is going to be a quick welcome to Deborah Blum (@deborahblum) who has just moved her blog, Speakeasy Science, to ScienceBlogs.
Why quick?
Because I am only 22 pages away from finishing her latest book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. This engaging tale of the race of science and medicine against chemical poisonings for profit and punishment features the true story of NYC chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler. Of course, the other actors are arsenic, methanol, chloroform, thallium, and radium,…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2010The local cub scouts had asked me to accompany them on a forest walk to give them some culture and history. And so I guided them in the evening sun to the singing of blackbirds along the wooded southern shore of the Baggensstäket narrows. History is thick there.
Early and Late Modern sea-lane tavern.
Napoleonic era small fort.
20th century cemetery.
Early Modern customs station.
Viking Period cemetery.
1719 battlefield.
1905 memorial celebrating the 1719 debatable victory.
Early and Late Modern cemetery.
And all the while across the water, Boo Manor with more Viking Period burials, a rune…
drorzel | May 3, 2010Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The candidates in the traditional suspense-building reverse order:
Lunar laser ranging 22 votes
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show 41 votes
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics 46 votes
Holography 47 votes
Laser eye surgery 53 votes
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) 60 votes
Laser frequency…
jdupuis | April 28, 2010A great two-part series on great computing museums from the last few issues of Communications of the ACM (here and here).
The museums they profile are:
The Computer History Museum
The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum
The Science Museum in London
The Deutches Museum
U.S. National Museum of American HistoryI'll include an extra bit from the first CACM article on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I'm choosing that one because as it happens I'll almost certainly be visiting it this coming July. I'm fortunate to have been invited to the annual Science Foo Camp, which happens to be at…
grrlscientist | April 24, 2010tags: Zeitgeist: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, documentary, television, religion, cults, mind control, offbeat, beliefs, history, mythology, streaming video
These multi-part videos are from a television exploration into the story of religion: the greatest story ever sold to the public by the power elites, who shamelessly use religion as a way to control the masses (includes Spanish subtitles).
Part 2 (the relationship between ancient myths and christianity and judaism; the relationship between astrology and christianity, etc.):
Part 3 (origin of the symbol of the cross, the meaning of the…
terrasig | April 19, 2010The 101st Annual Meeting of my primary professional society, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), convened in Washington, DC, on Saturday and will run through Wednesday, April 21. The theme for this year's meeting is "Conquering Cancer Through Discovery Research," and focuses strongly on the translation of discoveries into cancer treatments.
Although the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic dust cloud has delayed many European participants, over 17,000 attendees are expected at the Washington Convention Center where over 6,300 presentations are to be given.
AACR was founded in 1907 by 11…