Misc Science
tqa | March 11, 2010
As you might have noticed, ScienceBlogs picked up a couple of new bloggers recently. Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders moved their blog, Obesity Panacea, over to these parts last week. Their move gives me an opportunity that's way too good to pass up - an excuse to present my latest excuse for a prolonged gap in blogging.
I've been too busy getting thin to post much.
OK, maybe "getting thin" isn't the most accurate description. But it sounds so much nicer than reality - which is more like "becoming merely overweight instead of downright obese". (For starters, it's a much pithier…
tqa | March 6, 2009
A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text.
Death From the Skies
When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world will end. I then got depressed and then got an unsettling…
tqa | February 6, 2009
We're pretty familiar with hotspot volcanoes on earth. A rising plume of magma reaches to the crust, creating a volcano. The magma plumes can that cause the hotspots stay in the same spot for tens of millions of years, but plate tectonics works to keep the crust moving above the plume. The result is a series of volcanoes, with a small number of active volcanoes over the hotspot, at the end of a line of extinct volcanoes that trace the plate's movement.
The Hawaiian Islands are the classic example of this process on earth.
In this Google Earth view, the Big Island of Hawaii (at the…
tqa | February 2, 2009
Google just released a major upgrade to Google Earth that includes some features that science enthusiasts are going to love. Besides the regular Earth stuff, new layers have been added that cover Earth's oceans and the planet Mars.
Image copyright Google 2009)
The new stuff is undoubtedly going to chew up thousands of person-hours in the workplace over the next few days, resulting in a major drop in productivity and sending the economy spinning further into recession going to be a lot of fun to explore. Just trying to use the flight simulator feature in Google Mars could be a major time…
tqa | September 3, 2008
Ozymandias was a piker.
He left us his legs, most of his face, and a clear statement of what he wanted to achieve. When you get right down to it, he's not much of an enigma.
The people who built this left an enigma. Stonehenge was constructed to stand proudly forever, a monument to the greater glory of something, but we don't know what. Their engineering withstood the test of time. They - and their cultures - did not.
Stonehenge stands today, on a plane covered with the barrows of the unknown lords of long forgotten peoples. It reminds us, far more than Shelley's statue ever could,…
tqa | July 30, 2008
My scientific background leaves me more inclined to trust laboratory results than people, and I'm no more inclined to give athletes the benefit of the doubt in doping cases than anyone else who's been paying attention over the last couple of decades. When I heard that Jessica Hardy had tested positive for a banned substance at the Olympic Trials, and most likely will not get to swim in the olympics, I wasn't really surprised. Swimming hasn't been plagued with the same sort of doping scandals that other sports have seen, but it would be shocking if there weren't at least a few cheaters out…
tqa | July 3, 2008
As you may or may not know, there's been some conflict in the scientific publishing industry over the last few years. Traditional business models have been challenged by an "open-access" model, where the papers are freely available to the general public. In the traditional model, the money comes through subscription charges, and the readers pay for the privilege of access to the research. In open access publishing, the papers are freely available. The costs are covered through a variety of means, including fees paid by the authors.
Many of the traditional publishers have clearly felt…
tqa | February 25, 2008
Wilkins just tagged me with one of those blog meme things. Apparently, he thinks that I've nothing better to do with my time (and, unfortunately, he's totally correct about that). This particular meme involves historical figures. The rules are simple:
1) Link to the person who tagged you.2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.
I'm going to do what both Wilkins and Myers did, and pick someone who probably wouldn't…