personal
pharyngula | July 21, 2007Don't let the sight ruin your breakfast, but you can catch me babbling on bloggingheads right now. Don't try to compare it to Sean Carroll's star turn, OK?
Also note the traditional misspelling of my name. I'm thinking of doing a Prince or Madonna and getting it legally changed to just "PZ".
oracknows | July 21, 2007This one seems to be making the rounds among blogs that I frequent. Given that it's Saturday, when I usually don't post anything that requires serious writing, it's a perfect day to let the sheep in me have free reign and follow the flock, taking this test:
Your Score
: Robot
You are 100% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 28% Arrogant.
You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very…
pharyngula | July 19, 2007This is irrational, an intrusion into my privacy, rude, and beneath me, but I have been tagged with another meme by the behavioral ecology blog. I am to take this test of my personality defects, post the results, and pass it on.
These are not personality defects. How can you call perfection "defective"?
Haughty Intellectual
You are 100% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 57% Arrogant.
You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007I've mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn't like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event.
The town had a classic movie theater, the Vale. As a kid, I loved that theater: we'd go out of our way on our walk home from school to check out the movie posters, anticipating the shows we'd see on the Saturday matinee. It was not an upscale theater, and we got a steady diet of "B" horror movie features — stuff like Die, Monster, Die and Frankenstein Conquers the…
terrasig | July 16, 2007We're on the road today but I wanted to be sure that my Mom gets her birthday mentioned on the blog, so I scheduled this post in advance.
Put simply, my Mom is my inspiration for everything I have become. She started college (to be a teacher, I think) then embarked on a career as a secretary with a Pfizer sales rep. She then took leave to raise me and my sister. During my elementary school years she went back to nursing school, working the 11 pm - 7 am shift in the ER at a local hospital. I have the ultimate admiration for her going back to school, working, and having a family - an…
clock | July 15, 2007I missed this by weeks, but Dave asked a set of questions that I was pondering on, but found no time and energy to answer until now.
PZ, Janet, Martin, Chad and RPM responded (I am assuming some people outside SB did as well) and their responses (and their commenters') are very interesting.
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
Chronobiology, although I have not seen the inside of the lab for three years now. So, scientific publishing, education and communication - does that count?
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
Yes, I went to vet…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007So, there's some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the new movie or the new book.) I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books (yet), but my eldest child recently finished the first Harry Potter book and quite liked it. However, as we were discussing it this morning, we encountered one of my pet peeves:
We drive past the road where our elementary…
clock | July 13, 2007Wow - this was (and still is) a very busy week. On most days, I just crashed early, without having the energy to blog very much (at least very much for me).
In the last dispatch, I forgot to mention I met Jimmy Wales who came to visit PLoS and we talked about Wikipedia and building online communities.
Under the fold are a bunch of new pictures...
Professor Steve Steve got to meet the CEO of PLoS:
...and they quickly bonded:
Yesterday, I went to lunch with the Editors:
Then, after all the work was done, I was exhausted and I had to walk about 1.5 miles during the rush hour to meet…
pharyngula | July 12, 2007Some of you may noticed that someone on scienceblogs is going out of their way to say untrue things about me … it's a transparent ploy to get me to link to them, I think, and an attempt to ruin my reputation. It's not going to work, I tell you. No links! I'm not going to reward them with my attention! Don't believe a word they say!
clock | July 11, 2007OK, so I've been here for about a week now. It's been so far an exciting and overwhelming experience - there is so much to learn! And I am impatient with myself and want to get in the groove right now. I need to learn to slow down a little...
Anyway, I did manage to drop in here at the blog a couple of times and report on meetups with some local bloggers, but here is a little bit more about the week so far...
San Francisco is quite a unique city - I really cannot say it reminds me of any other place I've been to. Quite ecclectic and freewheeling. And hilly! My house is on top of the…
drorzel | July 9, 2007I don't read the local paper regularly, so it took a LiveJournal post to alert me to this story from the Times Union:
The unannounced inspection by TSA officials took place early last week. [Albany International Airport's] security measures failed in five of seven tests, most of the problems occurring at the passenger checkpoint, the sources said.
In one test, TSA inspectors hid the components of a fake bomb in carry-on luggage that also contained a bottle of water. Passengers are prohibited from carrying containers holding more than three ounces of liquids, gels or aerosols through airport…
oracknows | July 9, 2007Last week, I was forced to face the fact that I'm definitely, solidly, undeniably now middle-aged.
Oh, I could delude myself before and say that I'm "mature" and even pretend to some extent that the slow deterioration that time causes biological organisms doesn't apply to me. I could even dismiss the increasing creakiness in my knees and the ache in my lower back that I seem to notice more and more upon rising in the morning as "nothing," because they only cause me minor annoyance. Indeed, I could pretend that the little niggling bits of evidence that my body is aging, just like that of…
jstemwedel | July 9, 2007David Ng at the World's Fair has some questions:
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?
I'll play:
1. Currently I'm not a scientist but rather a philosopher of science and an ethics teacher for future scientists. However, when I last was a practicing scientist, I was a physical chemist whose broad focus was the dynamics and thermodynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems.
Here's a narrower description of my work: I…
pharyngula | July 9, 2007David Ng is asking if biologists have physics envy, which is both a common and a peculiar question (short answer: no, physicists should have biology envy). Then he follows up with a few brief questions to determine if scientists are actually pining away, wishing they'd gone into some different field … and here are my answers.
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
Developmental biology.
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
I started my undergraduate career with a general interest in marine biology, but quickly focused on neurobiology and…
clock | July 8, 2007This Tuesday at 7pm, you can come with me and learn everything you want to know about sea urchins at the Ask a Scientist event.
Then, next Friday or two, altough it is in the middle of the workday, I'd still like to go and see the Iron Science Teacher. Jennifer siad that it was great last Friday.
The PEZ museum is supposedly just a small room full of every single PEZ dispenser ever made, but it may be interesting to see if it is not too out of the way. And I'd love to see the Festival of Fire. Who wants to go with me?
I'd like to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Research Institute, the…
clock | July 7, 2007And some other non-descript meats. And great Italian wine. In the great atmosphere of Incanto. In the company of some wonderful people, including, among others, my SciBling Sandra Kiume:
Now,...well, too much wine so I better go to bed before I blog something stupid....
clock | July 7, 2007Jennifer Ouellette has the whole story, but here are a few more pictures (under the fold).
We met at Betelnut restaurant last night - Jennifer, Kristin Abkemaier (formerly of the 'Radioactive Banana' blog), Jeff and Curtis of the Jeff's Bench Science 2.0 site, and my old friends from Chapel Hill, now San Francisco transplants, Justin Watt and Josh Steiger:
Josh, Jennifer and Justin (l-r)
Me and Jennifer (l-r)
Kristin and me
Kristin, Justin and Curtis (l-r)
Josh and me
Me and Curtis
pharyngula | July 7, 2007Skatje has posted photos from our zoo trip yesterday, and they include the scariest butterfly you'll ever see. It'll give you nightmares.
We also visited the Pike Place Market, among other things. We have now discovered the secret way to Skatje's heart, for all of you fanbois out there: "bright orange pants up to his nipples". I was wondering how he talked her into actually trying some smoked salmon.
drorzel | July 7, 2007The slow-motion "meme" of the moment is this "eight things about yourself" list. Doctor Pion tagged me a while back, but I've been bad about actually responding, because I'm lazy. This seems like a good weekend topic, though, so here are some random facts about me (I'll try not to repeat any from previous versions of this sort of thing:
I have horrible eyesight, and wear Coke-bottle glasses when I'm not wearing contact lenses (as I am in the picture at left). Once, in college, a guy I played rugby with looked through my glasses and exclaimed "What, did your parents lose a bet with God?"
I…
clock | July 6, 2007
Enjoying the computer. Everything works!
More pictures and stuff later - I am exhausted (and a little jet-lagged) so it's time for bed....