personal
clock | June 27, 2007I find it very difficult to say something nice, deep, profound or meaningful at the time of sorrow. But I am deeply saddened by the news that Lindsay Beyerstein's father has died. Lindsay is a dear friend, a philosopher and a superb blogger (one of the rare bloggers who really became an online journalist in the best sense of the word), and her father, who I never had the fortune to meet, was an extraordinary man as well. So sorry!
oracknows | June 27, 2007Please take a moment to head over to Majikthise and pay your respects to Lindsay, whose father, Barry L. Beyerstein, died yesterday.
Dr. Beyerstein was a prominent skeptic and very active in the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He also served as chair of the Society of B. C. Skeptics, not to mention being a member of the Executive Council of CSI and serving on the editorial board of The Skeptical Inquirer.
He was only 60 years old.
Many moons ago Lindsay suggested to me in an e-mail that I get in contact with her father to become involved in the Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental…
pharyngula | June 27, 2007I beheld a strange sight when I stepped out my door this morning: a pair of cute little baby duckies waddling down the sidewalk, all alone and peeping frantically. They passed right by my house (of course—the miasma of evil is not inviting), turned left at my neighbor's driveway, went up the sidewalk, and hopped up the stairs to their door. It was so peculiar — I haven't seen any ducks in my neighborhood lately, and these two helpless ducklings were clearly lost — that I went up to the door, frightening the little guys away, to ask if they'd been raising ducks and had a couple of escapees.…
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007
Do you touch-type, or (like me) do you kind of know where the keys are but "freestyle" type, looking at the keyboard on a semi-regular basis?*
Are any of the letters wearing off on your keys?**
In answer to #2, I've completely lost L and N, and A and S are fading fast. Which, given my answer to #1, suggests that there will come a point where I'll be in real trouble.
(OK, you caught me with more than the pair of questions promised in the post title.)
*If you touch-type, do you have now or have you had recently a typing-related repetitive stress injury? (I tell myself that I avoid learning…
cmooney | June 26, 2007This is pretty cool--there is a concordance of Storm World available on the Amazon.com page for the book. These are the top 100 words:
2004 2005 2006 activity air another atlantic atmosphere basin between called came cane category center central change charney climate cyclones data day debate different down during early emanuel even first florida get global gray heat holland however hurri hurricane increase ing intensity know landsea later long major may media might models national new noaa now number ocean pacific paper people point…
sheril | June 24, 2007I've arrived in South Africa. The Southern Cross is visible and the moon is spectacularly bright from where I sit. Seasons and skies are backwards here. On June 24, it's the start of winter and 6 hours into the future. Tonight finds me pondering whether I'm now upside down on this great continent. More likely, I was never right side up to begin with.
Over dinner our team discovered we're all birders. This countryside has a great deal to offer in that respect and I hope to see bee-eaters. We also discussed this [Though I'm too exhausted for details, well worth reading]. For now, I'm…
pharyngula | June 24, 2007I'll be speaking at the Minnesota Atheists on 22 July, on "There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations
for the Mind and Religious Belief". Michael Egnor is welcome to stop on by.
oracknows | June 23, 2007This one's been floating around ScienceBlogs and the blogosphere in general; so I thought, what the hell? (Oh, wait, did my use of the word "hell" affect my rating?) In any case, this sounds about right:
Mingle2 - Online Dating
You'll be happy to know that I don't really plan on trying to "evolve" to rate a PG-13 or R rating. I really see no need, although sometimes the comments probably earn such ratings. On the other hand, I won't shy away from "adult" content if I consider it sufficiently important that I want to blog about it.
drorzel | June 22, 2007Here's my achievement for the week:
OK, that may not seem like much, but this is what it looked like before I started:
OK, that's not really my only accomplishment for the week-- I have three students for the first half of the summer (two of them for the whole summer), and all three got off to good starts on their summer projects this week. That's why it's taken me a whole week to clean my office-- I've been run ragged getting them all going, and keeping on top of their progress.
Still, the important papers have been filed, the unimportant ones recycled, and the trash taken away. Time to…
pharyngula | June 21, 2007Ahh, Seattle.
Seattle is godless.
We are, rather famously, one of the least churched cities in North America. It seems that most of us have better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church. Seattleites would rather take a hike. Or nurse a hangover. Or fire up the bong.
It sounds like my kind of place…and it should, I grew up there.
So I'm taking a little vacation to the Pacific Northwest, and will be visiting family and taking in the sights the first week of July, from the 1st to the 8th. All you Seattleites can use this thread to tell me how wonderful the place is and what I ought…
pharyngula | June 21, 2007Dang. Tagged. Can't you people leave me alone?
All right, here are the rules.
We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog
I suppose I could list what I had for dinner over the last 8 days, you guys don't know that, but then I'd have to…
clock | June 20, 2007I got tagged by Steve Poceta -(if you are more interested in sleep disorders than circadian clocks in funny animals, his blog is more interesting to you than mine) to participate in the Eight Random Facts Meme. Here are the rules:
1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
3. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been
tagged.
So, here are the eight random, late-night-after-a-busy-day-and-a-strong-beer facts about me:
1. I used to wear a goatee. When I arrived in the…
drorzel | June 20, 2007The video link I posted earlier appears to require some plug-in to play, which is a pain in the ass. I'm going to try posting it via YouTube, then, and see if that's better behaved.
jstemwedel | June 20, 2007You've probably seen the posts (here, here, here, here, here, and here.) responding to the University of Florida study claiming that women's names affect the social support or discouragement they'll get for pursuing technical subjects. (Those with the more "feminine" names will tend to be discouraged from "manly" activities like math, although apparently a frilly name won't hurt their performance in those activities.) Since the above-linked posts give the reasonable critiques of the research, I'm going to veer immediately to personal anecdata:
Is "Janet" a feminine name? It's not one of…
clock | June 17, 2007On this day in 1991 I hopped on a train and left Belgrade for good.
On this same day, a little bit earlier in history, a baby was born.
Somehow, those two events got connected.
Happy birthday to my wife!
drorzel | June 17, 2007Today is, at long last, Commencement at Union. At around the time this is posted, I'll be parading around in academic robes, or possibly listening to a variety of boring speeches.
Of course, I can't really claim that I don't enjoy this. After all, Kate and I drove back here from Boston last night after a weeding down there, specifically so I could make it to this morning's ceremonies, bad knee and all. Some faculty complain about having to attend commencement, but I get a kick out of it. Not so much the speeches, but seeing the students go through the ceremony-- the dazed look they get when…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2007I was reading the comments on Dr. B's brief query on ethical lines in response to a horrific story about the feeding of a live puppy to a large snake for the "entertainment" of teenagers, and I could not help but recall a conversation I had with my children a couple years ago about the feasibility of a pet snake.
While visiting friends in Santa Barbara, we went to a farmers market, where we encountered a guy with a backpack full of snakes. He handed one of those snakes (a cute little gartery guy) to the younger Free-Ride offspring. Apparently, the guy worked with the local snake rescue…
jstemwedel | June 15, 2007As you might guess, my site is one of the sources of content. If you're reading this post at New York Articles (or at "Articles", whose tagline is even more grammatically incorrect) rather than at my actual site, you are partaking of a suboptimal experience.
I'm not going to give you the URL for the lesser, because there is no value-added to speak of, unless you count the pennies that come in to the leech that grabs the RSS and sells the Google Ads.*
Does such a site do anything to improve an already crowded blogosphere? Does anyone treat a sloppy feed aggregating site of this sort as a…
terrasig | June 15, 2007As you may have noticed, my posting frequency has been a bit light as of late between work, family, and other non-blog responsibilities. So, I'm going to take a bit of a hiatus to recharge the old batteries - maybe a week or ten days.
There's plenty of other good pharmaceutical reading both here at ScienceBlogs and in my blogroll so I'm sure you'll be kept up-to-date.
Thanks very much for reading and I'll be back here again soon.
jstemwedel | June 14, 2007To address an issue that came up in discussion of posts on other blogs, I want to make clear the principles I follow when dealing with real-world scenarios here or via email:
My overarching goal is to foster reflection and dialogue among people (particularly scientists) working out how to behave ethically.
Talking about different scenarios can provide good material to sharpen our ethical intuitions and to try to formulate courses of action that are both ethical and do-able (from the point of view, say, of not wrecking one's career).
I don't believe that scenarios lose their usefulness if…