personal
clock | May 24, 2007Yes. I said I wanted this job. And, in a very new and interesting way, after a fun interview, I got it. Signed and faxed the contract yesterday. Will be in San Francisco for a little while in July, then telecommute afterwards. Can pajamas be deducted as tools one needs for the job? Exciting!
jstemwedel | May 21, 2007I used to think what I really needed this time of semester was elves.
When the term papers and final exams and case studies and research reports were in their stacks on my desk, casting shadows on my prospects of getting any other substantial projects done, I'd think, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could just leave these papers on my desk with a box of red pens, and have elves come at night and grade them? It would be like a fairy tale ..."
But seriously, knowing fairy-tale elves, there would be some trick. Sure, they'd grade the papers, but then they'd take my tenure dossier until I could guess…
clock | May 21, 2007First, I tentatively reserved a spot for myself for the Science Foo Camp on August 3-5, 2008 in Mountain View, CA.
Then, there is nothing for a long time, then three conferences I want to go to, and for all three I have some degree of negotiations about presenting about Open Science or science blogging or in some way being involved, and all three are almost simultaneous:
ConvergeSouth 2007 in October 19-20, 2007, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill, NC on October 21-23, 2007
ASIS&T: Joining Research and Practice…
pharyngula | May 20, 2007That weird guy Dave Ng put out a call for bloggers to flaunt their drinking containers. That's easy, at least.
1. Can you show us your coffee cup?
As if there were just one…
2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
From left to right:
I wrote some imaging and lab automation software that was marketed by Axon Instruments a decade ago, and I still have a few of their cups around.
Yay, Minnesota Citizens for Science Education!
I went to the Darwin exhibit at the AMNH, and now I drink from Chuck's head.
A bit hard to see there, but it's the classic Darwin fish…
oracknows | May 19, 2007Abel Pharmboy shows why I shouldn't have left my American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) proceedings abstract sit on my desk unread for a week.
Damn. Talk about blowing an opportunity. Of course, given that I don't own any pharmaceutical stocks (making me a rather poor "tool of big pharma" indeed), it doesn't matter.
clock | May 18, 2007I am working on a post covering three (excellent) recent Drosophila clock-genetics papers and I am trying not to mention a single gene in it - just the historical, methodological, behavioral and ecological context of the results. It will appear later today/tonight. We'll see how it turns out.
I have lined up ClockQuotes for the weekend, but I intend to be very busy so there may not be much or anything else posted - it is not really worth the effort when the traffic falls down to 50% over the weekend.
The doc who put my shoulder back is a genius. It never happened before that I never needed…
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007I hope you've noticed that Seed has sent a team to blog the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair currently raging in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I love science fairs. I've judged them (and recruited others to judge them). At our county fair, I'm always sucked right into the science-fair-type exhibits entered by kids in the Young California exhibit hall.
And of course, as a kid, I did projects for our school science fair.
Actually, it was officially a "curriculum fair" rather than a science fair. Why? Was science too scary an area even for the fifth and sixth grade teachers to…
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007 Dave at The World's Fair is collecting field data on coffee mugs. Or maybe he's trying to create a meme.
Anyway, he poses a bunch of questions which I seem to be unable to resist answering:
Can you show us your coffee cup?
Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?
Can you try to get others to comment on it?
My answers will be restricted to the coffee delivery vessels (all three of them) I use at work, thus excluding the travel mug I use in the car on weekday mornings and the mugs I use…
clock | May 17, 2007Business customers and children can be tough to manage online, but can you imagine managing scientists! They are already hard enough to satisfy in their native environment offline (e.g., to look beyond the usual metrics when awarding tenure). I know, I am making links in this post so cryptic, you'll just have to click to see what on Earth I am talking about and make your own connections...
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007Someone forgot to tell our department photocopier that finals started today; rather than being a vengeful photocopier toying with the pitiful mortals in its thrall, it was a happy photocopier that photocopied my final exams beautifully. And since I wasn't clearing any cryptic paper jams, my mind wandered into the question of how others approach final exams:
Multiple choice, essay, something in between, or a combination of question formats?
Scantron forms? Blue books? (If so, do the students have to buy them or does the prof provide them?)
In-class or take-home?
Open book or closed book?…
pharyngula | May 17, 2007I've got a better idea of what my schedule is like, and even have a recommendation for a hangout tonight — would anyone care to join me at the Arbor Brewing Company tonight (Thursday) around 7 or 8pm? I'm going whether anyone shows up or not, and if nobody joins me, I'll be drinking alone…and how pathetic would that be?
Look for the bearded fellow with a copy of that book with a bright yellow cover titled "God is Not Great" — I'll be working on my Hitchens impersonation.
clock | May 16, 2007
This and this arrived in the mail today. A birthday present from one of my readers! Thank you!
pharyngula | May 15, 2007Didn't I just say "Woo hoo" yesterday? False alarm. Scarcely do I clear one set of major tasks away than another set rise up. I already mentioned that I was going to be the speaker at the Humanists of Minnesota banquet on Saturday evening. I neglected to tell you all that I'm leaving for the University of Michigan tomorrow to give the keynote at the Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshop.
I know virtually nothing about genetic programming, so this is a wonderful opportunity to learn something about it.
Since I'm certainly not going to be able to tell them a thing about genetic…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2007Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it's looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between "is" and "ought", are we not? Some semesters, I've had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get…
clock | May 14, 2007The other day I was chatting with my brother (the smarter brother of Sherlock Holmes) on the phone, and he said something that may have some truth to it - I was predisposed, from early childhood, to understand and like the Web and the blogs. How? By reading and re-reading a million times the books about the adventures of The Three Investigators. Actually, only four of the early books in the series were tranlated into Serbo-Croatian, but I read them over and over. Later, here in the USA, I managed to find and read a few more in English.
What does that have to do with blogging? Well, back…
clock | May 13, 2007Yup, it happened again. My left shoulder popped out of the socket, right around 12:30 after midnight. I used to be able to put it straight back. My wife did it a couple of times before - she's a nurse after all. It first happened at a horse show when I was abotu 18 or so and had it fixed on the spot by a sports medicine doc. I had it put back by friends, passers-by, medical students, veterinarians, but as the time passes it gets more and more difficult to put back. This is the second time in a row (last time was about 5 years ago) that I had to go to ER, be put to sleep and wake up with…
pharyngula | May 13, 2007On the old site, I had a little tradition of occasionally showing off embarrassing baby pictures of the kids (here's Alaric, Connlann, and Skatje, for instance). Today is Mother's Day, and it would be cool to show off old pictures of Mom, but wouldn't you know it — mothers are much too clever for that. She just sent me a collection of baby pictures of Little PZ, so I'll turn the magic time-machine on myself, instead.
This is pure treacle, self-obsession, vanity, and nostalgia. Don't look below the fold.
My first mug shot. Those are my vital stats on there: 3/09/57, 7:07am, Dr Hogan, Head 14,…
oracknows | May 13, 2007This week has been a bit of a rough and depressing week on the old blog, with the news that Battlestar Galactica will probably be entering its last season,the appearance of annoying conspiracy theorists in new posts and trolls in old posts, really irritating technical difficulties the ScienceBlogs site, and the need to debunk two particularly bad commentaries about the state of cancer research in this country. Worse, I see a further need to revisit at least one rather depressing topic from the past next week. To top it all off, I was on call last week. Given this, I think I need a dose of…
drorzel | May 13, 2007Janet Stemwedel is marking everybody's favorite Hallmark holiday by posting an interview with her mother about going back to school to get a science degree. As Janet says, this was a major inspiration to her:
I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I probably couldn't (or wouldn't) fully grasp it when I was a kid, when she went back to school in her mid-30s my mother opened up my understanding of the world of higher education and of science, and offered me a vision of a woman's work that the society at large did not.
It's a very nice tribute, and…
terrasig | May 13, 2007My Mom did all the great 'Mom' things and was also instrumental in my career choice. After I started grade school, she started feeling out a career in nursing by working as a secretary in the emergency room department of a local hospital. She decided to go to nursing school when I was between 9 and 11 and I remember that her medical books - texts on physiology and pharmacology - began to pique my interest in this field.
Her dinnertime recollections of the previous night's ER happenings engrossed me, but simply grossed out my father. As I grew to have a family of my own, I became even more…