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pharyngula | April 15, 2007There is a short interview with me at One Blog A Day, and they asked about you people, you know, you commenters here, and I was brutally honest. Please don't rise up and strip the flesh from my bones.
drorzel | April 12, 2007Greetings from pitch-dark Northern California, where I'm just ecstatically happy to be awake at 5am. Jet lag sucks.
Other things that suck? Weather delays. We were supposed to arrive at about 1:00 yesterday afternoon, but snow in Chicago screwed that up completely. We spent a good hour and a half sitting on the plane at the gate at O'Hare, where they were down to one working runway, and two working de-icing trucks. This, on top of delays getting into Chicago due to the weather (see "one working runway") meant that we didn't get in until 4:00, so rather than spending a leisurely afternoon…
clock | April 11, 2007How did I miss this!?
Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, one of my personal scientific idols, died on January 25th, 2007at the age of 92.
He has re-invented, or perhaps better to say invented, the field of comparative physiology (now often refered to as 'evolutionary physiology'). He wrote the standard textbook in the field - Animal Physiology: Adaptation and Environment, that he updated through several editions, from which generations of biologists (including myself) learned to think of physiological mechanisms as adaptations.
He wrote a definitive book on Scaling, as well as a wonderful autobiography…
clock | April 10, 2007....my father would have turned 86.
I'll have a shot of slivovitz in his honor tonight.
cmooney | April 8, 2007Okay, I know this has nothing to do with science. But I'm in the mood to promote my kid brother. I'm sure you can understand.
I've just created Davy Mooney TV, using Searchles and combining together my brother's three existing YouTube Videos of live performances. Check it out:
pharyngula | April 8, 2007Hrrm … I seem to have stretched myself a little too thin this weekend. Early this morning I drove off to Minneapolis and Minicon to pick up Skatje and catch a few panels at the con, and then I drove back — I just got back a half hour ago — and despite the fact that there are a great many interesting things to talk about, this day has been a bit too much. Minneapolis really must pick itself up and move about 150 miles further west — I'll appreciate it, and St Paul will be eternally grateful.
I will address Wilkins/Rosenhouse, Grayling, Klinghoffer (grrr), Mooney, Laden, etc., but right now my…
cmooney | April 8, 2007
My brother Davy, a talented young jazz guitarist, is the subject of a lengthy profile in today's edition of the New Orleans Times Picayune. The occasion? He got through a grueling competition and so became the first of seven students admitted into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance's 2007 class at Loyola University, which has just been established.
Here's an excerpt from the article, outlining my brother's story:
By the summer of 2005, he had graduated from UNO and settled into a comfortable life as a working musician, performing at least five nights a week. He and his wife…
clock | April 7, 2007The Bodies Exhibition is coming to The Streets at Southpoint in Durham.
My wife saw it last year in NYC. My daughter will probably be too squeamish for it, but I'll try to get my son to come with me.
Once I go....well, it is certainly a bloggable event.
clock | April 7, 2007Earlier this afternoon, my wife and I went to the Weaver Street Market in Southern Village (which also has a blog) for some wine tasting. You can see the wine list here (pdf).
As the first rule of blogging is never to blog drunk, I had a to wait a couple of hours afterwards before I started to write this post. I wasn't really drunk, but I was happy enough to seriously consider singing on our walk home. I guess I am quite a lightweight...
Our strategy was for Mrs.Coturnix to taste the whites (and occasional red I recommend) and for me to taste the reds (and occasional white she recommends…
clock | April 3, 2007Or, to tell the traditional Passover joke:
A Jewish physicist in the UK was about to get knighted by the Queen. There was a long line of recepients waiting for the ceremony and they were all instructed what to say/chant once they come to face the Queen. The physicist kept silently practicing the obligatory words, but when his time finally arrived he got so nervous he forgot what he was supposed to say. So he started singing the only song he could remember "Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot..."
The Queen looked at him, then looked at her advisor and asked:
"Why is this knight…
jstemwedel | April 2, 2007In case you somehow missed it: tech writer and blogger Kathy Sierra canceled public appearances after receiving death threats. In addition to the death threats, she called attention to some posts about her that were threatening in tone (though probably falling short of actual threats) and definitely mean on now-defunct sites set up by other A-list tech bloggers. Since blogging about this, SIerra has received more threats. A number of bloggers think Sierra has smeared the people who ran the now-defunct websites by not drawing a clear enough distinction between the death threats (which they…
pharyngula | March 31, 2007Well, Skatje's going to Minicon next weekend—sending her off to hang out with intelligent nerds and geeks and people like Charles deLint and Lois McMaster Bujold and the Nielsen Haydens and Jane Yolen is probably the most responsible thing a parent can do. If any of my readers are also going, make sure she doesn't just go hide in her room and knit or chat on the computer. She needs to get out and socialize! Make friends! Watch Dr Who! Something!
Unfortunately, although I'll be providing the shuttle service to get her to and from the con, I'm going to be swamped with work for the next few…
clock | March 29, 2007Heureka is an online popular science magazine in Austria which you should check out, especially if you can read German. But some things are in English, including this interview with yours truly...
There also blurbs about it (in German) in derStandard online and hardcopy, as well as on their science blog Sciblog.
drorzel | March 28, 2007A little while after dinner last night, I started to feel achy and chilled and kind of light-headed, so I retired to bed. Where I had really spectacular fever dreams about... blogging. Somehow, I had come up with the greatest blog post in human history, or some such. I can't recall what it was, but it seemed brilliant when I was shivering under three blankets.
I think, perhaps, I need to get out more. For now, I'm going back to bed.
jstemwedel | March 27, 2007If you got here by following the link from Dennis Overbye's story about the movie Dark Matter, you may want to read the post he quotes about Theodore Streleski and the dangers of extreme power imbalance between graduate students and their advisors. (It's also possible that this time next year I can post a follow-up about the less extreme but still real power imbalances between the tenured and the untenured.)
And now, let me indulge in a tiny bit of grumbling about linkage:
Regular readers of this weblog may have guessed by now that my blogging is not aimed at getting huge traffic. I'm…
cmooney | March 26, 2007I'm a worst-case scenario kind of thinker. My May 2005 article about the destruction of New Orleans by a Category 5 hurricane--an article published about 100 days before Katrina--certainly demonstrated as much. I think it's rational to worry about extreme scenarios in direct proportion to how bad they would be if they actually happened--not to simply dismiss them because they're "unlikely" at any given moment or in any given year.
So perhaps that's why it is that lately, I find myself thinking a lot about the possibility of nuclear terrorism in a major U.S. city. How many people, when they…
clock | March 25, 2007We've had a few dogs over the years and housebreaking them was never a big problem. But now we got my mother-in-law's puppy labradoodle - who is a real sweetheart - for a couple of weeks to see if we can housebreak him because she was not successful.
My wife turned out to be a better animal psychologist than I am and figured out what the problem is. This is not a case of a little puppy who is not yet housebroken. This is a case of a puppy that was inadvertenly trained to poop inside the house and not outside. What we think happened is either that the dog got yelled at when he soiled the…
oracknows | March 25, 2007In case you wondered, yes, ScienceBlogs is just a big cabal, and, as evidence, I present the following photo from a week and a half ago, when I managed to meet, drink, and conspire to take over the science blogosphere at the Toledo Lounge in Washington, D.C. with Tara Smith of Aetiology, Evil Monkey of Neurotopia, and Chris Mooney of The Intersection. The locale was appropriate enough, given Tara's and my Toledo connection, and a good time was had by all.
Does Orac normally look like that? Well, remember, around this time, Dr. Egnor was at the height of his foray into making still more…