personal
drorzel | June 13, 2010A grey and dreary day here in Schenectady for the 216th Commencement at Union College. This is probably healthier for the graduates than the years when it's sunny and hot and people pass out in their seats, but it isn't the most pleasant send-off. Then again, my own college graduation was a grey and dismal day, and that's worked out all right.
This year's class of Physics majors was small, but stellar. We only had four majors, but every one of them graduated with both departmental honors (for doing thesis research) and Latin honors ([superlative] cum laude), and those honors were well…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2010This is a blog post that I more or less composed in my mind early this morning when, at 5 AM, I awoke with a runny nose and started sneezing.
Just like I have every morning at 5 AM for the past month and a half.
I do not, as far as I can tell, have a cold.
I do not experience the same runny nose or sneezing at other times of day.
Is it possible that I'm allergic to 5 AM? (People can't actually be allergic to a time of day, can they?)
Or, more plausibly (if only marginally so), is it possible that something about my circadian rhythms makes me more vulnerable to allergens in my environment…
drorzel | June 10, 2010Kate was away last Thursday, and just got back yesterday, so this is the first time in a week that all of us have been together. In honor of that, we'll break out the fancy camera remote technology for a group portrait (a Baby Blogging first!)
Emmy snuck into the lower left corner of the frame, to express her skepticism at all this shmoopy biped stuff.
drorzel | June 10, 2010One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling his hips, he made a deliberate effort to practice giving sound bites-- answering questions in 3-4 sentences with a good "hook" for the tv people to work with.
I thought of this when I stumbled across the following YouTube clips, which were shot by TV Ontario when I was at the…
drorzel | June 9, 2010I'm not in the general habit of endorsing candidates for state office in districts where I don't live, but I think I can make an exception in this case:
In a unanimous vote, the Broome County Democratic Committee approved of Town of Triangle Councilman John Orzel to run for the state's 52nd district, currently represented by Republican Sen. Thomas W. Libous.
John Orzel is my uncle, and my 10th and 12th grade Social Studies teacher back in the day. Libous is a career politician in the most negative sense of the phrase, and was one of the Republicans who orchestrated last summer's farcical…
mmckenna | June 9, 2010Joanne Manaster (site, Twitter) and Jeff Shaumeyer (site, Twitter) are running a Summer Science Reading Contest for kids and teens. They're looking for science authors to contribute books as prizes. Some cool people have stepped up, including Sciblings Deborah Blum and Rebecca Skloot (and me), but they could definitely use more. C'mon, represent: Consider it an investment in future audiences.
oracknows | June 8, 2010Orac is on his way home from the ASCO meeting in Chicago. Shockingly, he was so busy that he didn't bother to write anything last night, his last night in Chicago. Fortunately, he found something from the archives that's perfect for this occasion. This is something he wrote in 2007, after the last time he attended the ASCO meeting in Chicago. That means if you haven't been reading at least three years, this post is new to you. It also serves as an entry point for few pictures I want to post, just as soon as I get a chance to suck them out of my iPhone and onto my computer after I get home and…
mmckenna | June 7, 2010So, hi, Scienceblogs. I'm thrilled to be joining the conversation here.
By way of introduction, I'm Maryn McKenna, journalist and author and sole proprietor of Superbug, which has been running for 3+ years at Blogger but moves over here today, thanks to an invitation from the Sb staff and some extremely kind support from friends and colleagues who are already here.
Superbug began as online notes and digital whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which is a narrative investigation of the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph.…
drorzel | June 3, 2010I sometimes get comments asking why so many of the baby blogging pictures are taken from above. The answer is twofold: 1) I'm rather tall, and thus it's hard for me to get down to baby level to take pictures straight on, and 2) when I do try to get down to baby level, most of the pictures come out like this:
SteelyKid, like Emmy, interprets "Daddy near ground level" as "time to play" and comes charging over to me. It's usually dumb luck if I manage to get the camera up before she pounces on me.
So, if you want Appa-for-scale images, you're generally stuck with shots from above:
Fortunately…
pharyngula | June 3, 2010Jerry Coyne has put together a list of his 20 most favorite movies, and invited us all to join in. I can't. I just don't believe in it. There is no such thing as a best movie, just movies that some of us like a lot. I also can't list 20, so you'll have to settle for an idiosyncratic 5 movies that aren't the best, but made me happy anyway.
Zardoz : One of those movies where I just sat there with "Wait, what?" on an infinite loop in my head. Giant flying heads spewing guns, immortals and barbarians, Sean Connery in a diaper, Charlotte Rampling in nothing at all, Beethoven's Seventh, just…
laelaps | June 3, 2010As you can probably tell from the last two "photos of the day", I'm back from Utah. It was a wonderful trip, but I have been too swamped with other projects/commitments to get this blog back up to speed. Regular blog entries will resume soon.
After reading S.J. Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack while in transit to and from the beehive state, however, I started to reconsider what this blog is meant to be. Specifically, I am thinking of writing higher-quality essays less often than simply trying to feed this blog every weekday. This will be an experiment (Laelaps is, after all, a writing lab first…
terrasig | June 2, 2010Just the other day, I wrote about how DrugMonkey and I have experienced unprecedented and sustained blog traffic for posts we wrote in February on K2 Spice, one of a couple of marijuana-like "incense" products still sold legally in the United States.
Every morning, I dial up my SiteMeter blog statistics and take a look at what posts readers first land upon when coming to visit the humble world headquarters of Terra Sigillata.
Last week, 2,700 to 2,800 of the 4,000 most recent hits were landing on our February K2 Spice post. (You will also note below the sad state of my readership in that…
sb admin | May 31, 2010Anyone interested in Henrietta Lacks and the grave marker finally placed on her long unmarked grave this weekend should click here immediately for a beautiful post by scientist David Kroll, who attended the unveiling ceremony. It's filled with beautiful photos of the day, and a tribute to all Henrietta's cells did for science. His photo below shows Henrietta's new headstone in much sharper detail than the one I posted yesterday with the text of the inscription. Visit his post for many more photos of the ceremony, the graveyard, and Henrietta's family.
terrasig | May 31, 2010
In addition to my own photos herein, Tom McLaughlin posted a nice slide show of the day at his South Boston News & Record.
Despite two trees that snapped and fell in my driveway within six feet of my car in an impressive thunderstorm Friday evening, I drove on Saturday morning to Clover, Virginia, for the dedication of a gravestone that finally marks the final resting place of Henrietta Lacks, a concrete honor, if you will, to recognize the source of one of the most valuable medical tools of the 20th century and today.
For those who are not regular readers, Henrietta Lacks was a rural…
sb admin | May 29, 2010Today is a very exciting day: Henrietta Lacks (aka HeLa) has been lying in an unmarked grave since her death in 1951. Today, thanks to Dr. Roland Pattillo at Morehouse School of Medicine, who donated a headstone after reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her grave is finally marked. Below, a snapshot of some members of the Lacks family beside the new marker for Henrietta, and the marker for her daughter, Elsie, which was also unveiled today. Dr. Roland Pattillo is pictured at the far left:
Her stone, in case you can't tell from the picture, is shaped like a book. The text was…
drorzel | May 27, 2010Kate here with two pictures of SteelyKid at play. Here's one from last night in which she is beginning to realize the difficulties with her plan:
(Very shortly after this, she solved the problem by demanding that I put my sandals back on, and then leading me around by one hand while she pushed her cart with the other.)
And here's one from tonight where she works on recreating the fun-with-towers experience:
With my steadying the bottom, she eventually built that single column to be taller than she could reach the top of while standing. She was so pleased with herself.
(No, Appa isn't in…
pharyngula | May 25, 2010People are still asking me to come speak at various places, and I'm just going to have to put my foot down. Here's my calendar for the next few months:
Oslo on 16 June
Copenhagen on 18-20 June
Lindau on 26 June-1 July
Minneapolis and Convergence/Skepchick Con 1-3 July
Vancouver, BC on 30 July
Fargo, ND atheist convention on 17-20 September
Cheribourg, Quebec for RiboClub on 20-22 September
Montreal, AAI convention on 1-3 October
LA, Secular humanism conference on 7-10 October (I'll be on a panel with Chris Mooney, discussing accommodation vs. confrontation. Uh-oh.)
Mexico…
jstemwedel | May 21, 2010When last we checked in with Snowflake Free-Ride, our intrepid white rabbit had not yet found the courage to venture all the way to the end of the drawbridge from her hutch.
Well, on Tuesday, Snowflake got the bunny equivalent of a screened porch. This seems to have been enough to convince her to come on out.
Indeed, Snowflake was so enthusiastic about having free access to grass and dandelions (along with sun and breezes), that the very same day she also decided she was brave enough to hop out the open door of the bunny run into the wide expanses of the yard.
At first she would just hop…
drorzel | May 21, 2010Duke shut down its Usenet server yesterday, which is significant because Duke's server was the original home of Usenet. I think this means that Usenet is now available only to about a dozen people with panix accounts.
I note this here because Usenet was an important part of my life. I started reading the rec.arts.sf.* hierarchy in 1993, was involved in the creation of rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, and spent a lot of time there and on rec.sport.basketball.college as a graduate student and post-doc. It was my introduction to text-based interaction on the Internet, and led directly to…
drorzel | May 20, 2010How did my day of solo SteelyKid wrangling go, you ask? I can sum it up in one picture:
She's quite a handful...
(To be fair, this is part of a game that gets played even on days when I'm not about to fall over from exhaustion... But it seemed like a really appropriate picture to sum up the day.)