personal
terrasig | December 25, 2009To all of our readers, celebrating today or not, we wish you all the best of what this season means to you and your family.
I particularly like the sentiments shared by my colleague, PalMD, on what Jews and Muslims are doing today in Detroit, Michigan.
I also like the sentiments so nicely expressed by Greta Christina at Alternet.org on 7 Reasons for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays.
We also send out a big congratulations to original ScienceBlogs editor and science journalist, Christopher Mims, and his family on the birth of their beautiful son, Ike.
Gifts come in all forms. Enjoy all you…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2009Well, technically, wrappings for Christmas eve dinner: discos para empanadas.
It turns out, peeling them apart requires some patience and dexterity. Luckily, I had sufficient quantities of both.
I ended up making four different fillings. One was made with veggie ground beef, cheese, and green onions, another with potatoes, onions, and mushrooms, a third with plantains, and a fourth with ricotta cheese, raisins soaked in spiced rum, and chocolate chips.
The Free-Ride family (including the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment) judged them tasty.
Next time, however, I plan to skip…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2009To the young people wandering around Casa Free-Ride singing Christmas songs (not just the refrains but all of the verses):
None of the canonical reindeer is named Connor. And Santa does not have a reindeer named Nixon.
Love,
Dr. Free-Ride
P.S. The last batch of cookies will be out of the oven in one minute. But you need to let them cool before you sample them -- just like the other batches.
drorzel | December 24, 2009SteelyKid says "Look, Daddy! Somebody got me tissue paper!"
"It's the best Christmas present ever!"
Here's hoping you get everything you want this holiday season.
j7uy5 | December 23, 2009Visiting with Kevin, went hiking in Soledad Canyon. The light was
crazy, alterating between awful for photography, and interesting, but
always challenging. When it stopped snowing and the wind wasn't
blowing me around, I was able to get some decent pictures.
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clock | December 23, 2009It is always interesting to dig through one's blog archives and see what happened when, or get reminded of a post one forgot was ever written ;-)
So, here are some of the key posts on A Blog Around The Clock from 2009, chosen from almost 2000 posts that appeared here this year (which is MUCH less than the number of posts in 2008 - I've been slacking off!):
Science
Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish
An Awesome Whale Tale
Do you love or hate Cilantro?
Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work?
Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
Introducing…
jstemwedel | December 23, 2009I am, as it happens, done grading. But I need to express my concern (OK, bumfuzzlement) about something I saw quite a lot of on the final exams I was grading.
You may recall that I let my students prepare a single page of notes (8.5" by 11", front and back) that they can use to help them on their exam. Sadly, not all uses of such an officially sanctioned cheat-sheet end up being helpful. Imagine the following exam question, which the students are asked to answer in a few sentences:
Give van Fraassen's definition of "observable". Then, using this definition, classify each of the following…
goodmath | December 23, 2009 One thing that continually amazes me is the amount of email I get from
readers of this blog asking for career advice. I usually try to just politely
decline; I don't think I'm particularly qualified to give personal
advice to people that I don't know personally.
But one thing that I have done before is shared a bit about my own
experience, and what I've learned about the different career paths that you
can follow as a computer science researher. About six months after I started
this blog, I wrote a post about working in academia versus working in
industry. I've been meaning to update it,…
jstemwedel | December 22, 2009Possibly related to the last post. The lyrics are original.
(For this, you need to imagine the younger Free-Ride offspring humming in the background as the elder sings.)
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
We're sorry that we killed ya.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
At least we didn't grill ya.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Our only Christmas casualty.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Be thankful we don't "nil" ya.
jstemwedel | December 21, 2009It's time for Dr. Free-Ride to have a chat with the grown-ups. If you're a kid and you're reading this, think how much the adults in your life would appreciate it if you got up from the computer and put away your stuff that needs putting away (or played with your brother or sister nicely, or folded some socks).
I'll have a post with some neat-o pictures in it up in a few hours.
OK, just grown-ups here? Let's chat about the man in red.
Issue #1: Is opting into the Santa thing ethical?
This issue was raised in a comment on the New York Times Motherlode blog:
Lies. Just lies.
Though the child…
jstemwedel | December 19, 2009In comments on and earlier post, I mentioned that I no longer take extraordinary measures in anticipation of students taking an exam in an earlier sitting passing on information or answers to students taking the same exam in a later sitting. Commenter Martin wondered if I wasn't being naïve:
there has been no evidence of such answers-from-the-earlier-sitting cheating in the whole time I've been at this university.
Janet,
how do you know this, what do you do to look for this? I'm sceptical, because we've had incidents where students doing the same exam in different countries on the same day…
drorzel | December 17, 2009It's Thursday again, and that means Baby Blogging. But first, SteelyKid has a message:
"Thanks for the awesome rocking frog, Aunt Erin!" Of course, as with any toy at this age, the box is just as much fun:
And, of course, the obligatory Appa picture, showing that she is an enormous baby:
She's big enough to lift a bison!
jstemwedel | December 16, 2009An open letter to the handful of students during today's exam asking whether I could "explain" the fourth short-answer test item to them:
Dear students,
The question you are pointing to is unambiguously phrased.
The wording of the item is quite clear in asking you to explain what that particular author is arguing about that particular scientific explanation. Indeed, the question you are asking me in anxious whispers indicates that you understand what this test item is asking for, and that what you are asking from me is a hint about the right answer.
That's not how it works on the final…
clock | December 16, 2009
I know there is a nice subset of my readers who can read Serbian language. If you are one of those, you may be interested in the last issue of 'Pancevacko Citaliste'. Along with several interesting articles about science publishing and librarianship, there is also an interview with me by Ana Ivkovic, librarian at the Oncology Institute in Belgrade. The journal is Open Access, so you can download and read the PDF here.
terrasig | December 15, 2009The Preamble
Four years ago today, I wrote my first post in the blogosphere over at the old Blogger version of Terra Sigillata. The post, entitled, "A Humble PharmBoy Begins to Sow," set out my mission to be an objective source for information on natural health remedies and drugs that come from nature, whether used as single agent prescription drugs or as botanical mixtures and supplements.
I read blogs for about six months before setting off on my own, primarily because I wanted to be sure my efforts were not redundant with others. Because I am academic and paid by a combination of federal…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2009If my congested head is upright today, I must be administering final exams.
This puts me in mind of a question that has not come up this semester (and, with luck, will not), but that has come up on occasion in the past.
I frequently teach multiple sections of the same course in a given semester. On the one hand, this simplifies things, because it means that I have fewer exams to write. (A single final exam works for both section of Philosophy of Science.) But, since our final exams are scheduled based on the regular meeting days and times for the courses, there are then necessarily…
laelaps | December 15, 2009After spending a long weekend hammering away at the text, I am now happy to say that the first formal iteration of Written in Stone is nearly complete.
It has been difficult work. Making sure that the narrative flows smoothly throughout the book has been among the top challenges, especially since I am not using the somewhat worn technique of starting at a point in earth's history and chronologically creeping towards the present. Instead I am using the history of science as a way to introduce what we have come to understand about the history of life from the fossil record. The two narratives…
jstemwedel | December 14, 2009One of the sprogs gave me a cold. There is nothing like being knocked on your butt by a cold to take all of the fun out of a weekend spent not-grading research projects.
Also, it seems to have filled my head with phlegm that then got ... phlegmatic. Not quite congealed, but on its way in that direction. Desperate for relief, this led me to try something new.
OK, a neti pot is actually a very old treatment, but its use is new to me. Also, it's apparently mainstream enough that you can find it in Walgreen's, and that the package insert claims that "it has been clinically proven to provide…
j7uy5 | December 14, 2009Today is the 90th anniversary of the first Felix the Cat cartoon.
href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz26t_1919felix-the-cat-feline-follies_fun">1919-Felix
The Cat - Feline Follies
Uploaded by iToons.
- Watch more
comedy videos and sitcoms.
Needless to say, it changed a lot over the years. In the 1960's,
it was my favorite.
drorzel | December 13, 2009SteelyKid is a great big baby. By which I mean, she's large for her age. We keep running into other parents whose kids are about the same size as her, but a year or more older.
Every now and then, though, she does something to remind us that she's still got a lot of growing to do, such as trying on my house slippers:
For her sake, I hope those slippers never fit her...