personal
clock | February 17, 2009The Open Science panel is this Thursday at 3-5pm.
If you miss that, or even if you don't, come and meet me and other local bloggers, scientists and onlookers on Friday at Old Town Bar on 45 East 18th Street at 8pm.
jstemwedel | February 17, 2009Owing to the fact that children are vectors of disease, three out of four members of the Free-Ride household have been feverish, achy, sneezy, sleepy, and grumpy for the past few days. (It's not clear yet whether the progression of this bug will include other dwarves.)
Since I'm still kind of dopey, in lieu of a content-ful post, I'm offering some random musings from the sickbed.
Parental fever detection:
Before we go looking for the ear-thermometer, we check for fevers the old-fashioned way: kissing the forehead. If a forehead feels hot (or even warmer than usual) to our lips, then you can…
clock | February 16, 2009Mrs.Coturnix and I will be in NYCity this week. My main business is the Open Science panel at Columbia on Thursday afternoon, which I hope you can attend.
For a more informal way to meet, let's gather at Old Town bar near Union Square at 8pm on Friday night. Tell your friends! And I hope to see you soon.
terrasig | February 15, 2009I had occasion this week to tell friends the story of my maternal grandmother. She was born in 1906 in an eastern Pennsylvania coal mining town. Her family was so poor that she was sent at age 16 to northern New Jersey to clean houses for wealthy families. She gave me pictures of her from the late 1940s as the only woman in a machine shop and, later, continued to shop for her own groceries three-quarters of a mile away well into her late 80s. Although she drove my mother crazy (my Mom is a fantastic story of achievement for another day), I suspect that grandma had undiagnosed obsessive-…
cmooney | February 13, 2009Folks, it has been a really rough time for Sheril--she may or may not tell the full story herself, but suffice it to say that she has been hospitalized for several days and has only recently been allowed to come home, and this unfortunate turn of events has prevented her from attending the AAAS meeting in Chicago, where she was set to headline at the high profile "Science of Kissing" panel on Valentine's Day.
That's a very sad missed opportunity; but luckily, Sheril has also done a freelance article for New Scientist about the same subject, which has just come out and which you can read here…
oracknows | February 12, 2009I would like to thank all of you who have notified me of the decision for the three test cases in the Autism Omnibus hearings before the Vaccine Court. Science actually won in the courts, something you just can't count on with any reliability. It even won resoundingly. I also realize that, as much as it still shocks me, a lot of people look forward to what I have to say on this issue, as I've become one of the main "go-to" bloggers on all things vaccine. Normally, I'd be all over this, reading the decision in detail, culling choice quotes, and spreading my special brand of Respectful and not-…
rskloot | February 12, 2009
Culture Dish is mourning: After an amazingly long and wonderful life, my
dog Bonny died at home peacefully on February 7, 2009, just two months
shy of her 20th birthday. She was an incredible creature. Her story (which I wrote in 2004) inspired millions and forced good change on New York City. Despite her hard
moments, Bonny was eternally happy. She was also eternally loved, and
will now be eternally missed. I've been preparing myself for this moment for years, which helps a lot, but doesn't mean it's easy.
jstemwedel | February 11, 2009(Written for the inaugural edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival, with big thanks to DNLee for launching it.)
Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department's large job announcement binder (familiarly…
terrasig | February 9, 2009
Twenty years ago, University of Florida junior, Tiffany Sessions, disappeared from her townhouse complex in Gainesville, Florida. What happened to her remains a mystery today.
The photo to the left shows Ms Sessions on the left as she appeared in 1989 with the photo on the right age progressed to how she would've appeared last year.
Please accept my apologies in advance for those put off by yet another bit of disproportionate public attention given to the fate of a pretty blonde young woman gone missing. While a graduate student, I lived for two years in the same complex as Tiffany up…
cmooney | February 9, 2009So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…
drorzel | February 8, 2009I only started using FriendFeed a few months ago because other people at the Science in the 21st Century workshop were documenting the conference on it. I quickly became a fan of the service, which not only added an extra dimension to the meeting, but has also been a continuing source of interesting material from the feeds of others.
If you're not familiar with it, FriendFeed is a service that aggregates online content from other sources, and puts out a feed of all your online activity. my feed, for example, includes blog posts, del.icio.us links, YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, and…
drorzel | February 7, 2009SteelyKid is six months old today! To celebrate, here's some video of her bouncing around in her jumper:
(That's spliced together from a bunch of shorter clips. You can here me babbling inanely in the background, because my brain turns to cheese whenever I'm within about five feet of her. I was tempted to mute all the audio and replace it with some song or another, but decided it would be too cheesey. Also, I like the happy baby squawk at the end.)
drorzel | February 7, 2009Since everybody I know on Facebook seems to have done this, it seems I'm obliged to post a list of twenty-five random facts. I wouldn't want to have my Internet License revoked, or anything.
I've always been tall-- I'm not one of those tall people who was 5'7" in the tenth grade, and then shot up a foot over the next two years. I was always one of the three or four tallest kids in my class in school.
I haven't been skiing in at least fifteen years, but every year at this time when the radio station I listen to in the car goes into the all-ski-area-ads format, I wonder about trying it again.…
jstemwedel | February 2, 2009
Some of you may be aware that, at least in certain corners of the blogosphere, November is celebrated as International acaDemic Writing Month. Indeed, in November 2007 I jumped onboard the InaDWriMo bandwagon.
This past November I did not, largely because my November usually turns out to be a ridiculous month for serious writing. There's Thanksgiving and the attendant food-related preparation activities, plus the run up to the December holidays. Also, this year my kids were still playing soccer into December (which is what you get for being too successful in your weekly games), so I was…
jstemwedel | January 31, 2009Robert Burns's birthday, which was January 25, is an important day for Scottish celebration and food.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Give it a chance.
So, back at ScienceOnline'09, I was talking with AcmeGirl about marking the 25th with some lovely Scottish food. She was talking about haggis. In the Free-Ride house, seeing as how we don't do meat, we don't do canonical haggis either. (In 1997, in Scotland, I had a fabulous vegetarian haggis, but I doubt I could reproduce it in my own kitchen, at least on the first try.) So I was thinking maybe tatties and neeps (potatoes and turnips…
drorzel | January 31, 2009SteelyKid is running a bit big for her age-- she'll be six months next weekend, but she's outgrown all her six-month size clothes-- but she's still tiny. At least, I think so, and Kate has the pictures to show why.
(I look awfully smug in that picture, mostly because it's only in the last week or two that I've regained the ability to get her to go to sleep while I'm holding her. For weeks and weeks, every time I tried to get her to go to sleep, she'd scream and kick and thrash until I had to give up and either hand her over to Kate, or put her in the sling. That was a serious bummer, so I'm…
drorzel | January 29, 2009Today was a pretty rotten day in a lot of little ways that aren't worth going into. A smiling, happy baby does a lot to make up for that, though:
This week's picture was actually taken last night by Kate. The height differential between us accounts for the fact that neither SteelyKid nor Appa are fully in the frame. Still, it's a good illustration of just how darn cute SteelyKid is when she's happy.
cmooney | January 29, 2009
So...I have a new home.
Just two days ago now, I arrived in Princeton, New Jersey and occupied a new apartment here, along with the fiance and the puppy. Los Angeles was a blast, and it's somewhere I think everyone ought to try to live--but I wanted to get back to the hoary old east coast.
I also had reason to do so: I'm now a visiting associate at the Center for Collaborative History here. The professor I'll be collaborating with is D. Graham Burnett, a science historian who taught me Darwin at Yale back in 1997. We're working on a history of science project, not surprisingly...and that's…
drorzel | January 27, 2009Via Kathryn Cramer (on Facebook, of all places), an article from the Daily Mail about how kids these days don't get around much:
When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300…
edyong | January 27, 2009Last week, President Obama stated in his inaugural address that he would "restore science to its rightful place." ScienceBlogs has been quick to capitalise on his words by launching a new initiative called The Rightful Place Project. As an opening salvo, the Project is asking writers, bloggers and scientists from all over the world to answer this innocuous question:
What is science's rightful place?
Many of the others have had their say, and here's my take.
Science has different sides to it. On the one hand, you have the experiments and their results; the people and their stories; the…