personal
pharyngula | January 24, 2009I have safely arrived here in Calgary, and here are the plans for Sunday:
At 10:30, we'll be having brunch at the Best Western Village Park Inn.
At 2:00, I'll be speaking at the University of Calgary.
At 6:00, come around to the Kilkenny Irish Pub. There are possibilities of haggis.
Sound good? Sounds busy! See you tomorrow!
The great comment registration experiment is still in progress. I will switch it off on Wednesday to allow everyone to weigh in with their opinion. There are a few things I can experiment with on my end, too — we're supposed to somehow be able to use OpenID instead of…
edyong | January 24, 2009A little light weekend treat for you.
This beach scence was drawn using eight strains of glowing bacteria. Each has been engineered to produce a differently coloured fluorescent protein. The bacteria were swabbed over a nutrient plate and left to grow overnight, resulting in this living, shining work of art.
The best thing about it is that it comes from the laboratory of Roger Tsien, who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of work on developing the green fluorescent protein, GFP. This big daddy of glowing proteins was isolated from a species of jellyfish and its structure has since been…
drorzel | January 24, 2009Over at Neurotopia, the Evil Monkey is offering advice on how to earn extra money in graduate school:
The key to more than mere culinary survival in graduate school is to volunteer for research studies. I took part in more projects than I could count. Some don't pay squat. I once spent 2 hours a day for ten days sitting in front of an infrared tracking system that monitored shifts in my visual search patterns and movements of my finger as I followed a dot around a screen. I made about 100 bucks for that. At the time, I thought it a princely sum. Then I discovered where the real money was: in…
drorzel | January 23, 2009Baby Blogging is late this week, because SteelyKid has come down with the cold virus that's going around the JCC day care center. Snotty, crying, coughing babies aren't all that photogenic. I finally got a decent picture of her emerging from her sling after a two-hour nap:
It's a little tough to say whether the coughing has gotten better or worse, at this point. Her nose is definitely stuffed up more, though, which made it tough for her to take a bottle. Another fun visit to the pediatrician may be in order...
drorzel | January 22, 2009SteelyKid is now in day care five days a week. This is good for us, in that it lets Kate and I both go back to work full-time, and good for her, in that she gets to meet new people, and spend the whole day playing with interesting toys.
Of course, it has its bad sides, too. The norovirus that laid me and Kate out two weekends ago was something that is going around the day care center. And as I type this, I can hear SteelyKid upstairs coughing, with the cold virus that's also going around the day care center.
Whee!
terrasig | January 21, 2009
Many thanks for some blog publicity go out to Karl Leif Bates, editor of Duke University's online research monthly magazine, Duke Research, and co-founder of Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC). Many of you who attended this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 gathering may recognize Karl as he was in attendance.
Completely independent of any coaxing (Karl was *not* present at my free, Friday Fermentable wine tasting), my post is currently the February 2009 feature on the Duke Research section, Voices: Science in Conversation.
The backstory is that, during our December vacation, we…
clock | January 20, 2009Last year, the only snow day in the Triangle was January 20th. I remember, because a number of locals could not drive to the 2nd Science Blogging Conference. This year we were wiser so we organized it a few days early. And, lo and behold, on January 20th this year, we had snow again:
This was also the first time Juno saw snow. It took her three walks to lose the fear of this strange, white substance:
terrasig | January 20, 2009
It'll be a few days before I can get together posts on this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 conference in frigid North Carolina. The Friday Fermentable Live! was a terrific success and it already looks like there are seven posts out there (for example, Eva Amsen on her Nature Networks blog, Expression Patterns, put up an account with vasectomy-like precision).
I had the honor of participating in two sessions: one on gender and allies in STEM, online and off, with the youthful Alice Pawley and Zuska and another on pseudonymity/anonymity and building online reputation with PalMD. Speaking…
pharyngula | January 19, 2009I mixed up my dates in a recent post, so here's a clarification on precisely when I wll be in Calgary and Edmonton.
Sunday, 25 January, I'll be at the University of Calgary, talking about science education and creationism.
Monday, 26 January, I'll be at the University of Alberta for a debate with Kirk Durston. For even further confusion, unfortunately, that site says the debate is tonight — that's not going to happen. It's next week.
These are open to the public. There will be festivities somewhere around them, I'm sure.
People are also asking about the Ohio event in February. It's still at…
terrasig | January 18, 2009Just as I was starting to put together a few posts about my experiences at this weekend's ScienceOnline'09 soirée, I get a Tweet from Pam Spaulding that openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson didn't appear on HBO's inaugural coverage today and, at least for Kenny Yum of Canada's National Post and others in attendance, could not be heard.
As Pam says:
Remember, this was the supposed salve on the wound to the LGBT community for the upcoming high-profile appearance of Rick Warren at the actual inauguration on Tuesday, which will be seen by millions and will float out there on YouTube in…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Arts & Letters Daily has an item announcing the death of Andrew Wyeth (the link goes to the New York Times obit). This is noteworthy to me because he's one of a very few artists whose work (in poster form) has ever hung on my wall. Specifically, this painting, titled "Soaring":
I picked it up at a poster sale when I was in college, because I needed something to cover the institutional grey wallpaper in my dorm room, and I wanted something different from the standard-issue Dali posters. I liked the general look, but what sold me on it was realizing that the birds in the picture are…
jstemwedel | January 15, 2009Once again, I'm sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline'09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.
I'm going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on "Online science for kids (and parents)". I'll be highlighting a selection of the good content that's out there already, and I'm hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create…
rskloot | January 13, 2009
Right about now, many people are starting to fail at their New Year's resolutions. It happens every year: You were good for a couple weeks, but right about now you're starting to slip with a few cookies, some skipped days at the gym ... Why? Because humans aren't very good at changing, which involves nothing short of rewiring our brains.
A while ago I wrote a story for O, The Oprah Magazine, called "Why is it So Damn Hard to Change," which looks at the neurology of why most New Years resolutions fail, and the ways understanding a bit of science can help people struggling to break old…
terrasig | January 11, 2009Regular readers may note that ScienceBlogs.com has been off the air for the installation and upgrade of our blogging platform, MovableType. So while I finally learned how to use the old one after being here two-and-a-half years, I am now starting over. Hence, this first post being completely devoid of content.
However, I wish to honor my first two commenters with the new interface: a spammer from Istanbul (not Constantinople).
So without further delay, some music to mark this occasion:
There is also a very impressive version performed live (for an audience of one, the host) on MTV Europe in…
edyong | January 9, 2009Well for a day anyway...
ScienceBlogs is currently powered (and I say that in the most charitable possible sense) by Movable Type 3. This Saturday, we're upgrading to Movable Type 4, which will mean the following:
No new posts from any of us from Friday 6pm GMT for about a day
No new comments from you either (sad face)
Some inevitable teething problems when the upgrade kicks in
A bunch of vampiric, vitamin D-deficient bloggers who will stumble out into the bright, shiny world and be very confused, or just sit in a corner, typing into thin air and scratching themselves.
Have good weekends…
edyong | January 9, 2009Amusing little tale of journalism for you:
On 30 December, I wrote a piece about the spookfish and its amazing eyes. The last line of the piece was:
That must give the fish a great advantage in the deep sea, where the ability to spot even the dimmest and briefest of lights can mean the difference between eating and being eaten.
That's not a quote, it's my prose. So it was a bit surprising to see a BBC piece on the same topic, dated 7 January, where the same line turns up, word-for-word, and is attributed to Julian Partridge, one of the authors on the study. Spooky and fishy.
A…
drorzel | January 6, 2009In response to my call for uncomfortable questions, Ewan goes for the jugular:
what do you think your biggest failing as a father has been to date?
See, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about...
The answer is "I get frustrated too easily."
The first few weeks SteelyKid was home, I could get her to go to sleep by holding her curled up on my chest. It was disgustingly cute and heart-warming, and also, little did I know, a brief idyllic period. Starting around week 5, that stopped working, and I have yet to find a sure way of calming her down when she starts melting down, or getting her to…
edyong | January 6, 2009I'm honoured to have been included in this year's OpenLab - a compilation of 50 of the best posts from the last year, taken from a diverse array of science blogs.
My piece on Space Invader DNA has made the cut (although not as ironically so as Abel's vasectomy liveblogging meisterwork). I was always quite proud of this - it's a great story, it deals with horizontal gene transfer, which is a pet-favourite topic of mine, and the scientist who did the work actually commented and took questions from other commenters! And already, the extra attention from the piece has drawn the notice of a…
sheril | January 4, 2009When North Carolina temperatures dip, the old houses in Durham typically offer a crevice here or there for slipping in. And mice are kind of like sea cucumbers in the way they squish themselves through even the smallest vulnerability.
We discovered Gus and Jaq last month. I was up late working on the manuscript when a suspicious looking critter with whiskers crossed the kitchen. So your resident blogger invested in $20 plug-in eradicators. (My old Classics professor swears by them). Touted as the humane alternative to snap traps, they supposedly emit a high frequency sound somewhat akin…
pharyngula | January 2, 2009I have just returned from my last long drive of the season, finally and regretfully shuttling the last beloved member of the Myers clan off to the distant Minneapolis transportation hub. Now, at last, I can relax, shed of my patriarchal obligations (speaking of which, the hair is getting a bit long and wild, and the beard is looking a bit ferocious…I may have to do something to tame them). I've also feeling the fatigue of waging the war on Christmas — my trigger finger is all calloused, and the recoil bruises on my shoulder would make you weep to see them — so it's nice to have a little…