personal
pharyngula | November 1, 2007While I'm here in San Diego, I'll also be giving a talk/hosting a discussion at the Scripps Institute on Friday at 3:00. The title is:
Sharing science: education, activism, and advocacy
I'm planning on telling the attendees the secret to getting a million visits per month to their blogs. No, actually — I'm going to discuss and justify diverse approaches to getting the public engaged in science issues, and I plan to mention both what I consider to be successes (but which may not change the wider conversations) and failures (which even so are of value). And it's open to the public! Come on down…
pharyngula | October 31, 2007I came across this interesting meme: google for the image that comes up first for your name. I was a little surprised by what "pz" returns, but I think it is entirely appropriate.
Really…you don't want to cross me.
Doing an image search for "PZ Myers" returns a photo of me and Richard Dawkins first (which is OK!), and a picture of Cheri Yecke second, which I find terribly, horribly insulting.
jstemwedel | October 31, 2007I'm told we had a moderate earthquake here last night. Indeed, it is reportedly the largest earthquake in the area since the 1989 Loma Prieta quake -- which, as it happens, was the temblor that welcomed me to the San Francisco Bay Area.
I completely missed it.
You see, I was driving home from the store with the carrot sticks for the younger Free-Ride offspring's classroom Hallowe'en celebration. The roads haven't been repaved in a while, so I suppose the jostling that I attributed to the road surface might have been caused in part by seismic activity.
At home, the sprogs felt the shaking (…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2007Okay, this is amazing! One of my readers, who shall remain anonymous unless that person chooses to reveal him(her)self, has sent an Amazon gift certificate to me to purchase a digital camera. WOW! So I ask you, dear readers, which digital camera do you recommend? I want to take close-up pictures of birds (and insects and flowers) as well as pictures of birds that I am looking at while birding, which requires some sort of distance-focusing ability. I assume I should also have a fairly large memory card for those wallpaper sized images that I hope to share with you .. but you are the experts…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2007The little hawk-headed parrot is settling in fairly well. (S)he is rather cautious about me, reminding me, by flying away whenever the opportunity presents itself, that I am not the human that (s)he is familiar with. This will pass soon enough, though.
This bird is is good flesh, but is not yet eating on her (his?) own even though I give her(him?) a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as a seed mix, so I am handfeeding her twice per day; once in the morning and then again in the evening. The food is a powder that I mix with water (five parts water to one part food) and is fed…
sheril | October 31, 2007Halloween 2007 finds me dressed as a pirate doing my part to combat global warming!
And now a reader poll on this 31st day of October...
Which of the following do you find scariest and why? (answer in comments)
a) Global Warming
b) Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards
c) Iron Fertilization
d) Lack of funding for Education and Research Innovation
e) My favorite co-blogger's question for 2008 presidential candidates
* Alternative frightening submissions of your own are also encouraged *
And of course, would it really be Halloween without Michael Jackson's…
tqa | October 29, 2007
Here's a quote for you. It's one of the ones that should make you wonder whether you should laugh or cry:
And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
That, if you haven't guessed from the name in the middle line,…
oracknows | October 29, 2007Every so often, as a blogger, I get e-mail. Well, actually, I get a lot of e-mail, much of which I just don't have time to answer (nothing personal when it happens), but every so often an e-mail makes me feel as though Rod Serling should be popping up at the end. I got this one not too long ago:
From: "eric swan" (xxx@xxx.xxx)
To: oracknows@gmail.com
Subject: 911
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 23:23:22 -0400
who are you, what are your motives and who are you working for?
Eric Swan @ xxx@yahoo.com.
Eric Swan happens to be a 9/11 Truther who's appeared in the comments before, spewing 9/11 conspiracy…
pharyngula | October 28, 2007You would not believe what I just caughtSkatje doing — I am horrified at what my own child was perpetrating.
She was installing some abomination called "Ubuntu" on her computer.
My copy of Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to arrive tomorrow, and I am not going to share it with her. I may have to cut her out of the will.
sheril | October 26, 2007I can't deny my co-blogger here is a sexy geek. Heck, even if I tried, I'd have no case--it's been documented. Well, the west coast is starting to seem like a parallel universe because now I have this other co-blogger named Chris who's also a sexy geek with WIRED and they even live in the same town!
Remember MTV's Singled Out? That Chris - host of PBS's WIRED Science - is the newest member of our family over at the Correlations Compound and let me be the first to say welcome! Make yourself at home...
Okay, admittedly I never imagined I'd be blogging. Back in 2005, I promised some…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2007
Can you find the bar-tailed godwits here among the avocet and marbled godwits?
Image: Mary Scott, Birding America.
Thanks to a reader who would rather remain anonymous, I am going to go to Texas tomorrow and will return to all of you on Tuesday. I have scheduled a few things to publish on this blog while I am gone so you don't feel abandoned, and I will be peeking in at night and perhaps publishing a few things for you to read or a few pictures for you to look at during those times.
I return from Texas on Sunday night, and will be writing a little bit for you on Monday, but since The Bird…
jstemwedel | October 25, 2007As mentioned before, I'm currently at the Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (or SERMACS if you're in a hurry) in Greenville, South Carolina. I got in last night, just in time to catch the last 25 minutes or so of Dick Zare's plenary address on "The Chemistry of Propulsion".
Where I arrived was when he put up the slide that asked, "Is Global Warming Happening?"
Having looked closely at the published research, Zare's answer was, not surprisingly, "It sure seems to be!"
He then followed with some consideration of whether global warming is good or bad. Of course,…
clock | October 24, 2007My brain is fried. My flight home was horrifying - the pilot warned us before we even left the gate that the weather is nasty and that he ordered the stewardess to remain seated at least the first 30 minutes of the flight. Did the warning make the experience more or less frightening? I think it made it more so. Yes, the wind played with our airplane as if it was a toy, but knowing that the pilot thought it was nasty made it less comforting that he is confident himself in his abilities to keep us afloat. The scariest was the landing - we were kicked around throughout the descent until the…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2007David Ng at The World's Fair wants me to play along before I head to the airport. Here are the rules:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.
To make it easier…
pharyngula | October 23, 2007It has just now sunk in that I'm holding plane tickets that I'll be using next week to fly to … San Diego.
I hope for everyone's sakes that all is under control well before I get there … but isn't it just like a bunch of infidels to schedule a meeting for the middle of an inferno?
jstemwedel | October 23, 2007I'm blogging from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This morning, I was part of a session (along with Bora Zivkovic and Jean-Claude Bradley) entitled "Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication". I thought I'd make a few brief comments about the session while my impressions are still fresh, but I reserve the right to say more later.
First off, for an 8:30 AM session, I was pretty impressed with the turnout. There were probably about 55 people in the…
j7uy5 | October 23, 2007When I was in junior high, I used to do this. I
don't know
why. Probably I was bored with something that is inherently
boring. It does not spice things up very much. But
some spice is better than none.
href="http://www.hourlylaff.com/15-amazing-ways-to-tie-your-sneakers/">This
article shows 15 idiosyncratic ways to ties one's shoelaces.
I did not do all 15, but I did do several. The Loop
Back was my favorite.
HT:
href="http://tipnut.com/15-amazing-ways-to-tie-your-sneakers/">TipNut.
Most of the tips on TipNut are practical. This one is not.
Even so, it is nice to know…
clock | October 22, 2007No time to experience Clifford Simak's Wisconsin, but Mocha (124 W. Wisconsin Ave.) in Milwaukee is very comfortable, mocha is excellent and wifi is strong (and free). I'll be able to check in the room in an hour or two and will go to some ASIS&T sessions if I can without a name-badge. Our session is in the morning.
Jean-Claude, Janet, KT Vaughan (who I met at last year's Science Blogging Conference) and Phillip Edwards will arrive a little later and we'll go for dinner and fun on the town.
Report - tomorrow.