Reviews
sporte | April 21, 2007If you've ever looked at an evolutionary tree, contemplated phylogeny, cladistics, or the like, you're probably aware that Joe Felsenstein is one of the leaders of the pack.
And you will certainly enjoy, this interview that Blind Scientist has posted.
I wouldn't advise reading the interview to learn about doing phylogenetics, but you will learn a bit about the social anthropology of the field. Felsenstein does a wonderful job of supplying historical context to phylogenetic arguments and filling in the missing details.
A phylogenetic tree is a kind of model or hypothesis that's put forth…
sporte | October 4, 2006Awhile back Chemical & Engineering News published a fascinating article called "The Secret Life of Plant Crystals" with some wonderful photos of calcium oxalate crystals. Special cells (called "idioblasts") produce these crystals, with shapes that are unique to each type of plant.
Even though 75% of flowering plants make these crystals, no one knows why they make them and in fact, their functions may be as diverse as their shapes. Some crystals look sharp and dangerous, like thistles or thorns, suggesting that they function to defend a plant from hungry herbivores. Other crystals are…
sporte | June 20, 2006I recently completed a long trip out-of-town, giving a presentation at a Bio-Link conference in Berkeley, and teaching a couple of bioinformatics classes at the University of Texas, through the National Science Foundation's Chautauqua program.
The Human Subjects Protection Course
Before I left town, I had to take a class on how to treat human subjects. It seems strange, in some ways, to be doing this now, several years after completing graduate school, but my experimental subjects have generally been plants, protozoans, and bacteria; with a few rabbits, rats, and mice thrown in as antibody…
tlambert | April 27, 2005 This book review by Matt Taibi of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat is brilliantly funny. Go read it.
Taibi's review has been widely linked and praised by bloggers but I have found a blogger who didn't like it---John Ray, who wrote about it:
But reading these diatribes of rage and hate does certainly explain the horrors that happen when Leftists gain unrestricted power (i.e. in Communist regimes).
My guess as to why Ray didn't like it goes like this: Before Ray can fit a piece of writing into his worldview, he needs to decide whether it was written by a Leftist or not. In this case,…
tlambert | April 11, 2005 We bought a house a few years ago. It was our first entry into the real estate market and it was quite scary. Most houses in Sydney are sold by auction, and this seemed to be a way to coax buyers into paying more than they could afford. We saw a house that my wife really wanted, and while talking to the sellers' agent she blurted out the maximum price we would be willing to pay for it. We had sort of resigned ourselves to paying that much, but when the auction came around, we got the house for $10,000 less than that. That was my bid in the auction, and nobody was willing to bid more, so…