Stuff I don't know about
terrasig | July 5, 2010
Purty, innit? I got the raspberry one pictured above.
Disclaimer: This is not a corporate product review. I purchased my Kodak Zi8 for full retail price two months ago for $179.95. However, you can get it now for $129.95 at Kodak and everywhere else on the web. It was a fantastic deal at the old price - an incredible deal at the new price. It allows one to take fantastic quality, image-stabilized, 1080p HD movies that you can then watch on the TV.
However.
Editing the movies for posting on the blog is pissing me off no end.
I have a 24-minute interview with University of Pennsylvania…
terrasig | April 25, 2010
So you ran any number of 5K charity races yesterday or went on the Piedmont Farm Tour. But it's a rainy Sunday in the Southeast and you're wondering what to do with a house full of cooped-up kids, especially if it's too soggy to do day two of the farm tour.
Let me suggest that you get to Durham, NC, to MakerFaire:NC.
Maker Faire is an annual event organized by the people who bring us MAKE Magazine. Maker Faire:NC is a fully sanctioned event but is being planned and coordinated by Raleigh/Durham locals. Our goal is to bring together Makers, Crafters, Inventors, Evil Geniuses, Scientists,…
terrasig | March 31, 2010Who knew?
As I am stuttering through recovery from LungMutiny2010, I am paying more attention to my diet. So, as I try to go out for my 10 min walk everyday, I still drink some sports drink - usually Gatorade made from the massive vat of powder you can buy here at Costco.
We tend to get plenty of sodium in our diet - far too much in the US, actually - but I always worry about potassium when I am sweating (Disclaimer: I am not an exercise physiologist or a cardiovascular or nephrology physician.).
I always thought that the widely-sold sports drinks were the best sources of potassium outside of…
terrasig | February 19, 2010Just a quick post on an article that caught my eye: Jazz Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, CA, has announced that the US FDA has accepted their new drug application (NDA) filing for JZP-6, or sodium oxybate, for the treatment of pain and fatigue associated with fibromyalgia.
The NDA was based on positive outcomes of two, Phase III clinical trials - those randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind trials that serve as the gold standard for drug efficacy. The company expects an approval decision from FDA by October 2010.
Jazz has already garnered approval for sodium oxybate under the brand name…
terrasig | January 9, 2010While the coffee wasn't quite ready this morning, I ventured to the Wall Street Journal health page at the Wall Street Journal, one of my frequent first-reads.
I was immediately intrigued by a short article from the excellent Jennifer Corbett Dooren about Roche-Genentech gaining US FDA approval for a new rheumatoid arthritis drug, Actemra.
Actemra (tocilizumab) is a monoclonal antibody that works via a novel mechanism of blocking the receptor for interleukin-6, a pro-inflammatory molecule called a cytokine. What is most important is that Actemra appears to work in patients who have not been…
terrasig | December 27, 2009Sitting back today looking at news and webcams in my former home of Colorado had me also reflecting on the events that conspired to put me in North Carolina. This unexpected turn in my life also opened me up to a local community of remarkably creative people with national and international reputations in their respective fields.
One of these people whom I am fortunate to call a local hero is journalist Barry Yeoman. Barry was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as, "(One of) the best unsung investigative journalists working in print in the United States.... Yeoman specializes in…
terrasig | November 21, 2009At the recent U2 Academic Conference, I had the opportunity to be at the local premiere of It Might Get Loud, a much-more-than documentary of the electric guitar as told through the careers of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Jack White of The White Stripes and Raconteurs. For the record, I thought that White was going to be totally out of his league - while I wouldn't call him a "legend" as billed by the producers, I left being incredibly impressed with his background and breadth of abilities.
Related to the movie trailer below, I had an exchange with Toaster Sunshine, a…
terrasig | November 16, 2009Before you tell me to go do this, I did - and I still don't have a good answer.
I was reminded of this issue when I learned that a couple of friends were off this weekend to the snowy Rocky Mountain West attending the 2009 Carnivore Conference: Carnivore Conservation in a Changing World sponsored by Defenders of Wildlife at the Grand Hyatt Denver. Some of these folks are graduate students and freelance writers who are on tight budgets.
The most recent article I found on this issue was by Barbara E. Hernandez at BNET. She asked the same question as I, made some observations, and asked…
terrasig | September 16, 2009If you are in the area, this looks really good:
Award-winning author Gary Taubes will speak at next week's Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) Research Conference:
"Why We Get Fat: Adiposity 101 and the Alternative Hypothesis of Obesity"
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
12:00 noon to 1:00 pm
North Pavilion
Lower Level Lecture Hall
Gary Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007). He studied applied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard and has an MS degree in engineering from Stanford University…
terrasig | July 8, 2009Ahem.
I have privately received grief about the poor quality of a sentence I wrote yesterday while spouting off about my being quoted by ABC News on the first round of drugs reported used by the late Michael Jackson. (I suspect that the number of prepositions I just used here will elicit a response as well).
While I'm a half-decent pharmacologist, it seems an English major I am not.
Therefore, may I request that someone amongst this learned gathering kindly assist me in rewording the following statement:
I also enjoyed that fact, however, that my quote was missing from the responses of other…
terrasig | April 30, 2009I only signed up for Twitter (@abelpharmboy) on 21 January but have found it incredibly valuable for staying up to speed on blogs, MSM articles, local and national news, and science and medicine stories. I've already accumulated 284 "followers" which is about half of our daily blog visitors. I'd say that about 60% of those are not spammers.
Well tonight in the Bull City, there is an event called Triangle Tweetup, a meetup of local Twitter users at Bronto Nation Software (@bronto). I'm going as are a few bloggers our readers may know such as Bora Zivkovic and foodie, jewelry-maker, and…
terrasig | March 3, 2009Run, do not walk, to the most recent addition to the ScienceBlogs.com family, AoMFASR, the blog of geology professor, Dr Kim Hannula.
You people already had to bear with my fawning about Colorado but you'll now get real, natural history and geological sciences info from a scientist with expertise to share with you the glory of the American Southwest.
I think it's really gneiss that Sb invited Kim to join but I think she should be prepared not to take any schist from anyone. This blog network has its faults but a great many of us are alluvial fans.
terrasig | February 9, 2009I know that many of you have seen this article by Matthew Perronne since it was picked up by the majority of AP outlets this morning:
Two drugmakers spent hundreds of millions of dollars last year to raise awareness of a murky illness, helping boost sales of pills recently approved as treatments and drowning out unresolved questions -- including whether it's a real disease at all.
Key components of the industry-funded buzz over the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia are grants -- more than $6 million donated by drugmakers Eli Lilly and Pfizer in the first three quarters of 2008 -- to…
terrasig | January 27, 2009I'm stuck in the US East Coast ice and snow trying to get home after some science work for our nation's health agency (that is my rationale for posting this on my Sb blog). My four-hour equipment and weather delay has now turned into a canceled flight.
The gate agent just announced that those of us who can get out tonight will be booked on a US Airways flight.
The line came very close to breaking into outright applause.
Can anyone say "Sully for CEO?"
And if I'm going to put this out in public, let's give megaprops to Wisconsin-based co-pilot Jeff Skiles who did all the other stuff to set out…
terrasig | January 20, 2009Mike Dunford has a post about how some (ok, Fox News) are already stating the Obama isn't really president because of the flub in today's oath of office during the inauguration ceremonies - never mind that the former Senator actually became president at noon, about ten minutes before the actual oath (although Orin Kerr has an informative post on who was president from 12:00 to 12:10 as prompted by Howard Wasserman.).
I'm loving Twitter right now because Carl Zimmer brought my attention to a fantastic post earlier this afternoon by his brother, linguistics expert Benjamin Zimmer:
Early reports…
terrasig | January 16, 2009The best coverage of the science behind the apparent "bird-strike" cause of yesterday's USAirways miracle on the Hudson can be found at Scientific American online:
It basically comes down to the physics equation for kinetic energy: Energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. The velocity of the aircraft allows for the impact of this feathered bird to generate enough force to cause an engine to malfunction. [A 12-lb Canada goose struck by a 150-mph aircraft at lift-off generates the force of a 1,000-lb weight dropped from a height of 10 feet, according to birdstrike.org.]
Yes, this…
terrasig | December 10, 2008I have something like ten posts already started and none of them done due to that silly work thing. I don't know how the other people around ScienceBlogs actually get posts up with such frequency.
In the meantime, I had a thought while conversing with Alice Pawley and Suzanne Franks about their session at the upcoming ScienceOnline'09 unconference on gender issues in science where I, brave one that I am, will represent all men and discuss how we all think we boys can be allies.
In the meantime, please re-read Alice's post on the recent anniversary of the Montreal Massacre:
On December 6,…
terrasig | May 5, 2008I did not know this:
In the spirit of our recent hosting of the Tar Heel Tavern blog carnival and our general posts on debunking alternative medicine, I learned today about the source of these two words with ties to the homeland.
Miss Cellania's always informative posts at mental_floss blog linked today to Neatorama's, 10 Insulting Words You Should Know. The outstanding list, which you should read in its entirety, includes the origin of the word, "bunkum," which is derived from Buncombe County, NC:
In 1819, a North Carolina congressman, the Honorable Felix Walker, was giving a rambling…
terrasig | March 12, 2007As I may not be able to get an original post up today, I wish to direct readers to an interesting post by Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily. Dave does a very nice job of explaining how the purported energy savings of the DST change may not actually help, or worse, cost us energy in the end.
terrasig | October 9, 2006For those of you are are snickering at how this blogger didn't really understand trackback, a basic feature of blogging, just picture for a moment the all-too-common occurrence of four PhDs struggling at the lecture podium to get the A/V program to work for an esteemed guest speaker.
Well, I've got me one of them thar PhDs. However, a PhD is also supposed to give you license for "life-long learning," not that you really need a PhD to do so, of course.
Example: I try to do my best to cite interesting things I see in the blogosphere, especially those posts from my brilliant and witty friends…