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cwilcox | April 18, 2011See?
Photo by Andre Seale
You're looking at Me, Lucia Malla (a fellow blogger, but in Portugese! How cool is that?!) and, of course, PZ Myers, just after he got leid. Isn't he just glowing?
We managed to track down PZ Myers at the Society for Developmental Biology's West Coast Regional Meeting here in Honolulu - which we totally crashed. Thanks for the free talks, SDB! Especially PZ's!
gregladen | April 18, 2011
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted…
cwilcox | April 17, 2011In which I embarrass myself even more.
You can download it here
Lyrics: PhD (rewrite of Travie McCoy's "Billionaire")
I wanna get my PhD so fricking bad
Get all of those jobs I never can
I wanna be on the cover of Science Magazine
And all your future research will cite me
Oh every time I close my eyes
I see my name with letters on the side
Oh call me doctor if you don't mind, oh yeah
You'll see, my life will be complete
When I get my PhD
I would have an office of my own
Where I can be alone, buy myself a nice chair
Close my eyes and sit there
You know, I'll prolly make my TAs do the grading…
gregladen | April 17, 2011As Comcast moves towards being the next AT&T (and I'm talking about the ATT of the 1960s, which was more powerful than most countries and more nefarious than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney combined), it gets increasingly strange, self serving, and dangerous as a company to deal with. Over the last year or so, our service (we have Comcast cable) has increased in price and decreased in stations being offered that we will at this point do better by canceling it and adding an antennae (but this is how we get Internet). Now, Comcast offers a thing called "Extreme 105" which costs a bundle even if…
pharyngula | April 16, 2011What makes a plenary session different from the other sessions here? I don't know.
10:00-11:30 Session 6: Plenary Session (Chair: Marian Waterman [UC Irvine])
  10:00-10:30 Wei Yan (Univ. of Nevada) "The control of cytoplasm removal during late spermiogenesis"
I produced 100,000 sperm in the time it took him to say his first sentence. I'm so proud.
Part of process of spermiogenesis is removal of cytoplasm and organelles from sperm. Found late expression of Spem1 protein in maturation process which doesn't affect sperm numbers, but mulls strongly affect motility and sperm head…
pharyngula | April 16, 2011Hey, it's all about evolution. This is the session labeled as being about evo-devo, but I've been thinking about evolution in all of the talks, so I guess here we're just making it more explicit.
08:00-09:30 Session 5: Evolution of Development (Chair: Elaine Seaver [Univ. Hawaii])
  08:00-08:30 Brad Davidson (Univ. of Arizona) "Microenvironmental cues refine inductive signaling during Ciona intestinalis heart development"
Ciona heart is a simple system: only two precursors! Inductive response to FGF is dependent on cell adhesion. Cool confocal work on cell behavior.
  08:30-08:50…
pharyngula | April 16, 2011Incoming! Here's another dump of my notes from yesterday afternoon. I'll be hitting you with more later today.
Disease is the pretext here, but it's really all about development.
15:30-17:00 Session 4: Development and Disease (Chair: Jack Somponpun [Univ. Hawaii]; co-Chair: Jacqueline Ho [UPMC])
15:30-16:00 Jacqueline Ho (Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh UPMC) "microRNAs in kidney development and disease"
Congenital anomalies are most common cause of renal failure in children. Â Kidneys form from metanephric mesenchyme by induction from branching tubule - lots of interactions and…
pharyngula | April 16, 2011Well, a whole room full of them, actually, but also the proud nerd and meeting crasher Christie Wilcox, who, I now learn, has a darned good set of pipes.
pharyngula | April 15, 2011This session is all about pattern formation, focusing on those earliest, simplest decisions. How doe a mass of identical cells distinguish themselves inti regions with different patterns of gene expression. You might recall that this is the question that so baffles the creationist Paul Nelson. Nobody is going to give a moment's consideration to his concerns, because they aren't at all interesting.
10:30-12:00 Session 2: Pattern Formation (Chair: Vernadeth Alarcon [Univ. Hawaii])
10:30-11:00 Vernadeth Alarcon (Univ. Hawaii) "Cell polarity and differentiation in the early mouse embryo"…
gregladen | April 15, 2011WTF does that mean? How can an icon, a visual representation of something like a file or program, be "unused" if it is sitting there ... looking like something? As I sit here writing and grading papers and stalking people on The Facebook and working on a graphic for an upcoming blog post on squid on my Linux box while it updates several applications, installs essential security patches, and downloads a new kernel, all without incident or difficulty, my stupid and annoying windows machine, which has one job ... charging my iPod and updating it's library off in one wing of the Blog Cave ... is…
pharyngula | April 15, 2011Here we go, I'm attending the West Coast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology, and I'll be intermittently dumping my notes onto the web, so that's what you'll be getting today -- my sometimes cryptic impressions of a series of developmental biology talks.
This is the early morning session. It's late in the day for this Minnesotan, though…but beware, that just means I may start flagging this afternoon.
08:30-10:00 Session 1: Stem Cells in Development and Regeneration (Chair: Monika Ward [Univ. Hawaii])
Hey, speakers get lei'ed at the start of their talk! I guess I…
pharyngula | April 14, 2011Once upon a time, there was a man who thought rather highly of humanity's potential. Sure, there were things humans did that were awful -- they could be violent, and careless, and short-sighted -- but they also did amazing things like science and art that other species didn't. Overall, he thought that calling someone "human" was a high compliment. And this idea colored his thinking in such a way that it began to shape his expectations of people; maybe we should expect human beings to do more than eat and excrete and reproduce, and maybe we should recognize that the word "human" meant an awful…
gregladen | April 14, 2011Best little YouTube video you'll see all day, maybe all week:
Hat Tip: Kate Monson and Yatesh Singh
pharyngula | April 14, 2011We Gnu Atheists, and atheists of all kinds, are often accused of following "just another religion." Â I'm not particularly fond of the usual riposte -- something along the lines of sarcastically pointing out that atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby -- because I think we sell ourselves short when we pretend atheism is an absence of values rather than a positive and powerful collection of strong modern beliefs, but also because there are distinct differences in the way atheists should think, relative to theists. I say "should" because, often, where I see the starkest…
gregladen | April 14, 2011God will be the guest speaker at this Sunday's Humanists of Minnesota's Spring Banquet, and Scott Lohman will interview him on Atheist Talk Radio. I am not making this up. Below the fold, some advanced video God's people sent out, and details on this coming weekend's events:
"Mr. Deity," Brian Dalton on Atheists Talk #112, April 17, 2011
Brian Dalton is the writer, producer and director of the slyly subversive webcast comedy series "Mr. Deity." Mr. Deity has created our Universe with love and affection; mostly. This was not a simple production, you see, and there are many aspects to…
lborkowski | April 13, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Superbugs Found in New Delhi's Water and Sewage
Kim Barker at ProPublica: 'Spillionaires': Profiteering and Mismanagement in the Wake of the BP Oil Spill
Darryl Fears in the Washington Post: Goldman Environmental Prize goes to Texas man who took on refineries over pollution
Janet D. Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science: Equal Pay Day 2011: There is power in a union
Martin Austermuhle in the Nation: Washington, DC: Where Conservative Congressmen Dump Bad Ideas