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gregladen | February 21, 2010Many people give credit to Ronald Reagan, when he climbed up on the Berlin Wall and personally kicked it down brick by brick while under fire from the East German Stasi.
Many people give credit to Team USA, the Hockey Team that beat the USSR team at the Lake Placid Olympics.
Still others credit various movies , books, or political revelations.
But I tend to agree with what my father always said about this.
In 1987, teenager Mathias Rust flew a tiny, unarmed rented Cessna from Helsinki to Moscow, landing very near to Red Square. The soviets never detected the aircraft. This demonstrated…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for Monday's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days…
gregladen | February 21, 2010... well, not really, but they should!!!
Following two simple guidelines would help: 1) Don't ever change the function of installed software unless the user has requested it (don't even suggest it. Just sit there quietly until told othewise) and 2) Don't evern install new software. Ever. That is the user's job, not Google's or anyone else's.
I now know that Google's philosophy allows for the flagrant violation of these important guidelines, without impunity or regret. This makes Google Evil.
The relationship between software and function should not change on your computer unless you…
jwilbanks | February 21, 2010
The winner in our t-shirt contest. The background to the robot is a 2d barcode that de-references back to creativecommons.org, which I like a lot :-)
mikethemadbiologist | February 20, 2010Saturday links. With Extra Bonus Video! Science:
The Spotless Garden
Australia uses cat food in fight against cane toads
The Mushroom that Sleeps with the Fishes
The Basques may not be who we think they are
Climate change affecting Kenya's coffee output
What average genetic variation can tell us (or not)
Other:
Mule Variations
Our Towns: It Won't Line a Bird Cage, but It's Still News
Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet? Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What…
kcollins | February 20, 2010The 2010 USA Science and Engineering Festival is the first of its kind: multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary celebration of science in the United States that will take place in Washington, D.C. from 10/10/10 through 10/24/10 culminating in a two day hands-on expo with over 300+ booths dedicated to exciting the public about science in interactive fun exhibits.
Leading up to the Festival you will find on this blog, entries about what you can expect to find at USA Science and Engineering Festival, updates on our Nifty Fifty and Lunch with a Laureate programs, guest…
mspringer | February 20, 2010Unfortunately it's rarely on TV more than once every four years, but I have to say I've really gotten to curling. Not only is it interesting to watch, it looks like it's actually a sport that could be played for fun at the beginning level. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of curling in Texas for some reason, so I have to content myself with watching. And thinking about the physics.
The goal in curling is to end each round with your stones closest to the center of the ring. From the release point to the center of the ring is about 97 feet or so. Friction with the ice…
gregladen | February 20, 2010... especially for those I left behind.
"Oh... you're back. I see."
"Huh. Thought you might be staying in the hospital longer than that."
"Oh hai. I suppose you want your good chair back."
But seriously, this is where we find out what the true limitations of modern medicine are. Lying in the hospital bed, I wondered how I would manage taking a shower without getting the site of the surgery wet. They told me "Do not get the site of the surgery wet, or you will die!!!!" ... So I, over time, I asked a couple of nurses and doctors their opinion on how to do this. It was a little like asking…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for Monday's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days…
cortex | February 19, 2010I've got a new article in the Wall Street Journal on the complex relationship between age and scientific creativity:
When James Watson was 24 years old, he spent more time thinking about women than work, according to his memoir "Genes, Girls and Gamow." His hair was unkempt and his letters home were full of references to "wine-soaked lunches." But when Mr. Watson wasn't chasing after girls, he was hard at work in his Cambridge lab, trying to puzzle out the structure of DNA. In 1953, when Mr. Watson was only 25, he co-wrote one of the most important scientific papers of all time.
Scientific…
jwilbanks | February 19, 2010
Photo outside the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge, UK, licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike by jwyg (Jonathan Gray).
Today marked the public announcement of a set of principles on how to treat data, from a legal context, in the sciences. Called the Panton Principles, they were negotiated over the summer between myself, Rufus Pollock, Cameron Neylon, and Peter Murray-Rust. If you're too busy to read them directly, here's the gist: publicly funded science data should be in the public domain, full stop.
If you know me and my work, this is nothing new. We have been…
cwilcox | February 19, 2010It's really hard for me to write about sharks. It makes me angry. Unlike with so many species under the threat of extinction, when I try to talk to people about sharks, the message just doesn't get through. Show them a movie about Taji and they get infuriated. Have them look into the eyes of a tiger cub and they are overwhelmed with emotion. Maybe it's that sharks aren't warm and fuzzy enough - maybe if they had hair, people wouldn't be so leery of them. Maybe it's too many childhood memories of late-night Jawsfests. But when I try to explain to people that sharks are in trouble, that they…
mspringer | February 18, 2010Grad school and a major (good) event in my personal life have been gobbling huge swaths of time, hence the comparative silence around here. I'm afraid we may be down to a few times a week for the next few months. I hope y'all'll bear with me. ("Y'all'll" is of course the standard contraction for "you all will", is it not?)
Still, there's always time for some physics now and then. Say you're presented with a box with two holes in the side. From one opening, a laser beam - say, HeNe red - from a laser in the box emerges. From the other, the light from a red hot object in the box emerges…
cortex | February 18, 2010I've been reading a number of papers on the "science" of consciousness - I'll let the quotes express my skepticism - and I thought this clever metaphor from Francis Crick and Christof Koch, in their influential 2003 Nature review, was revealing. They compare the competition among our sensations to a democratic election, in which all those fleeting stimuli must fight for our limited attentional resources:
It may help to make a crude political analogy. The primaries and the early events in an election would correspond roughly to the preliminary unconscious processing. The winning coalition…
dgmacarthur | February 18, 2010The Genomes Environments Traits conference in Boston is without a doubt the place to be on April 27th for anyone interested in personal genomics: the conference has managed to attract nearly every human being in the world who has had their complete genome sequenced (excluding, of course, anonymous participants in the 1000 Genomes Project and various cancer studies), as well as an impressive list of luminaries from the field.
Wired describes the meeting as "The First and Last Meeting of Everyone with a Fully Sequenced Genome", and while that's a little hyperbolic (the twice-sequenced…
cwilcox | February 18, 2010I know I have failed on delivering you your weekly/monthly parasite posts. It's not for a lack of fascinating, sci-fi worthy parasites, but for a lack of time on my part. I'm afraid these posts keep slipping to the back burner, then getting forgotten about altogether as deadlines for grants, papers and all the rest set in. So, I think it's time to retire the Sci-Fi Worthy Parasites, at least for awhile. I will continue to post any cool new studies involving my favorite little critters, though - I promise!
I would hate for those of you who adore reading about twisted little menaces to feel…