Uncategorized
cwilcox | October 30, 2009Trick or treat! To me, nothing says Halloween like a good, old fashioned parasite. So scroll down for a preview of next month's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite! Enjoy :)
.
..
...
....
.....
Picture credit
gregladen | October 30, 2009Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.
As I had mentioned, I had the "hallway extension" room. Let me explain.
To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the left side past the bathroom was a…
grrlscientist | October 30, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published recently…
gregladen | October 30, 2009So there we were in the Haunted Guest Quarters of the Old Infirmary, and I had already heard the ghost once. In the morning, my colleague and BFF Lynne who was staying with us for a couple of days noted that she had heard the mysterious footsteps as well....
"Greg, one, maybe both, of your students are really afraid of ghosts," she said.
"Why were they even talking about ghosts?"
"They've talked about little else since finding out that the ghost tour business is the biggest thing in town! And sooner or later they're going to hear whatever that was."
"Nah, they'll just get drunk and pass…
gregladen | October 30, 2009Shulinab Nursery School is located in a small village of 500 people. The school can't get enough water from rainwater, so they need to set up a system that will let them get water pumped from a nearby windmill. The community will build and maintain the system, but it needs $500 to purchase materials.
Go here to help.
gregladen | October 30, 2009 This is Melisa Riviere. White People sometimes do hip hop. I have a reading suggestion for you. First a little background.
I've gotten into a few arguments on race and racism in my time, some on this blog. Racist thinking is all around us. Why just a few hours ago, a neighbor complained that his car had been robbed by the black kids that pass down our street now and then. How did he know it was the black kids? Because the people who robbed his car like hip-hop. How did he know that? Because they didn't take his rock cds. Oh, did they take his hip hop cd's? Well no, he doesn't…
gregladen | October 30, 2009For Halloween, I'm reprinting the only Ghost Story on my blog (so far). It is in several parts, and here's part one:
Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2
Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from…
mspringer | October 30, 2009There's an interesting article in New Scientist that purports to describe "seven questions that keep physicists up at night". The list is very heavy on the "deep questions" that tend to percolate around the more esoteric quarters of the high-energy physics world, and not so much on the vast bulk of physicists who (ad Chad and I like to harp on) do physics that's much more directly connected to the real (i.e., observable) world. For instance, it's the question of high-temperature superconductivity probably dominates the dreams of lots of solid state physicists, but it's not on the list. So…
cortex | October 30, 2009I still don't have any additional details, but the initial newspaper report from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier is disturbing:
A Southwestern High School English teacher has been suspended after reports he had students in his classes to read an article about homsexuality in the animal kingdom.
Dan Delong of Carlinville acknowledged his suspension but declined to comment further until he spoke with his union representative.
Delong is said to have allowed students to read the article "The Gay Animal Kingdom" from the June 7, 2006, edition of Seed magazine. Seed magazine is a science and…
jwilbanks | October 30, 2009I was asked in an interview recently about "open source science" and it got me thinking about the ways that, in the "open" communities of practice, we frequently over-simplify the realities of how software like GNU/Linux actually came to be. Open Source refers to a software worldview. It's about software development, not a universal truth that can be easily exported. And it's well worth unpacking the worldview to understand it, and then to look at the realities of open source software as they map - or more frequently do not map - to science.
The foundations of open source software are…
pronald | October 29, 2009Frank N. Foods reports that Biofortified, a science-based blog about plant genetics, gathered more votes than the closest challenger on the changemaker "GMO risk or rescue" competition by a 2-to-1 margin. How did this happen? The science blogging community Pharyngulated the competition thanks to a post by PZ Myers. When the opposition protested in a somewhat unethical manner, PZ hit them again. Although the votes are not final, it looks like biofortified may have won the grand prize- a conversation wtih Michael Pollan about plant genetics. Thanks everyone for your support.
sb admin | October 29, 2009I like paperback books that fit in my pocket. Unfortunately, about 25 years ago they pretty much stopped printing books in that size. Usually the closest you can get are those big floppy "trade paperbacks" or, in the case of the occasional Stephen King-type bestseller, a thick-as-a-brick paperback with big printing and fat pages.
It's not my place to question book marketers. My best theory is that book prices went up, for whatever reason, and then people wanted to feel like they're getting their money's worth: instead of a little pocket book for $2.95, you get the trade paperback for $16.…
agelman | October 29, 2009I like paperback books that fit in my pocket. Unfortunately, about 25 years ago they pretty much stopped printing books in that size. Usually the closest you can get are those big floppy "trade paperbacks" or, in the case of the occasional Stephen King-type bestseller, a thick-as-a-brick paperback with big printing and fat pages.
It's not my place to question book marketers. My best theory is that book prices went up, for whatever reason, and then people wanted to feel like they're getting their money's worth: instead of a little pocket book for $2.95, you get the trade paperback for $16.…
agelman | October 29, 2009We started our Statistical Modeling blog in 2004 as a way that I could share information with students, postdocs, and others in my research group. The idea was that we would post ideas and use the blog to comment on them. The blog was open to the world so that outsiders could hear about what we were doing and comment also. (We also set up a wiki but we found it awkward to use, and then it got hacked, so we abandoned that idea.)
But I soon realized that the blog was really more of a place for me to throw out ideas--a convenient notebook where I could write things down and no longer have to…
gregladen | October 29, 2009Broadly speaking there are two kinds of federally regulated sources for dogs and cats used in medical research, training, an testing, in the US. They are labeled, unambiguously, A and B. A-class sources are breeders that produce animals for use in research. B-class sources, also called "Random source," provide animals, usually adults, that are not bred, but just acquired somehow (more or less randomly?) and kept for a while, and sold to research facilities. Random source dogs and cats are not bred by these dealers. (These are USDA regulatory categories.)
According to a report produced by…