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grrlscientist | July 13, 2009Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter, I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of themselves and write an essay explaining why we think we are the best choice, and solicit votes from the public. Whomever receives the most votes wins…
grrlscientist | July 13, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1616 - 839 - 801 - 651 - 459 out of 292 candidates registered. I am in THIRD PLACE! Worse, second place STOLE one of the lines from my essay and used it as his own.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully, you will agree that I am a very well-qualified candidate for this job…
gregladen | July 13, 2009Yesterday some moron from Missouri made our lives miserable, made thousands of people's lives miserable, got a passenger in his car minorly mauled and caused a major environmental catastrophe.
If you live in Minnesota you probably know what I'm talking about. A man driving on Route 94 out by Alberville missed his exit. Thinking that his time was more important than anyone else's time (or lives) he pulled a nice slow u-turn with his underpowered suburban station wagon, crossing the path of an oncoming gasoline tanker. He took out the tanker. Thousands of gallons of gasoline were spilled…
gregladen | July 13, 2009Amanda, who is pregnant, claims to have had no food aversions and she claims to have no food cravings. This makes me laugh.
One reason it makes me laugh is that Amanda is one of the most rational, straight thinking people I've ever known. She knows there is a reality, she faces it daily, and she even teaches about it in a high school. So when she claims to have had no aversions and no cravings, I can only assume that denial of such things is itself some sort of side effect off pregnancy.
To be fair, the preponderance of evidence has eventually convinced even her that she has had aversions…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2009Merry Monday! Science links first:
LRO and the Apollo Hoax Believers...
Pew Letter about Chilean Salmon Industry
Other:
Accommodationists and New Atheists Sail in the Same Boat
cortex | July 13, 2009In the latest edition of Publisher's Weekly, I have a short review of The Greatest Show on Earth, the forthcoming book from Richard Dawkins:
Richard Dawkins begins The Greatest Show on Earth with a short history of his writing career. He explains that all of his previous books have naïvely assumed "the fact of evolution," which meant that he never got around to laying "out the evidence that it [evolution] is true." This shouldn't be too surprising: science is an edifice of tested assumptions, and just as physicists must assume the truth of gravity before moving on to quantum mechanics, so do…
cortex | July 13, 2009I had a review of Colin Ellard's new book in the NY Times Book Review on Sunday:
Let's begin with a quick geography quiz: Which city is farther west, Los Angeles or Reno? If you're like most people, you carefully reasoned your way to the wrong answer. Because Los Angeles is on the coast, and Reno is in landlocked Nevada, you probably assumed that Los Angeles is farther west. It doesn't matter that you've stared at countless maps or taken a road trip across California -- the atlas that we keep in our head is reliably unreliable.
Colin Ellard, a behavorial neuroscientist at the University of…
sb admin | July 13, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
I am thinking out loud here. Since that's never a pretty sight, you might wish to avert your eyes. With that merest of advance warning, the school closure problem has gotten me to think more generally about social distancing. The term itself is a kind of oxymoron. "Social" emphasizes togetherness, intercourse between people, relations. "Distancing" is negation of the social. We have examples: canceling school, prohibiting mass gatherings, telecommuting, but the underlying idea is straightforward. With a contagious disease that passes from person to…
drorzel | July 13, 2009As noted last Friday, I spent the weekend in Chicago with a bunch of friends from college, which kept me pretty busy-- some golf, ridiculously upscale steaks, improbably located Cajun food, a Cubs game (5-2 Cubs over Cardinals), ribs, and live blues music (from Joanna Connor and Duke Tumatoe). I think that's pretty much everything that you need to do in Chicago, save for pizza. I probably would've gotten pizza, had I had a later flight.
Anyway, I had a really good time. Of course, this was all taking place in the context of a Darwinian program to evolve a better brain by pickling the less fit…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1516 - 772 - 742 - 650 - 437 out of 288 candidates registered. I am now in THIRD PLACE! Worse, second place STOLE one of the lines from my essay and used it as his own.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully, you will agree that I am a very well-qualified candidate for this job…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter, I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of themselves and write an essay explaining why we think we are the best choice, and solicit votes from the public. Whomever receives the most votes wins…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009Whilst reading some of my colleagues' blogs, I ran across this announcement and realized that it's been ages since I first mention that I registered for the Science Online London conference a long time ago -- on the very first day that I could do so, in fact. This conference focuses on using the internet -- blogosphere as well as podcasts, soundfiles, photography, and streaming video -- as a public outreach and educational tool for and in support of science. This important conference is scheduled for 22 August 2009 in London at the celebrated Royal Institution of Great Britain, where it was…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1369 - 724 - 693 - 636 - 409 out of 276 candidates registered. I am still in second place, and first place is, as you can see, suddenly drawing away in an unprecedented burst of voting support. Hrmm.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully, you will agree that I am a very well-…
gregladen | July 11, 2009There's a lot of philosophical discussion about what, precisely, constitutes a law or a theory in scientific practice. There's also a lot of usage of the terms that has come to us over several centuries of not-quite-consistent application of terms.
Check out this interesting essay at The Austringer
jwilbanks | July 11, 2009Just a quick hit - I'm digging out after a wonderful break from work - but this deserves notice...
Since 2004, WisconsinView has made aerial photography and satellite imagery of Wisconsin available to the public for free over the web. As part of the AmericaView consortium, WisconsinView supports access and use of these imagery collections through education, workforce development, and research. Starting June 30, 2009, WisconsinView is making available all of its more than 6 Terabytes of imagery data under the new CC0 Protocol provided by Creative Commons. The CC0 (pronounced CC-Zero) Protocol…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2009
Image: appears here with the kind permission of Wetjens Dimmlich [Slow Loris Fickr site].
Send GrrlScientist to Antarctica!
Quark Expeditions is searching for an Official Blogger to join a voyage to Antarctica. Their goals, according to an email I received from their official spokesperson, Prisca, are to have their official blogger write a daily blog entry in English about their experience on this Antarctic trip, and to help raise public awareness of the environmental and conservation issues that pertain to the Antarctic. To select their official blogger, they are asking candidates to…
mspringer | July 11, 2009To me this is interesting. To people like my parents, whose retirement depends significantly on their investments during their maximum earning years (ie, now), "interesting" might not be the word they'd pick. Here's a graph I pulled off of Vanguard, representing a $10,000 investment exactly 10 years ago, for three different asset types:
The top line represents an intermediate-term investment grade bond fund. Traditionally it's a low-risk category of investment, with some ups and downs but mostly a relatively stable source of modest distribution growth. The middle line is a money market…