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grrlscientist | June 24, 2009
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 a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
gregladen | June 24, 2009First he was, I dunno, in the bathroom. Then he was, perhaps, down in the parking lot waxing his car. Then he was home working on his stamp collection or something. Then he was hiking the Apalachian Trail. Now, it turns out, supposedly, that Republican South Carolina Governor Sanford was in South America. What next?
There is a timeline here at the Charlotte Observer
You know, there is only one possible explanation for this. See headline.
cwilcox | June 23, 2009**giggle** That is one bold monkey - but the music really makes these videos.
stoat | June 23, 2009As I was pondering
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly---and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
I was reminded of Marvell (OK, I know, does it help if the first piece of Marvell I read (also this one) was because of a header in an Ursula K LeGuin story, "Vaster than empires and more slow"?), and when searching for the words delighted to discover that the top google hit for "through the iron gates of life" is... me in a former life. Well it beats rano's in the bidet1 :-)
It looks like I've since returned…
jwilbanks | June 23, 2009I'm at the Seed - Council on Competitiveness State of Innovation Summit. I was thinking about live blogging, but find that doing so makes it hard for me to think about what people are actually saying. There's a webcast if you're interested.
As far as conferences go, it's a good one. Rock stars on the stage (E.O. Wilson is a hero of mine) and interesting conversations about innovation.
But I'm frustrated, as I often am at "innovation" conferences. What follows is a bit of a rant directed less at this event, which as I said is a good one, but at the conversation I hear all the time about…
mspringer | June 23, 2009Yesterday we dumped a bucket of electrons on the Statue of Liberty and watched what happened. The most important thing we saw is that all the charge immediately distributes itself over the outside surface of the statue in such a way so that the electric field within the statue is zero. We also noted that the field was high on sharp points like the spikes in the crown, but we left that without further explanation. Today we fix that.
Fields can be funny things. In the case of electric fields and gravitational fields and numerous others, the fields are vector fields. This means that a given…
gregladen | June 22, 2009In light of the recent assassination, by a member of a right wing Christian anti-abortion cabal, of a physician who specialized in late term abortions, it may be worth having a look this medical phenomenon.
Well, my blog colleague Monado contacted me a week ago or so and we discussed this, and I felt that she should write up what she had, since she had done some research. I would then hope that my readers who are interested in this will go and have a look at her post.
The bottom line is that third trimester abortions are done for a diverse set of reasons, and a lot of what is said in the…
gregladen | June 22, 2009Citing recent killings in Arkansas, Kansas and the nation's capital, Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday said new hate crimes law were needed to stop what he called "violence masquerading as political activism."
The attorney general's call for Congress to act came as a civil rights coalition said there has been a surge in white supremacist activity since the election of the first African-American president and the economic downturn.
"Over the last several weeks, we have witnessed brazen acts of violence committed in places that many would have considered unthinkable," Holder told the…
gregladen | June 22, 2009UPDATE: There are reports that the missing governor is tweeting. These reports are unconfirmed.
His wife does not know where is his. The lieutenant governor does not know where he is. It is said that "he needed some time away from his children to write something." It is said he is working on a book. No one has seen him since Thursday.
Makes sense to me.
His chief of staff claims to know where he is. But he would say that even if he didn't.
Apparently, not having a governor for a few days is not that big a deal. I say, give it a week then maybe go looking for him.
BTW, this…
gregladen | June 22, 2009I wanted to know about Iran, and she told me. I was curious, because I had a feeling that there was more to the story than we were getting from the news. There had to be reasons that the students were rebelling against the Shah and pushing for an Islamic Revolution. She explained it to me, and at last I felt like I understood....
Here at Quiche Moraine, and more at TUIBG
mspringer | June 22, 2009Today we need an example of something weirdly-shaped and electrically conductive. There's no shortage of such things, so we might as well go with the iconic. This is the Statue of Liberty:
It's made out of copper, which over the years has taken on a decidedly not-copper color due to chemical reactions between the copper surface and the surrounding atmosphere. But it's still copper and thus a very good conductor of electricity. Unfortunately for our purposes here the statue is also hollow, and in fact the copper is only a few millimeters thick. This isn't unusual, almost all metal…
gregladen | June 22, 2009I've always lived among trees and gone to the woods for quiet, but it took a change of scenery to discover just how much trees mean to me....
Turns out, it was the trees!
cortex | June 22, 2009I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain.
The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, the endowment effect stipulates that once people own something - they have an…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2009
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 a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
gregladen | June 21, 2009Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.
Scene: Berkeley, California, April 1986. A bar. Five conference attendees, myself included, grabbing a hamburger and a beer in a fern-bar on or near Telegraph.
All eyes are on the TV's mounted over the bar, where we watch footage of an air strike against Libya. This is the retribution by Ronald Reagan against Insane African Leader Muammar al-Kadafi. The White House was issuing statements about al-Kadafi's involvement in bombings in Europe, the OPEC oil ministry kidnapping, linkage to the…
gregladen | June 20, 2009"The ninth annual Trafficking in Persons Report sheds light on the faces of modern-day slavery and on new facets of this global problem. The human trafficking phenomenon affects virtually every country, including the United States. In acknowledging America's own struggle with modern-day slavery and slavery-related practices, we offer partnership. We call on every government to join us in working to build consensus and leverage resources to eliminate all forms of human trafficking."
--Secretary Clinton, June 16, 2009
Highlights:
There were over 5000 prosecuted cases of trafficking globally…
gregladen | June 20, 2009Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.
The only place I've ever seen Great White Sharks in the wild (I'm not a SCUBA diver!) is in South Africa, where you can see them from cliffs, swimming back and forth looking for penguins (and seals?). I've heard there were some recent attacks near Cape Town (False Bay) by great whites, but I think they generally don't eat too many people there. That is probably because most South Africans either stay out of the water entirely or go all the way ... in SCUBA gear, or otherwise just keep a…