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grrlscientist | May 18, 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) blog carnival was just published! This blog carnival celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. So go read Scientia Pro Publica #4 -- In Memory of Stephen Jay Gould Edition and leave a comment there!
To send your science, nature or medical writing to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the…
mspringer | May 18, 2009I've never been much of a Star Trek fan. But given the subculture of nerdery in which I've been proud to spend much of my life, I've managed to pick up a fairly tremendous amount of the lore by osmosis. I've seen a pretty good percentage of the original series as well as the two good films (II and VI) and though I actively dislike The Next Generation I can appreciate the fact of its cultural significance.
And so it was with some interest that I saw a preview photo a number of months ago:
Blarg, thought I, Kirk looks like a obnoxious frat boy and Spock's hair somehow manages to evoke Jim…
sb admin | May 18, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
Five more schools in the New York City borough of Queens have closed because of suspected swine flu cases. Eleven schools have now been closed there and hundreds of students are down with a flu-like illness. Parents are understandably concerned, the more so because not many days ago Mayor Bloomberg and the city's health commissioner (just named by Obama as the next director of CDC) were reassuring city residents this was pretty much lie seasonal flu.
We thought that was something that might come back to bite them, and now it has:
The cityâs schools…
grrlscientist | May 17, 2009
I will be your host for the 101st edition of I and the Bird on 28 May. This blog carnival collects the finest writing, photoessays and photography in the blogosphere about bird watching and wild birds. Please send submissions -- yours or other people's -- to me or to Mike as soon as you can, so I can do the best job possible in assembling this blog carnival for you.
grrlscientist | May 17, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The host for tomorrow's (18 May) edition of Scientia Pro Publica is Eric, author of The Primate Diaries. To send your science, nature or medical writing to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (keep in mind that widget sometimes disappears when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and, to make life easier for the host, please include a 2-3…
mspringer | May 17, 2009I'm out of town, visiting family and friends in the period between the end of the summer and the time things get cranking back up later this summer. One thing I did do on Friday was catch the new Star Trek. I'll save the review and "physics of" posts for later this week. I'll be honest and admit that when I first saw the posters I thought it would be a train wreck. Long story short: it was shockingly good.
And I think I'll cut it some slack on the physics. Sure it was bad, but given the genre it was only normally bad rather than egregiously bad (the supernova bit excepted). But again,…
cortex | May 16, 2009Matthew Yglesias advocates for the free movement of sports franchises, so that they can hop from city to city with ease and thus follow the movement of population:
Right now, the New York City Designated media area contains 6.5 percent of households. LA has 5 percent. Chicago has 3 percent. Philadelphia has 2.6 percent. Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta all have about 2.1 percent. And things taper off from there. But considering that New York City has a media market three times the size of large cities like Dallas and Atlanta (and especially considering that it's nearby to the…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2009I am late linking to some of these, but late is better than never: here's the latest carnivalia for you to read;
Carnival of the Vanities. This blog carnival is all about celebrating the best writing published recently in the blogosphere, regardless of topic.
Book Review Carnival, 10 May 2009 edition. Lots of luscious books are reviewed here, just in time for you to find the perfect book to read while sitting on the beach!
Review Carnival, May 2009 edition. This blog carnival is filled with reviews of anything you can name, although my contribution was, as you'd suspect, a book review.
I…
jwilbanks | May 16, 2009Lately I've been spending a fair amount of time talking to the folks at NESTA in the UK. There's a lot of interest in how the kinds of legal and technical infrastructures we're building at Creative Commons might work at scale in the UK, and yesterday NESTA hosted me and James Boyle (founder of Creative Commons, and a guiding force in our science work from the very beginning) at an event labeled Open Innovation and Intellectual Property, jointly hosted by the Wellcome Trust and Creative Commons.
It was an interesting day. It was one of the few times I've had the scope of topic to cover all the…
hrynyshyn | May 16, 2009With around 1,000 pages to digest, only the most committed of climate policy wonks can give you an an honest assessment of the just-released draft of H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill that may or may not get the U.S. on the road to climate repair. Reaction so far is, predictably enough, mixed.
Greenpeace hates its, claiming that it would, at best, cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 4 and 7% below 1990 levels by 2020. Congress should, therefore, go back to the drawing boards.
Al Gore and company have chosen to back the bill -- and they want everyone associated with his Climate Project…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2009
I will be your host for the 101st edition of I and the Bird on 28 May. This blog carnival collects the finest writing, photoessays and photography in the blogosphere about bird watching and wild birds. Please send submissions -- yours or other people's -- to me or to Mike as soon as you can, so I can do the best job possible in assembling this blog carnival for you.
gregladen | May 15, 2009You will of course be supplying your own drinks and party food, as we are a strictly non-profit institution. The party is for the launch of the new blog Quiche Moraine.
When should this party be? Where should it be?
Now is your opportunity to let us know what you think. We hijacked the thread on this post to discuss this issue. Please pop over and chime in.
gregladen | May 15, 2009I hope you always, daily, check out Bora's list of new and exciting on PLoS.
The Carnival of Space is here.
Please submit your science posts to Scientia Pro Publica
gregladen | May 15, 2009It was May, 1992, and I was in a stupor of post thesis-completion cortisol letdown and alcohol-induced lethargy, and Mark Pagel was talking to me as I slouched in a large comfortable chair in the Peabody Museum's smoking lounge.
"It's obvious what they need to do," he was saying, and I could tell from the look on his face, even in my foggy state of mind, that a morsel of wisdom marinated in humor was about to be served up.
I swear this stuff works great. "Hrmphsmeh," I replied, indicating that he should continue, I was interested.
"They need Ross Perot."
"Hrmph???," I knew Mark (and…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2009I have been pinching myself for the past three weeks for two reasons: first I have good news to share with you and second, I was afraid that my good news was a dream that I'd awaken from.
My good news is that I just sent off a book review to be published in Nature magazine. Nature? you say .. Do you mean .. ?
Why, yes, I do mean ... !
I don't yet know when it will appear in print, but believe me, as soon as I know, you'll know! (aaand the author will know, and the book publisher, editors and publicity agents will know) Additionally, I am working on a longer version of this book review…
pharyngula | May 15, 2009Daniel Hauser, the 13 year old Minnesota boy with the dual affliction of Hodgkin lymphoma and idiots for parents, has been told that he can't refuse effective medical treatments.
In a 58-page ruling Friday, Brown County District Judge John Rodenberg found that Daniel Hauser has been "medically neglected" and is in need of child protection services.
Rodenberg said Daniel will stay in the custody of his parents, but Colleen and Anthony Hauser have until May 19 to get an updated chest X-ray for their son and select an oncologist.
The judge wrote that Daniel has only a "rudimentary…
sb admin | May 15, 2009The number of confirmed swine flu cases continues to rise: 4,298 in the US, 2,446 in Mexico, and a total of 7,520 worldwide in 34 countries. Much of the increase is just because labs are working through the samples that had been sent to them previously, but recent news from New York shows that the H1N1 virus is still spreading. Yesterday, three schools in Queens announced week-long closures after several students reported flu-like symptoms or were absent (241 students at one school, 50+ at another, and 29 at a third). The assistant principal from one of the schools, who is confirmed as having…
cortex | May 15, 2009An interesting new study on mind-wandering and the default network was recently published in PNAS. The scientists, led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB, used "experience sampling" in an fMRI machine to capture the moment of daydreaming: essentially, subjects were given an extremely tedious task and, when their mind started to wander (this was confirmed with subjective reports and measurements of task performance), had changes in their brain activity recorded in the scanner. It's been known for nearly a decade that daydreaming is a metabolically intense mental process,…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2009
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Fresh: A Perishable History by Susanne Freidberg (Belknap Press; 2009). Review copy.
Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West by Rachel Dickinson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009). Review copy.
Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds by Donald Kroodsma (…