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cwilcox | March 31, 2009Thanks to Allie, for this lovely way to waste time: a test for your animal personality.
Here's my results:
Tiger Genera and species: Panthera tigris Collective Term:A bolt of tigersDescription Tigers are handsome and powerful people with an innate self-confidence and elegance. There's a sense of immediacy and an aura of electricity that surrounds it, and when it walks into a room, something always seems about to happen. Consider the classic tiger personality of F. Lee Bailey. He expresses himself with the confidence of one who expects his orders to be unquestionably followed, and his…
signout | March 31, 2009Oh, readers. Is there anything I can say that will appease you?
Thank you for the inquiries, the orders, and the pleading tones. I swear, I'm alive; medicine is still interesting and worth writing about; and although Scienceblogs.com may eventually lose patience with the intermittent nature of my writing, I haven't yet lost interest in writing intermittently.
Soon, I'll tell you about the things that have happened since November. (November! I'm going to blogger hell.) I'll tell you about running codes by myself; about coming as close as I've ever come to saving someone's life; about the…
gregladen | March 31, 2009For implying, no, stating clearly, that you think that we run a crooked election system in this state.
On letterman. Film at 11. Or whenever I find it.
gregladen | March 31, 2009
Aprile Pazzo was about to call it a day when she noticed that the penguins she was observing seemed strangely agitated. Pazzo, a wildlife biologist, was in Antarctica studying penguins at a remote, poorly explored area along the coast of the Ross Sea. "I was getting ready to release a penguin I had tagged when I heard a lot of squawking," says Pazzo. "When I looked up, the whole flock had sort of stampeded. They were waddling away faster than I'd ever seen them move."
Pazzo waded through the panicked birds to find out what was wrong. She found one penguin that hadn't fled. "It was sinking…
tqa | March 31, 2009
With all precincts reporting, Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by 65 votes (77,344 to 77,279). It looks like this one might not be finalized for a while. According to the AP, there are 6000 absentee ballots to count, and ballots will be coming in until 13 April. So I wouldn't sit up late waiting for the final on this one.
gregladen | March 31, 2009Dean's Diner
For some reason, Susan didn't seem to like me very much. I have no clue as to why not. I was as agreeable as a kid as I am now as an adult. Whenever we would go into her restaurant, she would smile at my friends and then give me a disapproving glance....
Mike's Latest Post on QuicheMoraine.com
gregladen | March 31, 2009The authorities of the Russian town of Kemerovo arranged a special expedition to find the yeti habitat which was discovered by Google maps.
Recently there have been more than 20 claims from the local hunters who said they had seen strange creatures in the forests. These creatures resembled yeti. After the claims from the local hunters Kemerovo authorities decided to create the team of scientists for yeti searches.
The expedition turned to be successful. Scientists managed to find 'fresh' yeti footprints in the Azassky cave.
Scientists found two identical yeti footprints. One of them was left…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2009
What: A public presentation, "Does Religion Make People Better?"
Where: Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St., at the corner of Allen St. [map]
When: tomorrow, beginning at 8:00 pm.
Cost: free and open to the public. The debate will be held in the basement, and the bar takes cash only.
My fellow residents of NYC might be interested to know that the Center for Inquiry-New York City is hosting a debate with Austin Dacey and Rabbi Simcha Weinstein that addresses the question "Does Religion Make People Better?" (Keeping in mind of course that the statistics show that religion does not make evangelicals…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2009Here's the latest carnivalia for you to read and enjoy;
Family Life Blog Carnival, part 2. This blog carnival has SO many submissions that they published it in two parts. WOW! Don't we all wish we were so lucky? (hint, hint, to all you kind people who are madly writing about spineless creatures so you can send me your submissions before 6 April)
sb admin | March 31, 2009I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a…
gregladen | March 31, 2009Are there any concerned liberal-minded faculty or students at St. Cloud State in MN who can help us out with something? Email me. kthxbye
mspringer | March 31, 2009I have a Fermi problem for you. By the very nature of a Fermi problem, a precise answer is impossible, we're merely looking for a justified order-of-magnitude estimate. Here goes:
During last week's Earth Hour event, what amount of CO2 was not released that otherwise would have been? What is that number in terms of percentage reduction compared to the total worldwide CO2 release during an equivalent time period not during Earth Hour?
Now I'm not knocking the idea. I like to see people avoid trashing the biosphere too badly. Doubly so when it's possible to shave some money off of the…
cortex | March 31, 2009An inspired metaphor for the inherent instability of the brain by Moshe Bar:
The fighter plane F-16 is the first aeroplane intentionally designed to have an aerodynamically unstable platform. This design was chosen to enhance the aircraft's manoeuvrability. Most aeroplanes are designed to be stable such that they strive to return to their original attitude following an interruption. While such stability is a desired property for a passenger aeroplane, for example, it opposes a pilot's effort to change headings rapidly and thus can degrade manoeuvring performance required for a fighter jet.…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Since Tangled Bank has gone the way of the Dodo (Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker -- insert the name of your favorite extinct species here) and will probably never be seen again, despite promises to the contrary, there is a huge hole in the science writing blogosphere. A hole that must be filled. So I am proposing to do just that: I am starting a new science blog carnival, Scientia, which will be be THE science blog writing carnival.…
cwilcox | March 30, 2009For those of you on Twitter, check it out: It's a tweetathon for Earth Day!
Here's the scoop:
With a new administration and a renewed focus on the environment, Earth Day '09 is bound to be momentous. Use the #earthtweet tag to share what you're doing to help celebrate Earth Day. Whether you're hosting an event, or coming up with a unique way to conserve, your earthtweets will inspire others to get involved.
Help spread the word by telling your followers about #earthweet and installing the widget on your blog. Each day, we'll be handing out prizes for earthtweets that we feel deserve some…
gregladen | March 30, 2009Polycarbonate water bottles have received plenty of bad press for releasing potentially toxic compounds into unsuspecting drinkers, but there may be another culprit: everyday plastic packaging.
A German study of commercially-available bottled water found contamination by chemicals that mimic natural sex hormones. When the researchers raised snails in the water, they bred with extreme rapidity -- a warning sign that the chemicals were active. Contamination levels were twice as high in brands packaged in plastic instead of glass, suggesting that plastic was the culprit.
Wired Science
cortex | March 30, 2009Wired has now put more photos from my article on the Allen Brain Atlas online. They're grotesquely gorgeous:
While the Allen Atlas of gene expression has already proven itself to be a valuable research tool, I think the project's most profound long-term impact will come from its methodological innovations. For the most part, modern science remains a field of artisans, of technicians and grad students doing experiments by hand. However, because the Allen Institute needed to generate such vast amounts of data, they realized that a different approach was required. And so they pioneered a high-…
sb admin | March 30, 2009Trust For Americaâs Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released a report on improving food safety, and one of the chief problems they identify with the current system is a lack of centralized food-safety authority:
The report calls for the immediate consolidation of food safety leadership within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and ultimately the creation of a separate Food Safety Administration within HHS. Currently, no FDA official whose full-time job is food safety has line authority over all food safety functions. A speedy effort by the Obama administration to…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2009Here's the latest carnivalia for you to enjoy;
Book Review blog carnival, 14th edition. If you skim this carnival quickly, you will notice that the vast majority of books that are being reviewed here has always been and continues to be non-fiction works. (Kinda interesting, methinks).
Everything Worth Reading, this blog carnival focuses on any topic that the host deems worth reading .. although I assume that overall writing quality also plays a role in this decision-making process.
Observations on Life blog carnival, which is a rather eclectic collection of links to a wide variety of…
gregladen | March 30, 2009
Six bonobos, a species of chimpanzee, have died from a flu epidemic in a month at the Lola Ya Bonobo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ten more have contracted the flu.
These are apes in a rehab center, and apparently the flu (we'll assume for the moment that the diagnosis is accurate, but keep in mind that the term "flu" has different meanings in different parts of the world) hits hard and the animal dies in a few days after showing symptoms.
Details here.