Uncategorized
gregladen | January 25, 2009Everyone has pieces of literature or art that have influenced them the most. For me, it's this:
grrlscientist | January 25, 2009tags: Celebes Rainbowfish, Celebes Sailfish, Telmatherina ladigesi, guest blog essay, brackish water fish
As you might remember, I have been busily writing guest blog articles (and an article for my column in a print magazine published by the Avicultural Society of America), but one of my "guest blog" essays has just been published for all to read at The Reef Tank. Here is a link to the completed essay, an edited version will be republished here in its entirety in one month (now that I see it published, I wanted to change a few things to make it read better, so those changes have been made…
jjacquet | January 24, 2009I believe in Obama. So I wanted to be part of his story. Our story.
So last Saturday, I flew from London to Washington, D.C. to spend four days celebrating and witnessing the inauguration of our 44th President.
I made my way down to the Sunday concert featuring actors and musicians. The music part was great with opening performances from The Boss and Mary J. Blige. They did what they do best: sing.
But when Steve Carell stood up and gave a short political speech with no intentions of making me laugh I became suspicious. And by the time Tom Hanks opined on Abraham Lincoln's…
jwilbanks | January 24, 2009I got drawn into a debate about copyrights and factual data this week that felt like it merited its own blog post. It was kind of surreal new media debating - I was going back and forth with a smart guy from the UC Berkeley school of information on a friend's Facebook wall for most of a day on the topic. It was definitely a change from the typical FB chatter and in some ways the character count constraints of a wall post were formative to the debate. But some of the questions raised deserved long answers, and the issues involved are complicated and subtle and non-obvious. Hopefully moving the…
mspringer | January 24, 2009Today I'm going to soapbox about something utterly inconsequential and only tangentially related to science. Apologies all around. It's the weekend though, so I trust you'll forgive a bit of a deviation from the usual!
The nominations for the Oscars are out, and generally it's a pretty mundane lot. Take the Best Picture nominees, for instance:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire
To be perfectly honest I've seen none of these. I'm sure they all have their charms, but no one I've talked to (and my friends have good taste) really painted them…
cortex | January 24, 2009I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people.
1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
1841
There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the "schemes, projects and phantasies" that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a…
gregladen | January 23, 2009
*/
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
grrlscientist | January 23, 2009
Image: Orphaned. Contact me so I can provide proper attribution.
Despite the fact that I am experiencing my typical "post-conference blues", I have managed to remain productive, although this is a minute-by-minute battle. (Hanging out with all my cool and fun peeps reminds me of how lonely and socially isolated I truly am). For example, do you remember the big pile o' tasks that I told you I was working on? Well, it appears I am making progress!
putting the finishing touches on my OpenLab2008 essay and emailing that to the editor. Yes, I am terribly late! Done!
writing six book…
mspringer | January 23, 2009In the United States generally and to a much lesser extent in the UK and a few other countries you'll see some very old-school units of measurements. Miles, yards, pounds, fortnights, pints, gallons, and numerous others. Most of the rest of the world uses metric units, the primary variant of which is called SI units used almost universally in the physical sciences. You know, meters, kilograms, that sort of thing. My American patriotism aside, SI is of course a lot easier to work with. Kilometers to meters is a lot easier than fathoms to nautical miles (or whatever).
But it's not perfect…
cortex | January 23, 2009So far, my favorite response to the annual Brockman challenge - this year, the question was "What will change everything?" - comes from the physicist Stuart Kauffman:
Reductionism has reigned as our dominant world view for 350 years in Western society. Physicist Steven Weinberg states that when the science shall have been done, all the explanatory arrows will point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry and ultimately to physics and the final theory.
I think he is wrong: the evolution of the biosphere, the economy, our human culture and perhaps…
gregladen | January 22, 2009
I and the Bird #92 - The picnic party
Praxis Blog Carnival - Your Graduate Guide To Succeeding In 2009
The Giants' Shoulders #7
Book Review Blog Carnival--9th Edition
Change of Shift: Vol. 3, Number Fifteen
Grand Rounds 5:18: Ten Suggestions For Healthcare Reform
Carnival of Homeschooling
sb admin | January 22, 2009As we welcome the Obama administration into its first period, everyone at Sb is eager to see it restore science to its rightful place in US policy making and political culture. Now, from an archaeologist's point of view, there is one area of US law where science is sorely lacking. And in this case, it's not the second Bush administration's fault. Actually, this is an area where US law has lagged behind that of the rest of the developed world for as long as there has been a developed world.
What is science's rightful place in US cultural heritage management law? It should be everywhere, while…
sb admin | January 22, 2009Today I received an email from the hivemind, saying, in part:
In
his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama
reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and
imagination." He recently stated, "promoting science isn't just
about providing resources--it's about protecting free and open
inquiry... It's about listening to what our scientists have to say,
even when it's inconvenient--especially when it's inconvenient. Because
the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a
greater understanding of the world around us. That will be…
crowdfavorite | January 22, 2009Make no little plans; they have no power to stir men's blood.
---Daniel Burnham
The last eight years have seen subtle and not-so subtle predations on the practice of medicine. Will the new administration be able to promote the kind of change we need? Let's review some of the challenges facing the Obama administration.
Ethical apocalypse
Bush's evisceration of the Constitution of the United States has affected health care professionals. For example, the military has likely always used psychologists to assist with interrogations, but the last eight years has seen a huge increase in the…
sb admin | January 22, 2009Make no little plans; they have no power to stir men's blood.
---Daniel Burnham
The last eight years have seen subtle and not-so subtle predations on the practice of medicine. Will the new administration be able to promote the kind of change we need? Let's review some of the challenges facing the Obama administration.
Ethical apocalypse
Bush's evisceration of the Constitution of the United States has affected health care professionals. For example, the military has likely always used psychologists to assist with interrogations, but the last eight years has seen a huge increase in the…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2009tags: annual science communication conference, ScienceOnline'09, SciO09, Sigma Xi, Research Triangle Park, science blogging conference, nature blog writing
If you've been following this blog for very long, you will recall that a colleague (and former SciBling), Kevin Zelnio, and I co-hosted a session at the recent ScienceOnline '09 conference in North Carolina about Nature Blogging. I published a list of questions on my blog that were projected live onto a screen during our presentation (along with reader comments), to serve as a focal point to guide our discussion. I also asked the attendees…
pharyngula | January 22, 2009We had a little drama in St Paul this morning: an anti-choice kook decided that an effective way to silence a family planning clinic was to smash the entrance to Planned Parenthood with his SUV.
Several employees were in the building at the time, said Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kathi Di Nicola. She said the SUV hit the front door of the clinic two or three times, damaging the clinic's front door and surrounding stonework.
When Di Nicola arrived at the clinic, she said the man had gotten out of the SUV and was pacing around it, holding a crucifix and chanting. "He was agitated and he was…