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grrlscientist | January 22, 2009tags: interview, Nature Blog Network
I am still writing and editing a bunch of essays and blog entries, but while I work, maybe you will be interested to read an interview with me that was conducted a little while ago by Nature Blog Network (not to be confused with NATURE network, where I can also be found if you know where to look). This interview includes a really nice picture of me (snapped by a friend) and a picture of one of my companion parrots, as well as a picture of my ancestral homeland (both snapped by me).
For those of you who would like to read more, here is another interview…
mspringer | January 22, 2009Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics hold a bit of an odd place in the heart and mind of a physics student. On one hand it's one of the few subjects with truly universal applicability. No matter if you work in galaxy clusters, nuclear theory, experimental solid state, or anything else the concepts of those disciplines are going to assert themselves. Energy and entropy are everywhere. On the other hand it tends to be a tremendous pain in the neck to learn.
I'm in a stat mech class this semester, as you might guess. We do about two days worth of thermodynamics to keep up appearances,…
cortex | January 22, 2009So the book is now shipping from Amazon, B&N, Powells, Borders, independent booksellers, etc. I thought I'd post an interview I conducted with myself a few months ago. (Once upon a time, I read these author Q&A's that are used for publicity purposes and thought that someone else was asking the questions. Now I know better. But feel free to put your harder questions in the comments.)
Q: Why did you want to write a book about decision-making?
A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm an incredibly indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying…
pharyngula | January 22, 2009This is a promo for a wingnut movie that portrays the autonomy of women as a great evil … with an all-female cast. Even this short clip is nauseating.
The lies fly thick and fast. I'm particularly disgusted with the one interviewee who claims that, as a former representative of family planning education, she would go into schools and increase the teen pregnancy rate so that the girls would have 3-5 abortions between the ages of 13 and 18, and that this was the goal of her agency. Right. It is, of course, the antithesis of what family planning organizations actually do.
The rest is also vile…
cortex | January 22, 2009I know, I know, you're probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition. If so, then feel free to skip this post. I've got a new article in the latest Seed (it's a particularly good issue, I think, although it's not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking:
The game only has one rule, and it's a simple one: Don't think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can't think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head.
You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in…
grrlscientist | January 21, 2009
Image: Dalhousie School of Architecture.
Now that the world is brand new again, thanks to President Obama being safely ensconced in the White House, I am curious to know what you all are thinking and doing right now.
To get you started, I thought I'd tell you what I am up to. Now that I am back from North Carolina (my session was apparently a success), my NYC visitors are all safely back home again, the ScienceBlogs' MT upgrade is completed and I am mostly finished with transferring the proper files to my new laptop so I can continue doing my work on my blog, and I finally have some time…
dgmacarthur | January 21, 2009Keith Robison from Omics! Omics! has a fun nostalgia piece looking back on his days in the midst of the genomics bubble of the late 90s.
Subscribe to Genetic Future.
pharyngula | January 21, 2009Many of you were anxious to find out more about my trip to Columbus, Ohio in a few weeks, and here's the information you need. This is to be a Darwin Day banquet, open to the public, but there is a charge. It's on 14 February, so you could always bring a date and say it's their Valentine's Day gift, too.
sb admin | January 21, 2009I was on the National Mall yesterday when Barack Obama took the oath of office and gave his inaugural address, and the mood was both delighted and solemn. The densely packed crowd alternated between loud cheers and reverent silence as Obama spoke.
Our new president was blunt in his description of our current situation, reminding us that weâre at war, our economy is badly weakened, and our healthcare, education, and energy systems are far from where they should be (full text here). But he expressed confidence that we can meet these challenges:
Now, there are some who question the scale of our…
cortex | January 21, 2009Science exists in a cultural context. When the culture changes - and American culture has just a celebrated a rather massive change - the science is sure to follow. It's a truism but it's still true: our experiments don't take place in a vacuum. Scientists are members of society, too.
Sometimes, these cultural influences are direct. When the Bush Administration stifled data on global warming, it was directly influencing (or attempting to influence) the scientific process. But such direct interactions are rare: most of the time the culture seeps in without anybody noticing. It doesn't so much…
mikethemadbiologist | January 21, 2009Last week, I spent two days at a human microbiome meeting, the goal of which was to plan the direction (for now, anyway) of the Jumpstart/Human Microbiome Project, which has and will spend a total of $38 million. This got the Mad Biologist to thinking (always a dangerous thing, at best): why is so little science journalism dedicated to how science is funded, how key decisions are made in terms of funding priorities, and so forth?
Let me preface what follows with a disclaimer. I would hope that the majority of science-related coverage would deal with the output of the scientific research…
mspringer | January 21, 2009Reader Mike writes in with an interesting problem to work out. It runs thus:
You're in your car parked on the side of the road when you see your friend a distance d away, driving toward you at velocity v. You want to talk to him through your window, so what constant acceleration should you pick so that you're also traveling at v at the moment he reaches you?
The question as originally posed asked for the acceleration necessary to accomplish this in the minimum time, but in fact only one acceleration will cause him to catch up with you right as you both have the same speed. However long it…
gregladen | January 20, 2009 As we speak, someone is getting medical treatment at the inaugural indoors ceremony lunch thingie. Details will follow.
It is not the president or the vp or their immediate families. There are a lot of old people there, it could be almost anything.
UPDATE: It was Ted Kennedy, taken away on a stretcher. Hopefully a minor setback and nothing more.
Ambulances pulled up to the building, but have not pulled out yet. Perviously, Kennedy has been brought to the hospital a couple of times and has gotten past it pretty easily. He is fragile, clearly.
Kennedy was in a state of convulsions…
mspringer | January 19, 2009I think personally he is a good man who loves his family and loves his country. And I think he made the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances.
- Barack Obama on George W. Bush, 1/16/09
There's no shortage of shortcomings in the administration of the forty-third president. If your ideology is liberal, you can think of scores of disagreements with Mr. Bush ranging from mild disapproval to sputtering apoplexy. If your ideology is conservative (as mine is), well, you can think of scores of disagreements with Mr. Bush ranging from mild disapproval to…
clock | January 19, 2009Just because I was busy with the conference does not meen that PLoS stopped the virtual presses to accommodate me! Of course, there are a bunch of cool new papers in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE that have been published last week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Action Potential Initiation in the Hodgkin-Huxley Model:
In 1952, Hodgkin and Huxley described the underlying mechanism for the…
cortex | January 19, 2009The brain is a careless beast. Mostly, I blame my carelessness on the limited capacity of working memory - it can hold seven discrete items, plus or minus two - which means that we're constantly forcing ideas to exit the stage of awareness. And so thoughts come and go, as we try to juggle the demands of the real world with the feeble processing powers of the mind. For instance, as I was packing for my latest work trip, I went into the bathroom to grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. I grabbed the toothbrush, opened up the drawer to get the toothpaste, but then I noticed all these other things…
mspringer | January 19, 2009There's an interesting post over at Sentient Developments about the simulation argument.
The SA essentially states that, given the potential for posthumans to create a vast number of ancestor simulations, we should probabilistically conclude that we are in a simulation rather than the deepest reality.
Most people give a little chuckle when they hear this argument for the first time. I've explained it to enough people now that I've come to expect it. The chuckle doesn't come about on account of the absurdity of the suggestion, it's more a chuckle of logical acknowledgment -- a reaction to the…
pharyngula | January 18, 2009It's a good day to take a moment to read Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It tells of an oppression I can't even begin to imagine, and of frustration with complacency and a dream that was always being deferred.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every…
stoat | January 18, 2009I've been re-reading Neuromancer whilst putting my daughter to bed. Fear not, she gets stuff like The Tales of Beedle the Bard instead. Of the two, N is far and away the better book (wiki tells me that the novel appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923; the authors utter ignorance of computing technology doesn't detract from it as a novel, though oddly wiki doesn't find room to mention how inaccurate his vision of cyberspace has proved). It's the ultimate look-n-feel book; you just let yourself get carried away with the flow, and ignore the…
palmd | January 18, 2009The locals say it's cold, but North Carolina rocks. It's warm (meaning greater than 20 degrees F), hilly, piney. And people here are friendly. Here at ScienceOnline09 there is so much to do, both intellectually and socially, that I'm overwhelmed. In fact, even my computer is overwhelmed and is officially useless. The ScienceBlogs intern (who may in fact not be an intern and whose youth and vivacity is surpassed only by her briliance) did a little trouble-shooting with my tablet and found the problem, which will hopefully be solvable back up north.
One thing I've learned here: there are…