Uncategorized
gregladen | November 14, 2008What difference is there, really, between a roll, a muffin, and a croissant?
So what do we have in the blogosphere today, looking near the top of my blorg muffin...
You need to promise you are over 18 and an adult to visit A Blog from Hell, but if you get past the security, you can learn about Yet more evidence that right wing punditry causes brain damage.
More on Armistice Day
LRA: The Genocide We Missed
A quick summary of A few hurricane records, considered
I turns out that Barack Obama Is Not The Antichrist
New Homo erectus Pelvis, and it's a girl!
Some Archaeology News:
Iron Age…
thescian | November 14, 2008The realization of a dream. I believe we still need an inspiring campaign to create awareness and thereby generate enthusiasm among the taxpayers. Whatever lies ahead, this is a great day for the thousands of scientists and engineers who have made this possible.
cortex | November 14, 2008It's one of the more annoying side-effects of the financial collapse: instant updates of the Dow Jones Industrial Average are suddenly everywhere, popping up in the corner of cable news shows, in between weather reports on the radio, highlighted on websites, etc. It's a bizarre form of financial melodrama, as the moods of the market seem to lurch and pivot for no good reason. Yesterday afternoon, on the same day a terrible unemployment report came out, the Dow swung upwards and closed 500 points higher. This morning, it's down 350 points, although nobody seems to know why. This chart…
gregladen | November 14, 2008The government army in the Democratic Republican of Congo has pushed rebel forces five km back in the vicinity of Goma. These rebels are north and west of Goma. Of particular importance is the effect on some sixty thousand refugees who camped out in the vicinity of Kibati, which is north of Goma and between the rebel forces and the army forces. At present, opposing troops are essentially staring at each other across often very short distances. UN forces are trying to separate the factions, but the best they are likely to do is to reinforce Goma so that rebels do not take over that city.…
gregladen | November 14, 2008While on a trip to Nebraska, Blogger PZ Myers has has the worst possible thing happen to a blogger happen to him.
His laptop has bit the dust.
Please send PZ condolences, and if anyone is anywhere near Kearney Nebraska, with a spare laptop, GO SAVE HIM!!!!
mspringer | November 14, 2008I thought about linking this Forbes article on the economic situation simply because it's interesting. What actually made me link it was the sentence at the end:
And reality tells us that we barely avoided, only a week ago, a total systemic financial meltdown; that the policy actions are now finally more aggressive and systematic, and more appropriate; that it will take a long while for interbank and credit markets to mend; that further important policy actions are needed to avoid the meltdown and an even more severe recession; that central banks, instead of being the lenders of last resort…
cortex | November 14, 2008A quick programming note: I'll be in Baltimore this Sunday (11/16), giving a talk at the Walters Art Museum. The event starts at 2PM.
grrlscientist | November 14, 2008tags: neurobiology, neuroscience, animal communication, birdsong, premotor nucleus HVC, brain temperature, neural circuitry, motor behaviors, bioacoustics
Captive-bred Zebra Finch, Taeniopygia guttata, at
Bodelwyddan Castle Aviary, Denbighshire, Wales.
Image: Adrian Pingstone/Wikipedia [larger view].
Birdsong is the primary model system that helps scientists understand how the brain produces complex sequences of learned behavior, such as playing the piano. In songbirds, there are many interconnected brain regions that play specific and important role in the production of song. These…
grrlscientist | November 13, 2008Here's more blog carnivals for you to enjoy, this batch includes my favorite blog carnivals of all!
Carnival of the Vanities, the .. er? issue. This is one of my favorite blog carnivals because it features the best writing of the blogosphere, regardless of topic, so you are always going to run into something interesting to read here.
Tangled Bank, issue 118: Yes We Did Edition. This issue takes the form of Barack Obama's imagined first science briefing.
worldsfair | November 13, 2008If you take a gander at our "Terrytalks" speaker promo video, you'll note that one of the sillier requests we had for our student speakers was to pick a song that would work if Terry talks were to have a soundtrack. If you remember, Terry talks has a fairly straight up mandate to connect students to each other over things related to social reponsibility, interdisciplinary collaborations, and/or environmental stewardship.
Anyway, what was great was that the suggested songs were so very diverse in genres. In fact, you can have a listen by clicking the tape below.
There was actually one…
cortex | November 13, 2008Tyler Cowen weighs in on the latest twist in the bailout plan, which involves funneling money to credit card companies. Tyler asks if the Feds should really be in the business of encouraging more credit card borrowing. (I've actually been enjoying getting fewer credit card offers in the mail.) His answer:
No, and especially not with federal dollars. We're talking about credit card debt as a means of financing consumption expenditures. I am not sure what is the going credit card interest rate for the marginal borrowers who will be aided by this new change in the Paulson plan, but I believe it…
jwilbanks | November 13, 2008The nice folks at Seed named me a revolutionary mind this month. It's an honor to be in the company of the minds behind GISAID, Eigenfactor, Voice of Young Science, and CubeSat. Click through and check all of them out.
It's surreal to be photographed by a real photographer and followed around by a film crew. When I think of all the shots and film unused, I think about how nice it would be to see media companies releasing the backfile under CC licenses so that others could start to do remix on the unused content.
jwilbanks | November 13, 2008As much as I loathe to quote Rumsfeld, there's something inside the concept of known unknowns versus unknown unknowns. This is at the root of much of the work that I do, and this post is meant to address the role of the unknowns in the life sciences generally, but pharmaceutical development specifically.
Quite simply, the google searches work pretty well for the "unknown knowns" - stuff that someone else has posted somewhere on the web, something that is known or at least believed, something that is hyperlinked and indexable. This is the modern version of common knowledge, and some…
mspringer | November 13, 2008It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
- S. Holmes
Built on Facts is going on a brief (2 day) semi-hiatus as I've got a classical mechanics exam this Friday. It's not a total break though. The posts will be there, but they'll just be short. With all respect to Mr. Holmes, why don't we ignore him just for the moment and make today a bit of a survey day? Specifically, a survey about what we think about physics for which we have no (or very little) experimental data! Short answer format:
Does each exist or not?
1. A way for a massive…
cortex | November 13, 2008Zadie Smith has a terrific essay in the NY Review of Books on the future of the novel, or why realism - even when perfectly executed - has limitations:
From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal--indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our…
cortex | November 12, 2008I've been really enjoying Alex and Me, the new book by Irene Pepperberg, and not only because I've got an African Grey of my own. It's full of wonderful anecdotes like this:
The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom, where there was a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the little shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed really to notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth…
pharyngula | November 12, 2008It's annoying. I got another copy today of Joan Carroll Cruz's Eucharistic Miracles, a typical collection of credulous fables about crackers behaving oddly, and I don't need any more. This very silly book sent someone back about $16.50, plus postage, and it was a total waste since I already have several copies, and I just laugh at each of the ridiculous stories, anyway.
I'm going to get rid of them, though. I'm going to bring one copy along with me on my trip to Kearney, Nebraska tomorrow, and the first person to tell me he reads the blog and wants this book will get it. I'll even desecrate…
gregladen | November 12, 2008Or is "cheetos" singular ... I'm not sure.
But wait, there's more...
And now, a word from Joe the Plumber...
mspringer | November 12, 2008Today in my recitation we discussed several problems in acoustics. One of them involved beats. This happens when two tones which are very close in pitch are played at the same time. There's a demonstration on the Wikipedia article. I'll solve the problem here since if it confused people in class there's probably people googling it. It's an easy problem, the difficulty comes from a lack of clarity in this section of the book.
This problem is Young and Geller 12.54:
A violinist is tuning her instrument to concert A (440 Hz). She plays a note while listening to an electronically generated…
cortex | November 12, 2008It's hard to imagine that fifteen years ago scientists were forced to read old science papers on actual paper, as they paged through bound volumes of past journals. How quaint! How inefficient! (All that wasted shelf space...) How scholarly, in an old-school kind of way! It's so much easier to just rely on Google Scholar or Pubmed, especially when ensconced in a university with electronic subscriptions to everything.
But what's lost when information goes online? Sure, it becomes easier to find stuff, but have our searches become too narrow? A recent paper in Science looked at this very…