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grrlscientist | September 26, 2008tags: Wood Duck, Aix sponsa, birds, poetry, The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry
Abstract.
Male Wood Duck, Aix sponsa.
Image: John Del Rio [larger view].
This has been a difficult and frightening week, and I admit I was especially terrified to learn that my bank failed and was seized by the SEC last night -- how am I going to pay rent this month?? -- and I've wondered if we all would make it to Friday without the entire nation ending up hungry and homeless. But I am deplaning in Seattle at this moment, and getting ready to spend the weekend with my bird pals and my university pals, as…
sb admin | September 26, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
The Chinese food contamination scandal continues to widen. The European Union (EU) is now banning imports of all Chinese baby foods that contain milk. The problem is the presence of melamine, a cheap chemical used to make plastics that looks like protein in the screening assays used to see if food products meet standards for protein content. It was added by unscrupulous Chinese pet food manufacturers a year ago, resulting in the illness and deaths of thousands of cats and dogs in the US and Canada. The thinking is that melamine combines with cyanuric…
mspringer | September 26, 2008The Terminator?
Which headline do you think would sell more papers?
INTELLIGENT ROBOTS KILL 20,000, NO SIGN OF STOPPING
or
AUTO FATALITIES DECLINE 50%
In a nutshell, this is the PR problem of technology. Technological progress is taken for granted, and technological problems are trumpeted to the skies. In this case, I'm pessimistic about the chances of autonomous cars. Here's an article for Motor Trend which isn't really about the safety of robot cars, but which takes the following shot anyway:
"Driving will be safer," say the experts. "Computers will ensure that smart cars always maintain…
gregladen | September 26, 2008
Last night, gunfire was exchanged between Pakistani and American troops (and Afghani troops as well). This may not have been a particularly big deal, but minor incidents like this can turn into decades of strife and warfare when people like George Bush, Sarah Palin, and that selfish addled moron the Republicans have nominated to run for President, John McCan't, are in charge.
I am deeply annoyed at the selfish and cowardly stunt McCain pulled earlier this week. As the Herbert Hoover of the presidential candidates, the only thing McCain can do to have even the slightest chance of winning…
eklemetti | September 25, 2008
Thanks to everyone who has responded to my Eruptions poll so far. Looks like we have a couple clear favorites, based on the results right now:
Profiles of historic eruptions - 35%
Profiles of active volcanoes - 33%
Discussion of monitoring techniques - 18%
Discussion of volcanic hazards - 15%
So, I'll start thinking about some historic eruptions and active volcanoes for the next lull in activity. Thanks for everyone's input!
grrlscientist | September 25, 2008I thought I'd mention the upcoming Science Blog writing discussion that is scheduled for Tuesday, 1 October, at Manhattan's Apple Store in Soho. This isa panel that will discuss the value of a blog to communicating with the public about one's research. The panel will be moderated by Katherine Sharpe and, along with me, includes several of my SciBlings, Jake Young, Jessica Palmer, Steinn Sigurdsson, and Brian Switek.
What: Apple Pro Session panel with ScienceBloggers
Date: Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Time: 7 - 8pm ET
Location: 103 Prince Street [map].
You might also wish to refer to several…
grrlscientist | September 25, 2008Here's another blog carnival for you to read and enjoy;
Carnival of Education, #190. This is filled with lots of education-related goodness.
gregladen | September 25, 2008This is the CERN press release regarding the status of the Large Hadron Collider. The bottom line: There was a release of helium leak inot sector 3-4 (which I'm pretty sure is next to sector 7g). They thik they know what caused the leak but they are not sure.
In order to investigate, they have to warm up these parts from near absolute zero to room temperature, inspect, repair, fiddle, but with/of what and in what manner is unknown, then cool it all back down again. The warming up and cooling down each take weeks.
If the repair and inspection takes only a few days or a couple of weeks,…
mspringer | September 25, 2008We're holding a rock, and we drop it. What happens?
There's lots of methods for treating this problem. We've done it with Newton's laws of force, and we've done that in more than one way. We've done the Lagrangian formulation in terms of minimizing the classical action. I don't think we've done the quantum mechanical propagator yet, but we'll get to it. Today we'll do the Hamiltonian formulation.
Like the Lagrangian, it's a formulation of mechanics that's based on the relationships between energy, momentum, and position. Define a quantity H called the Hamiltonian, and set it equal to…
cortex | September 25, 2008I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping mood. And no, I hadn't been talking on a cell phone.
For me, one of the most annoying parts of insomnia is the way I continually almost fall asleep. I'm drifting off into that dreamy netherworld, my thoughts growing languid and slow, when all of a sudden I remember I can't sleep, and snap back into awakeness. It's damn annoying.
What causes this insomniac process? If I had to…
cortex | September 24, 2008Walter Pater famously declared that "all art aspires to the condition of music." What he meant is that music is able to work on our feelings directly; no ideas interfere with its emotions. I'd amend that slightly, and say that art should also aspire to the condition of architecture, especially when the architecture looks like this. (von Schelling said that "architecture is music in space," which has nothing to do with anything but is a nice line.) In other words, art should fill us with visceral feelings, but it should also be rooted in the real world. An architect can't just make beautiful…
cortex | September 24, 2008The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record: he is the lone outlier of Wall Street. According to most calculations, since 1951 Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has generated an average annual return of about 31%. The average return for the Standard & Poor's 500 over that period is 10% a year. The stock market is a random walk, but Buffett has somehow found a way to consistently beat the randomness.
So what'…
cortex | September 24, 2008A little housekeeping. First, I've got a new website! The best part is the article archive. I've also got a few speaking gigs in the next month, in case you happen to be in the area. On Friday, I'll be at the Idea Festival in Louisville. On October 1, I'm at Georgia Tech. I'll be at the GAIN conference on 10/24, talking about Escoffier and cheap wine. On October 29, I've got the pleasure of interviewing Mark Jung Beeman (the scientist featured in my recent New Yorker article) at the Neuroleadership conference.
cwilcox | September 24, 2008Ok, this isn't so much of interest to a biologist as it is to me - a current Florida resident. Two new studies today released by FSU and FAU begin to predict the toll of global climate change on Florida's economics, and the results aren't pretty.
"The impacts of climate change on Florida's coasts and on our economy will be substantial, persistent and long-term, even under our conservative estimates," says Julie Harrington, director of the Center for Economic Forecasting and Analysis at FSU. "Should, as many models predict, sea level rise, and hurricane strength and other factors become more…
mspringer | September 23, 2008Hey, I just wanted to draw some attention to this great post of Chad's about femtosecond lasers and laser bandwidth in physics and chemistry. Those lasers are near and dear to my heart, as they're one of the main focuses of my research group.
And just so you have some original content, here's the Crazy Matt Opinion Of The Day: I like the Seinfeld Microsoft ads. They don't make me want to buy Windows, and they're not very dramatic or even interesting. I like them because they have Bill Gates doing the robot and reading a programming manual as a little kid's bedtime story. I like the idea…
grrlscientist | September 23, 2008The NYC millionth comment party has FINALLY been scheduled! ScienceBlogs has rented out the top floor of the Delancey and will be providing pizza and a bar tab up to about $600 (drinks over that amount will not be covered) -- FREE! The Delancey will be suspending their usual cover charge, just for us.
So here are the two ScienceBlogs/Seed Media Group Millionth Comment parties that I will be attending:
ScienceBlogs' NYC-Boston area Millionth Comment party:
Date: Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Time: 7pm ET
Location: the top floor of The Delancey Bar and Nightclub, 168 Delancey Street on Manhattan's…
purepedantry | September 23, 2008Sorry about the light blogging everyone. I am super-busy at work preparing for an upcoming vacation, so I just don't have the time for it at the moment. I expect light-blogging between now and the middle of October, so check back with us then.
cortex | September 23, 2008Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoffrey makes an astute observation about how the latest consumer technologies have a way of becoming metaphors for the mind. Before the brain was a binary code running on three pounds of cellular microchips, it was an impressive calculator, or a camera, or a blank slate. In other words, we're constantly superimposing the gadgets of the day onto the cortex. Geoffrey notes that a recent article featured on the BBC on fMRI scans of taxicab drivers ("Taxi drivers have brain sat-nav") is very similar to an earlier study, except that the most recent article used satellite…
cortex | September 23, 2008This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the…