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kevin z | September 13, 2008Craig is away at a workshop but emailed me this message to relay. Remember to visit and bookmark our new site!
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When I was much, much younger, I joined Jacques Cousteau's Calypso Club (named affectionately after his beloved ship). Was anyone else club members? Is there still a Calypso Club? The rights and privileges of this elite club were endless. Entry was limited to any child with a few bucks to their name and a few cereal box tops. My membership packet came in with all kinds of information, patches, stickers, and certificates.…
mspringer | September 13, 2008Yesterday I was watching Discovery's Project Earth, avoiding doing homework and grading. It's an interesting show, with ideas ranging from the interesting to the preposterous. The episode I saw proposed launching little lenses into space to scatter a small fraction of the sun's light away from earth. The tests were failures, and more damning but glossed over in the program were the sheer number of launches needed to put a significant number of lenses in space. At that point, why not just use reflective mylar sheets in space? They're much cheaper and you can put a lot more in space with…
petnoyer | September 13, 2008Farewell, Scienceblogs. This will be my last post at SB's DSN. It's a little sad for me, because I kinda feel like I grew up here. Since I started blogging, I had two little girls, moved from Los Angeles to Texas, bought a house, and enrolled in a PhD program. Since moving to ScienceBlogs, I completed my coursework, passed qualifiers, and started writing my dissertation. So, it can be done! Don't let that cranky luddite professor discourage you. There's always time for ScienceBlogs.
To ScienceBlogs, thank you for inviting us and nurturing us here. This is a unique gathering. The community…
mspringer | September 12, 2008"It's not the heat, it's the humidity."
This is said by people all over the country, especially so in the coastal south where 90+ degree heat is made that much worse by air thick enough to swim in. But heat is usually an inconvenience. Hurricanes are another matter. It's not the wind, it's the water.
I was in Baton Rouge during Katrina. We had tropical storm force winds that knocked around anything not car-sized or bolted down, downed trees, and some lost power. What's a little less well known is that New Orleans only experienced category 1 winds - low category 2 at the absolute most…
kevin z | September 12, 2008Our time here with Seed is at an end. One chapter closed, another one is opened. Right now it is a time a great changes for me. As many readers know, I recently moved to North Carolina to take up a position a research technician at Duke's Marine Lab on the coast. Thankfully we did not get the full brunt of Hanna, just a bucket load of rain and 30 mph winds. Unfortunately, my U-Haul truck broke down on the interstate and I was stranded a day and half in Ashland, Virginia with truckloads of drunken racing fans. But I am here now in Cateret County getting settled in and enjoying being back in…
cortex | September 12, 2008I would love to watch this sport in person:
Goalball participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents' goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves. Blindfolds allow partially sighted players to compete on an equal footing with blind players.
Think, for a moment, about what an impressive cognitive feat that is. The rest of us depend almost entirely on our vision to localize objects in space. But these athletes have learned how to detect fast…
grrlscientist | September 12, 2008Here's a blog carnival for you to enjoy;
Friday Ark, #208. This blog carnival is a great one for a rainy Friday (like this one in NYC), because it shows images of animals, all sorts of animals, for you to contemplate and enjoy!
Carnival of Food and Travel, issue #3. This is an eclectic mix of food and travel and food that oyu only eat while traveling.
cortex | September 12, 2008Did you know that every time you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch instead of a meat based sandwich you reduce your carbon footprint by more than two pounds? (I love it when environmentalism affirms my own habits.) That's about 40 percent of the savings that are achieved from driving a hybrid car. I'd also like to take this moment to endorse the Trader Joe's salted peanut butter made from unblanched peanuts. It's delicious.
mspringer | September 12, 2008There's a comic strip called Non Sequitur. Not one of my favorites, but occasionally there's a pretty good one. Here's an example. We have a kid speculating about firing a gun on the moon. He asks:
If you were on the moon, which is a vacuum, and tried to shoot a gun, would it fire? After all combustion needs an atmosphere with oxygen... or does the casing of the bullet create its own atmosphere? If so, the bullet would travel farther in the reduced gravity, but would it travel faster than it does on the earth?
Let's take 'em one at a time.
First, the bullet would fire. Explosives…
cortex | September 12, 2008In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion about Sarah Palin's lack of experience in foreign policy. These criticisms all depend on the same assumption: that knowing more about foreign policy is always better. (Experience is typically used as a stand-in for knowledge, so when people say that you're inexperienced what they're really saying is you're ignorant.) But is that true? What is the payoff of expertise when it comes to political judgment?
Philip Tetlock has conducted the gold-standard study of political expertise. In the early 1980's, he picked two hundred and eighty-four people…
petnoyer | September 12, 2008
If art is the universal language, how do you say "don't eat orange roughy"? We'll have to ask electronic artist Don Relyea, who generated the image above. "Orange Roughy" was inspired by his wife's cooking, which, unfortunately, includes the fish formerly known as "slimehead".
Orange roughy are long lived and quickly depleted. They come from seamounts around New Zealand, generally. The fishery works like a clear cutting operation. Take it all and move on. It's not sustainable. On the bright side, the New Zealand government is one of 69 countries to take part in a new international…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2008A fellow scientist whose work I have long followed, Ricardo Azevedo, has a new gig writing a blog sponsored by the Houston Chronicle. Congratulations, Ricardo! Do go over there and read his first essay; "The Fittest Theory."
mspringer | September 11, 2008You're probably more tired of politics than I am, but somebody has to be the voice of reason around here. I apologize to my physics-loving nonpolitical readers and urge those of you fitting that description to avoid anything I write with the politics tag. It will all be over soon.
Maybe it's because McCain now leads Obama on Intrade, but the hysteria just grows louder and louder. Take Effect Measure, here on ScienceBlogs, discussing McCain on rape. Here's the charges:
Charge: "In 1994, John McCain voted against legislation -- pushed through Congress by Joe Biden -- that helped put an end…
omnibrain | September 11, 2008 Alice Pawley of Sciencewomen fame is heading down to Champaign on September 27th to help me throw a millionth comment bash. We'll even buy you a round of booze and perhaps some yummy foods thanks to some wonderful financing by ScienceBlogs! We have tentatively planned on meeting at the Blind Pig or Jupiters Pizza (it's a bar too - don't worry!)
We look forward to meeting all you ScienceBlogs fans here in Champaign-Urbana. Home of.... uhh... the University of Illinois and uhh... corn?
sb admin | September 11, 2008By Mary Carol Jennings
In the setting of the upcoming elections, my Senator, Jim DeMint, recently wrote a letter of opinion to the Washington Times opposing a global HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria bill that will provide life-saving medications and prevention against infectious disease in the developing world. Though the White House and a broad bipartisan coalition of legislators and community groups support this bill, his statements suggest that he considers this bill a superfluous, expensive government investment.Â
When DeMint has called for our leaders to reduce the programâs funding…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2008
Living the Scientific Life was mentioned in the 9 September 2008 Canberra Times! [larger view].
I am thrilled to tell you that a new reader found my blog through a mention by the Canberra Times! This scanned image was sent to me by that reader who I would like to thank for letting me know about it. Now, if only I could visit every place in the world that my blog is seen and appreciated ..
cortex | September 11, 2008I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. I can vividly recall the horrifying details of the day. I can still smell the acrid odor of burnt plastic and the pall of oily smoke and the feeling of disbelief, the sense that history had just pivoted in a tragic direction. Such vivid, visceral, emotional memories are known as flashbulb memories. They are defined by their cinematic feel, how they are dense with sensory detail. They also feel especially accurate: I'm completely convinced that my 9/11 memories are uncommonly precise, permanently etched into my hippocampus. But I'm wrong. My memories of 9/…
mspringer | September 11, 2008Reader nanoAl had an interesting observation about the post on applying an electric charge to the earth. We were trying to find out how much electric charge would need to be applied to the earth and the moon to cancel out their gravitational attraction. The answer was suprisingly little. Here's what nanoAl had to say:
Thats about 320 kg of electrons! I wonder how strong a box it'd take to contain the pressure from all that repulsive force, anyone know how to calculate it?
As a matter of fact, I do! Most people know that pressure is force per area. But fewer people know that it's also…
