Uncategorized
gregladen | July 18, 2008A selection of carnivals for your blogospheric enjoyment:
Skeptics' Circle, the 91st at Sorting Out Science.
The Carnival of Education, #180 at Steve Spangler dot com.
Read about New carnival - 'Hourglass': biology of aging at A Blog Around the Clock.
And, while you are over at Clock, check out The Giant's Shoulders #1, if you have not already...
cortex | July 18, 2008Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of words on how Obama's pivot on FISA might turn off his liberal base, or how McCain's tax cuts will appeal to working women, or they'll consider the political implications of whatever issue happens to be in the news that day. The underlying assumption, of course, is that issues matter, that voters are fundamentally rational agents who vote for candidates based on a coherent set…
gregladen | July 18, 2008 Nelson Mandela I'll never forget the day I watched you walk out of prison.
South Africa's elder statesman Nelson Mandela is marking his 90th birthday Friday in a private celebration with his family at his home in the Eastern Cape. However, as VOA's Delia Robertson reports from our bureau in Johannesburg, the rest of the country is celebrating very publicly.
From the national cabinet to kindergartens, from hospital wards to prison cells, and shopping malls to sidewalk-sellers, most South Africans seem to be celebrating the 90th birthday of the much-loved Nelson Mandela, these days…
cortex | July 18, 2008I visited the Cambridge Google offices last month and talked about Escoffier, umami, Kanye West and the plasticity of dopamine neurons:
petnoyer | July 18, 2008
The internet's abuzz about this photo of a surfer in Smyrna Beach, Florida (the sharkbite capitol of the world). Is it real or is it Photoshop? An article from London's Evening Standard has the most extensive coverage found so far. The blacktip apparently leapt from behind the surfer while a camera snapped away. The shark was discovered in the "digital darkroom".
Why is it important to the deep sea? Because we share these oceans with all kinds of thinking, feeling, swimming, and leaping creatures. That's the moral of the story.
Hat tip to Clark Thompson with a shout out to the 2-1-5, and…
kevin z | July 17, 2008Why are we encouraging this behavior!! Doesn't everyone know that in the future they will rise out of the oceans to destroy us????
cortex | July 17, 2008Speaking of data visualization, a reader sent along this link to some fabulous examples. Each of these images, according to artist and creator Jason Salavon, is composed of "100 unique commemorative photographs culled from the internet. The final compositions are arrived at using both the mean and the median, splitting the difference between a specific norm and an ideal one." They remind me of some cheesy Renoir portraits.
petnoyer | July 17, 2008
World Wildlife Fund has an entertaining new website called WaveForward where you can "discover your inner fish" by answering a few questions about where you vacation, what movies you watch, and what you like to do at parties. You can also learn more about Sustainable Seafood and Healthy Ecosystems. Check out the feature story "Buyer Beware" in the Coastal development section.
I was totally psyched to learn that my inner fish is a Hammerhead Shark, and that I am...
... an extremely adapted predator that uses my oddly shaped head to increase my ability to find prey.... my vertebrae are…
cortex | July 17, 2008One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who gave that debt high ratings, the mortgage brokers who gave out shady loans to people with bad credit, etc. But, in the end, the bubble really began when lots of people chose to buy the wrong home. They bought homes that were too big and too expensive, fueling an unsustainable boom in new home…
cmcclain | July 16, 2008Since I saw this on Youtube I can't that clever little jingle out of my head. The short animation and music is by the obviously talented Kojiro Shishido. Check out his channel for the rest of the videos. I am also a big fan of what looks like the sea urchins eating french fries.
cmcclain | July 16, 2008The Melbourne Museum is doing the unthinkable. They are unleashing a giant, rotting, stinking, mound of invertebrate flesh upon the public (July 17th at 11:30 AEST). One better they are going to hack into with all manner of surgical instruments. I just wish I could be there to view it myself! Luckily they are streaming the whole thing shebang on the internet. Unfortunately, you will not be able to savor the aroma of several hundred pounds of preserved squid over the internet
For you in the US who have no idea how to convert 11:30am AEST to your time it is 6:30 tonight in Pacific Coast…
cortex | July 16, 2008Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine:
On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from sampling wines without first knowing what we were drinking. Everyone thought this was a great idea. So with the help of the wine steward I selected two expensive bottles from the wine cellar and then I went down the street to the liquor store and bought the cheapest bottle of wine they had made from the same type of grape.
I thus had two different expensive wines and…
gregladen | July 16, 2008The Seed Magazine motto is "Science as Culture." Interesting. I think they are talking about the interaction of culture and science, and about science as a part of the broader culture. But it may also be true that science, or scientists in particular, form something of a subculture (not a perfectly bounded one, of course) that acts differently from the rest of the humans.
Randy Olson has sent around an email to the numerous bloggers who simultaneously released reviews of the movie Sizzle (see here for details of the movie, here for an interview with Randy Olson).
I've reproduced most of…
gregladen | July 16, 2008First, let me note this new carnival that I hope gets a LOT of attention. It is currently hosted at A Blog Around The Clock and is know as The Giant's Shoulders. This is because it assimilates posts on classic papers. This is one of those motivating carnivals. People don't blog enough on classic works in this day and age (why, back when I was a whippersnapper we blogged on the classic works three times a day, dagnabbit!!!) so this carnival seeks to encourage this behavior.
The Giant's Shoulders # 1 is HERE.
Other carnivals out today include:
Reconciliation Oekologie: Special Summer…
cortex | July 16, 2008Olivia Judson believes that it's time to jettison "Darwinism" from our vocabulary:
Why is this [Darwinism] a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the "Origin."
He wasn't, and it has. Although several of his ideas -- natural and sexual selection among them -- remain cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology, the field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch…
cortex | July 16, 2008This is a fourth culture I can believe in:
Google has a lot more on how the video was made using 64 rotating lasers (no cameras!) and some cool data visualization programs. (They also released the raw data for the point clouds, so anybody can, at least in theory, create their own visual remix of the Radiohead music video.) As people like Ben Fry demonstrate, the visualization of massive data sets - a pressing problem for modern science - is a great place for art and science to come together.
petnoyer | July 16, 2008
People seem fascinated by the prospect of purchasing virtual real estate at Second Life, but if you ask me, Google Earth is a better place to stake your claim. For instance, I am studying deep sea-fans, or gorgonians, in the West Atlantic twilight zone between 50-150 m. Many of these have their first description in the reports by Wright and Studer (1889) of the HMS Challenger expedition 1873-1876. This expedition is a piece of history that could come alive again in a "Google Ocean" environment.
The main difference between then and now is that 19th century biologists studied dead and broken…
kevin z | July 15, 2008Who would of thunk it? Like Mark Powell recently stated:
"In the "duh" category, fish are thriving in a no-fishing zone in Australia. After looking at graphs, the 10 year old son of one of the scientists said if you stop fishing, don't you expect to find more fish? Uh...yeah."
It also appears that this surprising result is repeated in the UK as reported by BBC today:
"Five years without fishing around Lundy Island off the coast of Devon have brought a significant revival in sea life, scientists report.
Lobsters are seven times more abundant within the protected zone than outside."
DING! DING…
gregladen | July 15, 2008 Chuck Chuck the Panda This is one of those dreaded blog posts when the blogger tells you what he had for breakfast.
To be honest, I'm beat. Sleep deprived, but for a good reason. My daughter, Julia, was out VERY late last night, did not get home until way after 1:00 AM in the morning!!!!! And to think on her 13th birthday!
That is because she returned from the Galapagos last night, and her flight from Miami was late. This was a trip organized and operated by my sister, Bunny, and her husband, Glen. The two of them try to arrange for a nice (although usually too short, I'm sure)…
kevin z | July 15, 2008Madhusudan Katti has the latest and perhaps greatest Oekologie blog carnival ever. Its HUGE and with such a great and diverse selection. Well done Madhu! Go over and check it out now and poke around his very interesting blog called Reconciliation Ecology. He has a lot intriguing posts on how humans interact with their environment.