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kevin z | May 15, 2008Do you support the proposal to create a Marine Monument in the northern islands? Do you enjoy the slogan "You'll love how deep we go" as much as us? Do you find it absolute and utter bull-honkey that the CNMI legislature resolved to oppose the formation of marine reserve on unfounded grounds? Then help out Angelo to create the second largest marine no-take zone in the world!
I'm asking of you dearest deep sea readers to go over to the Saipan Tribune, CNMI's daily newspaper, and scroll down the front page to the poll and click "YES". RIGHT NOW! The poll will be in place until the end of the…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2008tags: Columbia University Press, books
Books, books, beautiful books! One of the several presses whose books I love is Columbia University Press. Today, I learned that Columbia is having a "white sale" where they are offering more than 1000 of their titles for sale at prices that are between 20-80% off the original price. I already browsed through the science section and I would be thrilled to read 1/3rd of the titles listed there. But in addition to science, they have a huge number of subject areas that you can choose from, ranging from general interest and best sellers, current events and…
cortex | May 15, 2008The secret to winning in the NBA playoffs this year is to play on your own court: teams at home are 20-1. At first glance, this makes little sense. It's much easier to understand why football teams (the noise can disrupt play calling) and baseball teams (each field is unique) might benefit from playing at home. But why basketball? The court is always the same and the offense doesn't rely on audibles.
The only tenable hypothesis, it seems to me, is that teams on their home-court have an affective advantage.* The cheering fans make them more likely to be in the proper emotional state of mind.…
kevin z | May 15, 2008They're at it again. Conservation group Greenpeace is accusing the crew of japanese whaling ships of "embezzling" whale meat from the whale "research". CNN reports:
The environmental group said "large-scale embezzlement" was allowed as an "open secret" by the Institute of Cetacean Research in Japan. The body oversees Japanese whale hunts, which are done in the name of "scientific" research.
The institute has previously accused Greenpeace and other organizations of "harassment" for interfering with Japanese whaling voyages.
The environmental group said that 12 members of a one whaling ship…
cortex | May 15, 2008D.T. Max has an absolutely fascinating article in a recent New Yorker on the molecular gastronomist and chef Grant Achatz and his battle with tongue cancer. While Achatz's doctors initially insisted that he get his tongue surgically removed, the chef opted for an experimental treatment of radiation and chemo. The treatment appears to have worked, but it took months before Achatz regained his sense of taste:
When irradiated, taste receptors usually disappear and reappear according to the importance that they had to our hominid ancestors: sweetness goes last and returns first. "Before you can…
gregladen | May 14, 2008
The Hofstra University Library, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Hofstra Cultural Center present a conference:
Darwin's Reach examines the impact of Darwin and Darwinian evolution on science and society in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).
The central theme of this academic conference is an exploration of how Darwin's ideas have revolutionized our understanding of both the living world and human nature.
Papers exploring diverse topics on…
gregladen | May 14, 2008This is big. This is really big.
The Tangled Bank Web Carnival Number One Hundred and Five is at The Beagle Project!!!!!! And it's the Tag Team Edition with Peter McGrath and Karen James!!!
Go there now!
moleculeoftheday | May 14, 2008Adamantane is a sort of triple-fused-cyclohexane structure:
I've previously covered its role as a functional group in a dermatological drug. The neatest thing about adamantane is that if you make polymers of it, you have carbons with four tetrahedral single bonds to other carbons, or a molecular diamond. Since part of why diamond is so unique is because it is in such a geometrically favored, fully valence-satisfied lattice, molecular diamonds are interesting in a lot of the ways diamonds are.
gregladen | May 14, 2008Grand Rounds 4:34 is at Health Business Blog
The Carnival of Home Schooling is here. I don't know why I'm telling you that. They always reject my posts for some reason.
The Carnival of Cinema is requesting submissions: Go here to submit.
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans…
pharyngula | May 14, 2008Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn't notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved's latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.
The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every…
cortex | May 14, 2008One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the way):
Or as Proust put it: "How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory...The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." That bleak view of memory jives with lots of recent work looking at the cellular reconsolidation of…
cortex | May 14, 2008I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern neuroscience into the current debate over New Atheists and religion.
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or…
grrlscientist | May 14, 2008tags: The Death of a Toad, Richard Wilbur, poetry
"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul."
-- Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
I received so many poetry suggestions from you that I decided to continue to publish poetry on my site once per week for you to enjoy. One of my SB colleagues, John Lynch, posts a poem every Friday (here's his poetry archives), so -- because I don't want to conflict with John's poem of the week -- I will post a…
cmcclain | May 14, 2008Hugh Bradner died this week at the age of 92. Bradner was a prominent physicist and professor emeritus at the Scripps. He worked on the Manhattan Project and later designed instrumentation for the fusion bomb. He was one of the first Americans to make a deep dive using SCUBA.
Interestingly, Bradner is probably not best known for is contributions to physics but rather as the scientist that invented the wetsuit. From Wikipedia...
In 1951, UC Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner had the insight that a thin layer of trapped water could act as an insulator. He sent his ideas to Lauriston C. "Larry"…
pharyngula | May 14, 2008There was a brief flurry of surprise a while back that Richard Dawkins acknowledged the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and that it was even possible that aliens might have visited Earth — for some reason, creationists thought this was hilarious, although it's actually a very clear element of scientific thought. We can admit a possibility — Dawkins even admitted the possiblity of a god in The God Delusion — but that does not imply that we think there is evidence for such a thing, and evidence is a necessary prerequisite for an idea to enter the purview of science. It was a little…
gregladen | May 13, 2008Submit your blog posts (deadline: Wednesday) to Tangled Bank now, right now ...
(hint: klick the kitty to get to the Beagle Project Blog, where Tangled Bank will be hosted, and make your submission)
kevin z | May 13, 2008Imagine you can redesign Google's logo. What would it be? Perhaps the two o's can be portholes in a submarine that is exploring the 'l' hydrothermal vent? Google tasked K-12 students nationwide to come up with future Google logo's in the Doodle 4 Google.
Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google's homepage logo. This year we asked U.S. kids to doodle around the theme "What if...?"
Well, the entries are in, and we couldn't be more impressed. We received thousands of wonderful doodles, and choosing 40 finalists for the public vote had to be one of the…
pharyngula | May 13, 2008I am stunned that this t-shirt could be proudly displayed anywhere anymore.
Now get this: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is running an online poll that is asking, "What do you think of the Obama t-shirt?", with two choices: "It's racist" and "it's fine". You might be wondering why the newspaper would even have to ask…but here's the kicker.
"It's fine" is winning.
Do you think maybe we can shift the balance there? Or should we just let this indictment of Georgia's racism stand?
sb admin | May 13, 2008An op-ed in the Baltimore Sun introduced me to a new use for the term "Iron Triangle," this one pertains industries and organizations involved in food aid. In "It's Time to Stop a Tragic Waste," David Kohn writes how hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. food aid is squandered on subsidies to "corporate agribusinesses, shipping companies and large aid agencies." Unlike other wealthy countries, he writes, the U.S.
"insists on buying 99 percent of its food aid from U.S. farmers, at U.S. market prices, and then sending this food overseas."
There are a multitude of reasons why this…