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razib | April 19, 2008Massimo Pigliucci's wedding profiled in The New York Times... (did a double-take when I saw that on the front page...but it's for real)
mixingmemory | April 19, 2008I can't seem to stop listening to Music from the Big Pink, so now you have to listen to it too:
grrlscientist | April 19, 2008tags: Three Questions, Ralph Black, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).
My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I will start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by Dave, a friend and long-time reader of mine, who writes that this poem was written by "a great modern poet…
gregladen | April 18, 2008... the blog carnival, is HERE at Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale
kevin z | April 18, 2008Banksy is a prolific street graffiti artist from England who recently made the cover of Science magazine. His work often points out life's ironies and carries a political or societal message. For more from Banksy, click here. More of his art can be seen in the Flickr pool.
More under the fold...
esiegel | April 18, 2008Bret Underwood, a friend of mine from my time in Madison, WI, saw my post on String Theory, and took issue with my statement that it wasn't testable. I'm still standing behind what I said, but let's address what Bret has to say.
I donât understand your argument above for why string theory is untestable. In fact, it seems to me you just outlined the best possible case for string theory! What you said above is that if I have a string theory construction of a phenomenon (say, the Standard Model or Inflation), which uses a set of parameters X, and makes some predictions, then I can find another…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2008tags: Design, Robert Frost, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).
My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I will start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by another reader of mine, who said it has always been one of his favorites.
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and…
mixingmemory | April 18, 2008There's a pretty good review of the literature on repression, a central concept in the pyschoanalytic tradition, and an important one in many court cases these days, in the current issue of The Review of General Psychology (via Mind Hacks). If you have a subscription, or access to a library with one, you can read the article here. Here's the abstract:
Does Repression Exist? Memory, Pathogenic, Unconscious and Clinical Evidence, Yacov Rofé
The current dispute regarding the existence of repression has mainly focused on whether people remember or forget trauma. Repression, however, is a…
petnoyer | April 18, 2008
Lophelia pertusa is a framework building scleractinian coral found between 200 - 1000m in the Gulf of Mexico and around the world. Suspension feeding galatheoid crabs are typically associated with Lophelia thickets and bioherms. Their chelipeds are outstretched to capture particulate organic matter from the water column. Notice the marine snow 'falling' in the background. The coral framework provides habitat to numerous associated species of fish and invertebrates. Special thanks to Dr. Ian MacDonald from TAMU-CC for contributing the picture.
Tune in for Coral Week April 27- May 3 at Deep…
kevin z | April 17, 2008Guess who is the Encyclopedia of Life's biodiversity of the week?? The cuttlefish!!
Diver: "awww wookit da purdy wittle squidy!"
Cuttlefish: "Who you calling a squid punk? Why you backing off? I thought you might want to "cuttle" a bit... thats what I thought..."
Hat tip to Michael Barton, FCD.
gregladen | April 17, 2008The I and the Bird #73: The Other Diary of Samuel Pepys web carnival is up at A Snail's Eye View
cortex | April 17, 2008Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race:
If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased.
So you're madder than ever at the other candidate. You may even be more likely to vote for John McCain if your candidate loses.
That prediction is based on psychological research that helps to explain the recriminations between…
cortex | April 17, 2008One of the odd things about blogs, at least for me, is that they encourage a really informal and oddly intimate relationship between the writer and reader. I feel like I really know my favorite bloggers, in a way that I would never presume to know my favorite novelists or newspaper columnists or magazine writers. Partly, I imagine, it's the informal voice of the blogosphere, and partly it's the enticing mix of idiosyncratic personal information and opinionated commentary that defines the bloggy format. A blog, at least for me, is the writing genre that most closely approximates a friendly…
grrlscientist | April 17, 2008tags: Spring, Thomas Wolfe, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).
My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I will start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by "The Ridger", a long-time reader who was inspired by yesterday's photoessay (the images I snapped for that were taken…
esiegel | April 16, 2008Ahh, stars. Giant furnaces of nuclear fusion. Doing the stuff our Sun does, burning hydrogen fuel into helium (among other things) and emitting lots of visible light and energy in the process.
But when we take a look at brown dwarfs, they aren't like normal (i.e., main sequence) stars like our Sun. Instead of burning hydrogen into helium for their fuel, brown dwarfs don't generate enough pressure to make that happen; they can only burn hydrogen into deuterium.
Let's go over what the differences here are. A hydrogen nucleus is just a proton, with a mass of 938.272 MeV/c2. (I use these units…
grrlscientist | April 16, 2008tags: free subscription, American Chemistry
Did you know that you can get a subscription to the magazine, American Chemistry, for free?
kevin z | April 16, 2008Teuthologist Dr. Steve O'Shea and Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid. Photo credit: Kathrin Bolstad
Monster squid hunter extraordinaire Dr. Steve O'Shea will be dissecting giant and colossal squids and it will be webcasted LIVE from Te Papa Museum in New Zealand. It will be an event-filled week as Dr. O'Shea and his squidaliscious team of crack experts unlock the mysteries of deep sea squids, starting with the thawing!
"Thawing the frozen squid is the first challenge. There have been many suggestions (inlcuding 462 suggestions from the public!) about how to carry out this process…
cmcclain | April 16, 2008
The good news is...more ocean!
Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, UK, says a new, more accurate reconstruction of sea levels over the past 2000 years suggests that the prediction of a an 18-59 centimetre rise by 2100 made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is wildly inaccurate. Meeting at European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna, Austria, this week, researchers including Jevrejeva said in a statement that the pace at which sea levels are rising is accelerating. They predict they will be 0.8-1.5 metres higher by next century.
I managed to find…
petnoyer | April 16, 2008Did you know that Evel Kneivel was an "Ecodaredevil" before he started jumping cars and canyons? He hitch hiked from Butte, Montana to Washington, D.C. in the cold of winter to help save elk from slaughter in Yellowstone Park.
That's one reason J Nichols dreamed up the Ecodaredevil award for his Earth Day presentation at Duke University in Durham, NC at 6pm in the Bryan Center on April 22.
Miss Krysten Knievel, daughter of acting daredevil Robbie Kneivel, will receive the first inaugural "Ecadaredevil" award following what promises to be an inspired lecture and presentation. Check out J's…