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cortex | April 16, 2008For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the richest Americans were only slightly happier than the American public as a whole; in an even more famous study, done in 1978, a group of researchers determined that 22 lottery winners were no happier than a control group. This is commonly referred to as the Easterlin paradox, after the economist Richard Easterlin who first proposed it in 1974.
But new evidence suggests that the…
grrlscientist | April 16, 2008tags: The Rabbit, Mary Oliver, 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 Tina, a fellow ornithologist who studied Florida scrub-jays. Tina writes; "I saw the poem project and had to…
petnoyer | April 15, 2008Mark your calendars for the last few days of April because the tentacles are gonna hit the fan here and across the blogosphere from April 27 to May 2 when Deep Sea News asks readers "how deep is your love" for corals. This is 2008, the International Year of the Reef! But we're gonna try to squeeze it all into one big Coral Week between April and May, kinda like an online tropical vacation from work ... or something.
You may have noticed we celebrated International Polar Year just last month. Yes, it's true, it's other years, too... the Year of the Rat, the Year of Sanitation, its all…
esiegel | April 15, 2008I was doing a little research into the history of telescopes, and it was about a century ago that they finally realized how much more potential light-gathering power reflecting telescopes had as compared to the older refracting telescopes. On Mt. Wilson in California, astronomer George Ellery Hale and optician George Willis Ritchey (back then everybody was named George -- look it up!) were embarking on a program to build large reflecting telescopes as the wave-of-the-future of Astronomy.
But even before this telescope was operational, Hale and Ritchey were thinking of bigger and bigger…
gregladen | April 15, 2008The April 15, 2008 edition of Books Carnival is at The Book's Den.
The "To Hell With Expelled Blog Carnival!" will be held at Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale. Please send your entries by April 17th.
kevin z | April 15, 2008According to CNN.com, the Nisshin Maru, a japanese whaling ship, returned from the "field season" with only half its intended sample size for its scientific whaling.
"Japan's top whaling ship returned to port Tuesday, leading a fleet that killed just 55 percent of its season target of 1,000 whales amid violent protests in the Antarctic.
The Nisshin Maru made a special stop in Tokyo so the coast guard could inspect it for possible damage sustained during clashes in which animal rights activists tossed containers of rancid acid at the whalers.
The fleet killed 551 minke whales this season, far…
chrisdrudge | April 15, 2008Hi all. I am hereby extending the deadline on my banner contest to the end of this week (April 18). This will hopefully coincide with an appreciable rise in posting frequency. I thank you for your patience on this matter.
cortex | April 15, 2008It's a joke I've heard many times from neuroscientists who use monkeys in their research: "There are all these regulations about the treatment of primates, but there are no regulations governing the treatment of post-docs". (Of course, we don't record from neurons in the post-doc brain, or at least I hope we don't.) But the joke captures something important about the use of primates for biomedical research in most developed nations, which is that they get treated, in most cases, rather well. Obviously, they're still research subjects, which sucks. But they're generally kept in enriched…
grrlscientist | April 15, 2008tags: The Observatory Ode, John Frederick Nims, 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 can 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 a reader from Ireland, Gerry, who writes; "You were looking for science poetry and I had to send…
grrlscientist | April 15, 2008I have been thinking about a book review that I published yesterday about David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood. In short, my review of that particular book was positive, but not effusive. Because I focused on errors/ambiguous wordings and on what I think that book lacked, it is possible that I came across as being too harsh. As a result, I'd like to know if I should use an unambiguous rating system, such as something like Amazon's five star system, to help you quickly assess what I think of the book?
I like to publish positive book reviews on my blog, and generally refuse to even finish…
pharyngula | April 15, 2008I don't usually think of Australians as particularly prudish — brash and outspoken are more common stereotypes — so this story about the Anglican Church Grammar School banning gay partners at their dances seems a little out of character. I know we've got some Australian commenters, so I expect they'll correct my misunderstanding and explain that their compatriots are all fussy little schoolmarms who faint at the slightest whiff of ribaldry.
Anyway, the headmaster tries hard to justify the decision. There are "protocols and decorums," he says. Another school follows suit; they want to maintain…
cortex | April 15, 2008Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made?
The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind and brain have made tremendous progress. That is, of course, the correct answer. When you think that, one hundred years ago, Ramon y Cajal had just published his "speculative cavort" laying out the neuron doctrine, or that we still had no effective treatments for any mental disorders (the frontal lobotomy would become popular a few…
sb admin | April 15, 2008Most of us probably take our tap water for granted, but recent events remind us that we shouldnât. Salmonella contamination of the water supply in Alamosa, Colorado sickened over 300 people and left residents avoiding showers and drinking bottled water for a week. Abel Pharmboy explains that the city was one of the few that didnât have a water chlorination program â but thatâs changed now, and the episode reminds us that trace amounts of chlorinated acid byproducts in the water seem less alarming when compared to potentially fatal bacterial illness.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, manure and…
kevin z | April 15, 2008As part of Earth Day festivities next week, I will be a guest with Karen of the Beagle Project and Rick of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunsets on Jason's Cephalopodcast. This will part of a 24-hour webcastathon for Earth Day. Jason's theme for his segment is "The Other 71%" in reference to the amount Earth's surface covered by oceans.
There will also be opportunities to participate in the dialog through chat rooms while the webcast is live streaming, so I encourage everyone to tune in at 10pm GMT (6pm Eastern US time) and join the conversation! There will be more details on how to…
kevin z | April 15, 2008And blik surface graphics has them! Nothing says sweet dreams like an octopus dragging you kids teddy bear to the ocean depths.
Hat tip to Miriam.
grrlscientist | April 14, 2008
I have bad news and I have .. more bad news ...
Even though I am unemployed and have mounting debts for medical bills that I can't possibly afford, I learned today that I owe income taxes, according to the misnamed online tax program, FreeTaxUSA.com (which isn't free at all). In worlds other than this one where things are a little fairer, owing taxes would normally mean that I earned enough money in 2007 that I can afford to share a little with others instead of purchasing a plasma screen television, but unfortunately, this is not the case.
How the @#!*& did this happen? I am paid a…