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grrlscientist | February 2, 2008tags: blog carnivals, history
The 61st edition of the History Carnival is now available for you to read and enjoy. This is a big carnival, and yet they saw fit to include a piece that I wrote (yeah, me!) so go there to learn lots of new and interesting things.
kevin z | February 2, 2008If you are regular reader to Deep Sea News, you may be used to the strangeness that is the deep ocean. In fact, you may be immune to oddity by now, half expecting quirkiness in place of something resembling the norm. You, dear reader, may even not think twice about the bizarre hydrothermal vents that line the mid-ocean ridges and back-arc basins of our deep sea. Forget everything you learned about hydrothermal vents. Sure, water seeps down into cracks in the ocean floor, gets heated when it comes into contact with superheated rocks above a magma chamber, rises up through fissures carrying…
grrlscientist | February 2, 2008I just thought I'd take this opportunity to let you all know that I have not been kidnapped by space aliens nor by the infamous "kidney harvesters", that I did survive my birdday. Apparently, I have a few more friends here in NYC than I thought, and they all banded together to mercifully ensure that I would relegate my birdday celebration into the foggy corners of oblivion.
According to my memories, the evening started out well enough, but it becomes progressively foggier. I do (vaguely) remember that I had fun, but according to several of my friends' stories, I apparently had a very VERY…
stoat | February 2, 2008That was my starting point, anyway. And I'll aim to get back to it soonish. But I got sidetracked by the emission theory of vision, an idea so stupid that only a greek philosopher could possibly have thought it up, much less believed it.
I'd really like to understand whether anyone actualy believed this nonsense, or if it was just a metaphor. The wiki article is sourceless, and poking around the net didn't really throw up much of use. Google books provided me with some of Johanssen on "Aristotle on the sense organs", which makes it clear by quotation that Empedocles thought Aphrodite had made…
jlynch | February 2, 2008Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!
So began a work published today in 1922 in Paris on the fortieth birthday of its author. The work is, of course, Ulysses, and the author, James Joyce. The book ends with a eight-sentence, unpunctuated…
cortex | February 2, 2008This is from Paul Bloom's review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book on the uses and abuses of experimental philosophy:
Near the end of the book, Appiah says that when he tells a stranger on a plane that he is a philosopher, he often gets the question, "So, what's your philosophy?" He answers, "My philosophy is that everything is more complicated than you thought."
gregladen | February 1, 2008
Sir Ian Wilmut earned his knighthood for his major role in cloning a sheep (Dolly). (In the old days, you had to duel kill infidels and stuff to earn a knighthood, but whatever...). There is now a move, possibly quite justified, asking Queen Elizabeth II to take away the honor.
The petition originates from fromer employees of the institute where the cloning was carried out, the Roslin Institute of Scotland. Some time last year, Wilmut admitted that his colleague, Keith Campbell, played a much greater role in the cloning experiment than he did. The petition includes this language:
"The…
cmcclain | February 1, 2008A specially set-up and cleverly named company, CrabCo began an "experimental expedition" to test the feasibility of commercially harvesting two deep water crabs, the king crab and the red, or chaceon, crab. The aptly-named trawler Perseverance has pursuing these crabs for the past five days. But things did not go well.
We'd have liked to have brought in 1.5 tonnes as that's what we need [to make it viable]. However, after laying some 240 pots, on long-lines of 70 pots to a line over the past week in rough seas, the return was just 150kgs
gregladen | February 1, 2008A paper just out in Genomics presents a very thorough study of cat genetics. Cat as is in kitty cat. The findings are expected, yet surprising in a few areas. The conclusion the authors draw about cat origins is very weak, in my view, but the information this study provides about cat breed genetics is excellent and will be of value to cats around the world.
Wild cats (Felis silvestris) are or were found in a roughly continuous distribution across much of Africa (not restricted only to savannas, as is often stated), the Middle East, and Europe, and possibly disjunct in Southeast Asia (…
cortex | February 1, 2008This prank reminds me of that Stanley Milgram experiment where people stopped on busy New York City sidewalks and looked up. When only one person was stopped, about 4 percent of pedestrians joined the man and looked at whatever he was looking at. But as Milgram increased the crowd size, more and more people stopped and stared. In other words, it was a positive feedback loop. A bigger crowd staring at the sky led to even bigger crowds. And everybody was looking at nothing.* Such is the power of "social validation".
*I like to pretend that this psychological phenomenon explains American Idol.…
cmcclain | January 31, 2008Here's a wonderful clip of Nancy Knowlton discussing her coral research in the tropics. Nancy is one of the world's premier marine biologist with an accomplished scientific career. Courtesy of Scripps Oceanography, UC San Diego, "Endangered Oceans" Explorations DVD, Volume 10 No. 3
cmcclain | January 31, 2008Recently scored a used copy of a book by Jacques Cousteau. Inside its covers lies a wonderful narrative and the pictures I present for this Friday's Pictures. As a fan of both Cousteau and the Life Aquatic, I can begin to see Anderson's inspiration.
grrlscientist | January 31, 2008
Orphaned image.
Happy birdday to me.
I thought that I'd take myself out for a celebratory drink tonight, so here I am, lighting fires in my beer. It's a good thing I am not drinking scotch: I might burn the place down doing this. Well, there is still time to address this oversight, I suppose.
cortex | January 31, 2008Baudelaire famously described his memory as "a tomb, a corpse filled Potter's field/a pyramid where the dead lie down by scores/I am a graveyard that the moon abhors." Well, the neural reality of the brain suggests that his poetic metaphors weren't such exaggerations. That, at least, is the implication of a bizarre new finding:
Surgeons made this accidental discovery while a 50-year-old-male patient was undergoing "deep brain stimulation," as part of an experimental treatment for obesity.
With the patient under local anesthesia, but fully awake, surgeons traveled into the deepest recesses of…
cortex | January 31, 2008One of the questions I get asked most often when discussing my book is what artists working today are creating work that's relevant to the discourse of science. My stock answer is to mutter something inarticulate about Richard Powers. But now I've got someone new to talk about: Olafur Eliasson.
Until I saw Eliasson's retrospective at SFMOMA, I was really only familiar with his big Tate Modern installation, The Weather Project:
But my favorite pieces at SFMOMA were of a much more intimate scale. As Eliasson puts it, they are about "seeing yourself seeing". I'd describe the work, but it can'…
cortex | January 31, 2008I just got back from a week long trip to California. (You can hear me talking about Proust on KQED here.) The weather was awful - rain and more rain - but I still got glimpses of what I love so much about the Golden State. Consider the Hollywood Farmer's Market. It's a weekly gathering of a few dozen farmers, tamale stands and organic cheese makers. The crowd is an eclectic mix of dreads and Prada, birkenstocks and Tod loafers. But I can summarize my fondness for the place with a single conversation I had with a chicken farmer who sells eggs:
Me: Are these eggs cage free?
Farmer: Yes. The…
petnoyer | January 31, 2008 The fourth season of LOST finally begins tonight on ABC. Hoo-rah!
Deep-sea fans weathered all sorts of abuses last season after John Locke blew up the Others' submarine "Galaga", and Mikhail used a hand grenade to flood the Looking Glass. The Looking Glass is an underwater jamming station equipped with a "moon pool" staffed by two tough chicks willing to throw down for the facts.
We figured the best we can do here at DSN to enhance your entertainment tonight is to give you a few facts about our favorite plot drivers- submarines and moon pools.
The "Galaga" looks like a shallow water…
jlynch | January 30, 2008Just a brief notice that my ASU colleague Quentin Wheeler has named a species of whirligig beetle after Roy Orbison. Orectochilus orbisonorum, which resides in India "is unique among Indian Gyrinidae and Orectochilus lacordaire, in general, since the ventral surfaces are white as the result of clear areas of cuticle allowing internal tissues to be visible." The description is to appear in Zootaxa. Quentin, director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, in the past has discovered 65 new species of slime-mold beetle of the genus Agathidium, with one…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2008tags: Carnival of the Liberals, blog carnivals
The latest edition of the Carnival of the Liberals is now available for your reading pleasure. I've been sending them regular submissions for the past six weeks, and they -- finally -- included one, so you have to reward them by going over there and reading their linked material.