Uncategorized
cortex | October 22, 2007Taking advantage of a new Amazon feature, Steven Johnson does some literary data-mining:
The two stats that I found totally fascinating were "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words," the latter defined as words with three or more syllables -- words like "ameliorate", "protoplasm" or "motherf***er." I've always thought that sentence length is a hugely determining factor in a reader's perception of a given work's complexity, and I spent quite a bit of time in my twenties actively teaching myself to write shorter sentences. So this kind of material is fascinating to me, partially…
tlambert | October 22, 2007Yose Widjaja, one of my students, has written a cool graph visualization system. The easiest way to get a feel for the way it works is to look at a video:
We're looking for comments, new graphs to visualize and so on. He has a blog for the project here, where you can download a demo and learn more about it.
tlambert | October 22, 2007Pinko Punko visited DC and took some pictures, including a couple for us. The American Enterprise Institute:
And the Completely Evil Institute:
grrlscientist | October 22, 2007tags: books carnival, blog carnival
The 21 October issue of the Books Carnival is now available for you to read and enjoy. I am pleased to say that they included two pieces written by me!
cortex | October 22, 2007A nice article on birth order in the latest Time. One of the interesting things about birth order effects is that, although they are statistically subtle, people have been noticing the consistent differences between first and last borns for a long time. It's one of those examples of folk psychology where the folk turn out to be right.
It's awfully hard to resist the charms of someone who can make you laugh, and families abound with stories of last-borns who are the clowns of the brood, able to get their way simply by being funny or outrageous. Birth-order scholars often observe that some of…
cortex | October 22, 2007My book got a very nice little spread in the new Wired. There's a picture of me at an uncomfortable zoom and a short Q&A:
Q: Do you really think that we'll find answers to science's Big Questions in the arts?
A: Virginia Woolf isn't going to help you finish your lab experiment. What she will do is help you ask your questions better. Proust focused on problems that neuroscience itself didn't grapple with until relatively recently - questions of memory that couldn't be crammed into Pavlovian reinforcement: Why are memories so unreliable? Why do they change so often? Why do we remember only…
jlynch | October 22, 2007Good Monday morning to all my readers, especially to the 406 who read the blog via Feedburner. Did you know, that if each and everyone of you donated a mere $10 to our DonorsChoose drive, we’d have raised a total of $5,353 and will have met our challenge goals? That’s less than three cents a day spread over a year, and overall ten dollars well spent.
You know what to do ...
Thank you.
And if you donate (or have done so), please remember to forward your e-mail receipt to scienceblogs@gmail.com to take part in our prize drawing.
And now, your Today in Science.
Events
4004 BC - The universe…
katie glasrud | October 21, 2007... well not today. I learned very little today , but generally, here are some interesting things I've picked up in class:
-If you sever a cat's cerbral cortex from its hindbrain it can still walk on a treadmill (in a harness that compensates for the poor feline's lack of balance). This was the topic of one of PZ's many tangents.
-One way to inhibit the HIV virus is to make a drug that targets a protein our cells make. The key is to identify a protein the virus needs but that we do not. CYC202, a cyclin-dependant kinase inhibitor, may be one such drug.
-"HIV virus" is redundant, but hey, so…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2007Wednesday 24 October will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at The Primate Diaries. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Eric ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
There's an open hosting slot on 5 December and further ones closer to Christmas. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
sb admin | October 20, 2007Since we broke the story of the first "popcorn lung" case in a popcorn consumer, many new readers have visited The Pump Handle. We've been writing about the hazards of diacetyl for years (here and here, for example). If this is your first visit, you might want to know who we are, where our name comes from, and why we are constantly writing about ways the FDA, EPA, OSHA, MSHA, CPSC, and other federal regulatory agencies could better protect our health and environment.
The story of the pump handle dates to the London cholera epidemic of 1854, when John Snow examined maps of cholera cases and…
pharyngula | October 20, 2007Squeeeee! I like totally love Robert Hooke, and now you can read Hooke's notebooks online. The broadband version is phenomenal — it's like leafing through the 17th century.
cortex | October 20, 2007The New Yorker recently had a cool short story by T.C. Boyle about a boy who couldn't experience pain. The story is told from the perspective of a doctor who has trouble believing that the symptoms of the child are real. The mother pleads:
"He's not normal, doctor. He doesn't feel pain the way others do. Look here"--and she lifted the child's right leg as if it weren't even attached to him, rolling up his miniature trousers to show me a dark raised scar the size of an adult's spread hand--"do you see this? This is where that filthy pit bull Isabel Briceño keeps came through the fence and bit…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2007Some of you may have noticed that there is another award on my left sideboard, the Intellectual Blogger Award. Part of the requirements for receiving this award is that the award recipient (me, in this case) must choose five blogs that make her think. I decided that I would choose blogs that deserve more exposure to the public in my opinion, instead of choosing those blogs that have been noticed and awarded the Intellectual Blogger Award several times already. Interestingly, all of the blogs that fulfilled these criteria are written by women. So I am proud to list these blog writers as my…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2007tags: Friday Ark, blog carnival
The 161st edition of the Friday Ark is now available. This blog carnival focuses on linking to images of animals. Some of those images have stories associated with them, but the main emphasis is the image itself.
cortex | October 19, 2007America is getting good at exporting our diseases. Everybody already talks about obesity and the way American eating habits are slowly fattening up the rest of the world. But that's not the only disease we are sending abroad. Here's VSL*:
Americans are on pretty chummy terms with depression, chatting almost as easily about therapists and Paxil and Lexapro as we would about sports scores and the weather. But in Japan -- where Buddhism has encouraged the acceptance of sadness and warns against the pursuit of "happiness" -- the concept of depression is just now beginning to permeate public…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2007tags: grammar, punctuation, online quiz
You Scored an A
You got 10/10 questions correct.
It's pretty obvious that you don't make basic grammatical errors.
If anything, you're annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs.
As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they're only human.
And it's humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.
The It's Its There Their They're Quiz
How did you score? And how did the authors of this quiz guess that basic punctuation and grammar mistakes on blogs can drive me to distraction?
cmcclain | October 19, 2007Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sigillata has a nice write up about Therapeutic Natural Products from the Sea. The ocean fauna is the potential host to several "sources of compounds that can be used as therapeutic agents." These include drugs to treat some cancers and leukemias. The better news is that most of these drugs, after originally being isolated from marine animals, are now derived synthetically removing the need to further harvest. It is really a win-win...win situation. Low impact to marine systems, cures for diseases, and one hell of reason to conserve ocean environments.
petnoyer | October 19, 2007
Industrial fishing operations take most of the blame for collateral impacts to sea-turtle populations, but new research shows that small-scale fisheries--operated by hand from little open boats --can kill as many critically endangered loggerhead sea turtles as industrial scale fisheries. A pioneering case study conducted on small-scale fisheries at Baja California Sur, Mexico found that small scale artisinal fisheries in Baja California Sur can kill 1000 sea turtles per year, and possibly many more.
Local fishermen ply these waters for halibut and other bottom fish using gillnets and strings…