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tlambert | October 16, 2007John Mashey offered some good advice in a comment on my post on the War on Gore. I'm following Michael Tobis' example and boosting it from comments.
Editorial and News
Editorial and news really are often quite separate, with the Wall Street Journal as an extreme case. I get it for the numerous excellent articles and rarely look at the Op-ed section, except that every once in a while, they actually say something rational. I once discussed the separation with a Wall Street Journal reporter, who started by saying the Editorial gang were "evil neocon dinosaurs," then moved to less-unrepeatable…
cmcclain | October 16, 2007For much of Cindy Lee Van Dover's professional life, she has been a pioneer...In 1990, she became the first woman with a license to pilot an Alvin...She was named the first woman to direct the Duke University Marine Laboratory here.
You can read the rest of the interview over at The New York Times.
cortex | October 16, 2007So my book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It might even be in your local bookstore. I'll do my best not to turn this blog into an orgy of self-promotion, but feel free to check out some of the early blurbs (from Oliver Sacks, Joe Ledoux, Antonio Damasio and others) and nice reviews. And stay tuned for news about the book tour, which begins in November...
grrlscientist | October 15, 2007tags: Oekologie, blog carnival
The tenth edition of the new blog carnival, Oekologie, is now available for your reading pleasure. There's lots more there to read than my material, so go over there and take a peek.
grrlscientist | October 15, 2007tags: All Women Blogging, blog carnival
The most recent issue of the All Women Blogging carnival is now available. This particular blog carnival is huge so be ready to spend a fair amount of time reading their many many links.
sb admin | October 15, 2007In an editorial in the October 12th issue of Science, former Assistant Surgeon General Fitzhugh Mullan highlights the challenges inherent in the position of Surgeon General. Mullan recounts a July hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which featured testimony from former Surgeons Generals from the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations: Drs. C. Everett Koop, David Satcher, and Richard Carmona.Â
In his opening statement, Chairman Henry Waxman noted that the hearing was one in a series asking âwhy federal agencies that were once admired as the finest in the…
jlynch | October 14, 2007Events
1951 - Mexican chemist Luis E. Miramontes synthesizes the first oral contraceptive
1997 - The Cassini probe launches from Cape Canaveral on its way to Saturn.
2001 - NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter’s moon Io.
Births
1608 - Evangelista Torricelli, Italian physicist
1829 - Asaph Hall, American astronomer
1909 - Jesse Leonard Greenstein, American astronomer
1940 - Peter Doherty, Australian immunologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1980 - Mikhail Lavrentyev, Russian physicist and mathematician
2000 - Konrad Emil Bloch, German-born biochemist and Nobel…
petnoyer | October 14, 2007We don't mention it often, but Craig and I publish regularly outside Deep Sea News, in the public arena of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Craig authors ~3 scientific journal articles per year since 2004. I author ~2/yr. The last two years were above average for both of us. This is amazing to me, because we spend so much time writing for DSN. Either our cups runneth over, or the glacial pace of scientific publishing obscures the impact of our extra-curricular reporting activities here at DSN. I tell you this so you know we are contributors to the field, not only journalists. We make the…
tlambert | October 13, 2007ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts is competing for a $10,000 college blogging scholarship. She has a great blog called Retrospectacle. The scholarship winner is decided by votes, so go here and vote for Shelley!.
cortex | October 13, 2007The correlation is pretty clear: the older we get, the happier we become.
Only in the last decade have researchers begun to measure happiness across the life span and, in doing so, try to understand why older people tend to be so content.
The explanation doesn't appear to be biological -- some chemical in the brain that mellows us just when all those plump neurons needed for thinking and memory are shriveling up. Rather, most scientists now think that experience and the mere passage of time gradually motivate people to approach life differently. The blazing-to-freezing range of emotions…
jlynch | October 12, 2007On a day when Al Gore and the IPCC won a Nobel Prize for their work on the climate, I just want to quickly highlight one of the projects in our DonorsChoose challenge. This one is from a teacher in Indiana who wants to teach their 25 second-grade students about the weather and states of matter. The school is 87% low income (and thus high poverty). The challenge needs a further $419 as I type, so please consider donating.
grrlscientist | October 12, 2007tags: friday ark, animal photographs, blog carnival
Friday Ark, Friday Ark, it's time for this week's Friday Ark, you guys! This morning, the 160th edition of the Friday Ark was published, all so you can ease your way into the weekend by looking at cute pictures of fuzzy kittens, slobbery puppies and stunning birds.
grrlscientist | October 12, 2007For those of you who have been in grad school, or who know someone in grad school, you are acutely aware of the extreme financial burden this represents. In fact, unlike professional students, grad students often live in relative poverty for the next ten years after they are awarded their degrees because they are struggling to pay off their debts on a postdoc's salary. Additionally, because postdocs and young professors lack job security until they are awarded tenure, these adult scientists have to resort to a variety of financial coping mechanisms often through their mid-30s and even their…
cmcclain | October 12, 2007If you haven't heard our Seed overlords are offering $15,000 in matching funds. Seed is also offering some sweet prizes to donors which you can enter to win:
1 fresh, new iPod nano
21 "Seed Hearts Threadless" tee shirts (design here )
21 ScienceBlogs mugs
21 subscriptions to Seed magazine
9 copies of "The Best American Science Writing 2007"
Sweet indeed! Interested? Just forward your email reciept from DonorsChoose to scienceblogs@gmail.com.
There well be three prize drawings, each on a Tuesday: Tuesday the 15th, Tuesday the 22nd, and Tuesday the 29th (3 Tees, 7 mug, 7 subscriptions,…
cmcclain | October 11, 2007
Image credit: © 2003 MBARI. Stellamedusa ventana is a recently described species of jelly, the size of softball, from the deep sea. The bumps on the bell and arms are loaded with stinging cells (pneumatacysts) that can capture and hold on to prey up to 5 cm (2 inches) across.
signout | October 11, 2007Whoops. Signout is so severely mellowed out that she scheduled her vacation posts all wrong. Oh well--just means fewer krazy kommenters to "huh?" at on her return.
As reparation, she submits this sweet memory of cluelessness from the archives, then hastily returns to picking sand out from between her toes. She promises to resume writing--and in the first person, no less!--next week.
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"Is someone down?" asked T., who was driving. We were on our way back from an intern retreat day in the mountains, and while stopped at a traffic light, we…
grrlscientist | October 11, 2007Some days, I wish I was a lesbian. Yesterday evening was one of those days, in fact.
So my little story started a few nights ago when I was out alone (as always), drinking a beer and checking email at a local pub when some guy starts talking to me.
Um, okay, whatever.
I answered him as briefly as possible and then tried to ignore him. Nonetheless (and unfortunately for me), it took him a little while, like maybe half an hour, but all of a sudden, he decides he is in love with me. Nevermind that he doesn't know anything about me, except that I am trying to ignore him, and nevermind that I…
cortex | October 11, 2007Here's Vaughan on a neat grammatical shortcut:
Whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the 'fuck test'.
Simply insert the word 'fucking' into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the 'fucking' is the stressed syllable.
For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I've found so far.
On a…
jlynch | October 11, 2007It goes something like this ...
Reasoning involves using the laws of logic.
Laws of logic are God's standard for thinking.
The atheist's view cannot be rational because he uses things (laws of logic) that cannot exist according to his profession.
I have made you dumber by having you read this. Wow.