Uncategorized
cmcclain | September 20, 2007A spectacular entrance: The Queen Mary 2 luxury liner made its maiden call to the Port of San Francisco on February 4, 2007. Surrounded by a flotilla of ships, yachts and escorted by a San Francisco fire boat, Queen Mary 2 circled the harbor before docking at Pier 27. Six cameras were used.
jlynch | September 20, 2007John Mashey has informed me that the much bally-hooed paper by Klaus-Martin Schulte (see here and here) will not now be published by Energy & Environment. More details at DeSmogBlog. Feel free to Digg! the DeSmog post.
pharyngula | September 20, 2007My colleague in the philosophy department here at UMM, Tamler Sommers, has a couple of interesting interviews online, one with Frans de Waal and another with Jonathan Haidt. de Waal is good — there's some cool stuff in there about altruism and politics. Haidt … well, again, I find myself with mixed feelings about his work. The "social intuition" model, where people make emotional judgments and then makes intellectual rationalizations after the fact, sounds reasonable to me. But then, he goes on to make these arguments about "four pillars of morality" — harm, fairness, purity, and duty — that…
illconsidered | September 20, 2007Ever found yourself wondering (between gags) as you read some elaborate peice of climate change denialist tripe (debunking here)"Do they really believe all that c**p??"
Well, via Stoat, we can see that chances are not bad that they do not.
For thourough coverage of Lord Monckton be sure to browse Tim Lambert's good work.
grrlscientist | September 20, 2007After spending last night in frustrated despair over my many seemingly insurmountable woes, all of which were exemplified by my truncated blog entry, the IT man at ScienceBlogs, Tim, rescued me by sending a copy of the text this morning so I could republish it for you to read. After several attempts to republish, it has finally reappeared. I hope it stays accessible to all of you after the intense angst it caused me and Tim and anyone else who heard me crying most of the night.
Tim = my hero!
muchas smoochas!
So now I am eating another Cadbury Royal Dark Chocolate bar today, while nursing a…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2007tags: carnival of the vanities, blog carnival
I just learned that the 20 September edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is now available for you to read. This blog carnival is the original one, and it is still going strong. The theme for this blog carnival is to collect the best writing in the blogosphere together into one place, regardless of topic.
sb admin | September 20, 2007Ok, so this is not my first blog post ever, but it is my first post as a member of Science Blogs. Unlike Groucho Marx, who did not wish to join any club which would accept him as a member, I am very excited to be here and very flattered by that invitation.
So some breif introductory messages...
To fellow Sciblings, I would like to say hello and I look forward to getting to know you as people and writers. I am already a fan of Tim Lambert at Deltoid, William Connolley at Stoat and Chris Mooney of The Intersection and I have come across many excellent articles from others here, so I am eager…
petnoyer | September 20, 2007CK tells me that The Scientist magazine is taking an online poll about your favorite life science blogs. The link to place your vote is here.
There's no legitimate way to bribe you for your vote without raising questions of impropriety, so instead I will attempt to coerce you with insidious logic and campaign strategery. Look at it this way...
First of all,Craig's going to be a TV star sometime real soon, so if you vote for us now, you might get invited to his Monterey mansion with an infinity pool overlooking the Pacific.
Next, ask yourself who tips you to the hot new personal submarines.…
grrlscientist | September 19, 2007At least one of my articles (the running article that I published earlier, that took me four hours to write) was destroyed tonight by the ScienceBlogs server when the IT people replaced a burned out memory module. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of the finished piece since I had published it earlier in the day and I stupidly thought it was going to be fine. But NO! It isn't fine, it was destroyed. To say that I am outraged is a complete understatement. Instead of wasting my time sitting in the library and writing all afternoon, I could have gone out drinking and I would have accomplished…
harderkid13 | September 19, 2007One of the requirements for PZ's neurobiology class is reading Carl Zimmer's book Soul Made Flesh. While reading this book, I am continually struck by how religion resists change in science. Why? Science and religion don't even address the same issues in a culture. Robert Boyle seemed to think they should be separated as well. Perhaps that is why he managed to make some significant advances in science and the scientific method. Any thoughts?
grrlscientist | September 19, 2007tags: laughing cat blog carnival, blog carnival
Those of you who cannot get enough of cats will be pleased to learn that there is another cat carnival out there for you to enjoy. This one is new; The Laughing Cat blog carnival just published its second edition. It includes some really amusing links.
thescian | September 19, 2007is the homage paid by ignorance to learning. -E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
grrlscientist | September 19, 2007tags: blog carnivals, encephalon, cognition, learning
Yep, here I am again, asking you to send me submissions for the upcoming issue of the blog carnival, Encephalon, which I am hosting on Monday, 24 September. Of course, I want my efforts to be recognized as the best ever on behalf of this carnival so I am going to ask you all again to send me your submissions! Encephalon is THE carnival that focuses on blog writing about all aspects of neuroscience, from the molecular to the cognitive. So if you want your brainy words to be read by a larger and more diverse audience than you usually enjoy…
thescian | September 19, 2007I will be away from the blog this week. I'll repost some selected posts from the past to keep the blog going. Here's the first.
A gravity well is a hole dug out in space for frogs to live in. But, nobody knows who put the frogs in there. The frogs have been suspicious of Something Beyond for a while, an Outside, an infinite expanse of water with tasty flies and warm rocks to sit on. Every self-respecting frog jumps atleast once a day to see Something Beyond. Unfortunately, even the most athletic ones that jump three feet high cannot get a glimpse out of the well.
Over generations,…
cmcclain | September 18, 2007CNN as an interesting article on plastic.
We now consume around 100 million tons of plastic annually, compared to five million tons in the 1950s when American housewives were just discovering the wonders of Tupperware. To put that into perspective, one ton of plastic represents around 20,000 two-liter bottles of water or 120,000 carrier bags, according to the British Web site Waste Online.
But don't think plastic is evil...
According to PlasticsResource.com, an educational Web site run by the American Chemistry Council, people have benefited from plastics. Using recycled plastic as a…
sb admin | September 18, 2007Yesterday, the University of California at Irvine announced that it was reappointing Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of its new law school. Chemerinsky had been offered the job, but then the University withdrew the offer after the LA Times published a Chemerinsky op-ed critical of the Bush administration. After an outcry from scholars and an in-depth conversation between Chemerinsky and UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake, Chemerinsky was re-offered the position.
This incident has spawned 163 news articles (according to Google News), while another case involving academic freedom gets far less…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2007tags: blog carnivals, Carnival of Family Life
Hey you guys, here's another issue of a blog carnival that is new to me! This is the 17 September issue of The Carnival of Family Life that was just published for you to enjoy. This is a huge blog carnival, so get ready to be there for awhile, poking through the links.
jlynch | September 18, 2007Births
1819 - Leon Foucault, French physicist
1907 - Edwin McMillan, Chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1951 - Benjamin Carson, American neurosurgeon
Deaths
1896 - Hippolyte Fizeau, French physicist
1967 - John Cockcroft, British physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
grrlscientist | September 18, 2007For approximately one year now, every Monday morning, ScienceBlogs has been sending out a weekly digest of what is happening with the various blogs on the site. I have found it to be useful since I no longer have time to read everyone's blog, but I can at least catch the weekly highlights on the site. This digest includes special recognition of awards that any of us have received during the past week, the daily buzz topics, the daily quote, the three highest-traffic blog entries for the previous week and the top referral sites where our traffic is coming from. If you'd like to read the same…