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tqa | July 2, 2007
It's amazing what a difference a few short years can make. Once upon a time, many prominent Republicans believed that perjury was a crime so heinous as to warrant throwing the president out of office. Today, however, we find that many of these same characters believe that any sort of jail sentence is far too harsh a punishment for that very same crime.
There's likely to be stiff competition among leading Republicans for the "biggest tool in the drawer" award over the next news cycle or two, and the final winner probably won't be clear until after the Sunday morning shows are over. At the…
moleculeoftheday | July 2, 2007There really isn't that much to this one, but I've always loved the name, and it's really easy to make: chalcone.
You can actually make chalcones with no solvent at all by just mixing aldehyde, ketone, and base in a mortar and pestle. Like Ritz mock apple pie, it's fun to try at least once, even if you don't have any use for it.
tqa | July 2, 2007
When an anti-evolutionist attempts to publicly "explain" a scientific paper, it usually signals two things: you should read the paper for yourself, and you should not be surprised to find that the creationist "explanation" misrepresents what the paper really says. A new blog post by Paul Nelson is no exception. Nelson, descending from the (relative) intellectual heights of the Discovery Institute to join the crowd at Dembski's Whine Cellar, tells his readers that scientists did not grasp the true point of a 1975 paper because they did not read it all the way through.
The paper in question…
cmcclain | July 2, 2007When we picture monsters from the deep, most envision colossal sea beasts ready to drag the unsuspecting sailor to abyss. In actuality the sea beasts are at the other end of the size spectrum. Those viscous, nasty bacteria that line your digestive tract that could send you to your grave originated from deep-sea bacteria. A Japanese group report in PNAS that the two groups of bacteria share several genes allowing both to survive inhospitable habitats allowing them to flourish from temperatures between 39-158 degrees Fahrenheit.
cmcclain | July 2, 2007 More on the continuing saga that surrounds the Black Swan reported at the New Straits Times. This is going to get pretty confusing so I will provide it as sequential list time series.
Volvo launches a media spectacle that has the public looking for a sunken treasure as tie in to the festering heap of movie titled Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
Volvo hires Odyssey Marine Exploration to scout sites around Mediterranean to drop the Volvo's treasure chest.
During the scouting expeditions, Odyssey stumbles upon a ship codename the Black Swan in international waters.
Separately,…
denialism | July 2, 2007I officially retract my question to Luskin as it has been answered. When I last asked my question of Luskin in regards to their assertion that the denial of tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez was a matter of "academic freedom", I really wanted an answer to it. My question was:
Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that it is never acceptable to discriminate against a professor in a tenure decision based on their ideas?
Now, Tara shows me the answer to my question in her post Why deny only one part of science? IDists branch out into AIDS denial.
I think my question is…
cmcclain | July 2, 2007The French have discovered that UV radiation penetrates up to 100m deep in the waters of the southeast Pacific Ocean. They propose this might explain why surface waters in this region are poor in nutrients and a relative biological desert. As you may recall from your science classes UV degrades organic compounds including DNA. The research appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
integrityofscience | June 30, 2007
It's been a while since we checked in with Flamy McGassy, but here's a toon from a couple months ago. Despite the Supreme Court ruling on C02, Flamy is unabashed in this episode: "Feeling the Heat."
The takeaway message is that despite the Court's intervention, enemies of science-based decisionmaking still lurk in the EPA. However, it is admittedly dated: the two officials featured in this cartoon Willia "Kids <3 Lead" Wehrum and Alex "Kids <3 Rocket Fuel" Beehler had their nominations withdrawn the week after this cartoon originally ran in April. Connection? Probably not.
Still,…
tqa | June 29, 2007
Once again, the unholy wars have broken out here at Scienceblogs. The latest skirmish got started when Matt Nisbet put up an article titled "ATHEISM IS NOT A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE." In this article, Nisbet claims that atheists don't face a civil rights struggle, but merely "a public image problem." Many of the comments left over there have argued with that basic point, as have PZ, Jason Rosenhouse, Mark Hoofnagle, and other Sciencebloggers. Personally, I think Nisbet is right on this one - but only if the term "civil rights" is defined so narrowly that it loses most of its meaning.
There is…
grrlscientist | June 29, 2007tags: blog carnival, writing
The 247th issue of Carnival of the Vanities is now available for your reading pleasure. This blog carnival focuses on the very best writing published recently on a blog, regardless of topic. I am pleased to report that they selected a submission from me to be included in their list.
grrlscientist | June 29, 2007tags: oceanography, plastic bathtub toys, duckies
Have you seen one of these duckies? (May be bleached white by now).
If so, please report your find to researcher, Curtis Ebbesmeyer.
Image: Simon de Bruxelles.
If you live in Great Britain, you could earn a £50 (US$100) reward if you find a plastic duck on the seashore during your upcoming holidays.
It turns out that a flotilla of thousands of yellow ducks, green frogs, blue turtles and red beavers (all of which are bleached white by now), each branded with the logo "The First Years", are headed your way after bobbing around the Pacific,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2007
This is my healthcare plan. It is much better than your stinky French one
(from here)
In a previous post, I wondered why we don't just steal someone else's healthcare system instead of inventing some untried and untested system. In TNR, Jonathan Cohn asks the same question (italics mine):
A closer model for the United States would be France, which doesn't have that problem and which--thankfully--also merits considerable screen time in Moore's movie. As Paul Dutton explains in a new book called Differential Diagnoses, the French prize individual liberty, so they created an insurance system…
grrlscientist | June 29, 2007tags: vocabulary, online quiz
I did well on this quiz -- how about you? How did you score?
Your Vocabulary Score: A
Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!
You must be quite an erudite person.
How's Your Vocabulary?
cmcclain | June 28, 2007The Setting of the Sun Over the Pacific Ocean and a Towering Thundercloud, July 21, 2003
As Seen From the International Space Station (Expedition 7)
clock | June 28, 2007I have got to see this movie! Is it coming to the USA any time soon? Or Netflix?
Thanks Peggy...I won't be able to sleep tonight, scared of the bleating woolly terror!
mixingmemory | June 28, 2007I kid you not:
Halpern, D.F., & Wai, J. (2007). The world of competitive Scrabble: Novice and expert differences in visuospatial and verbal vbilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(2), 79-94.
Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied "always," with the rest split between "sometimes" and "rarely or never." Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings, suggesting that expertise develops with…
cmcclain | June 28, 2007In the whirlwind that is my life this summer, I have not been able read or review The Silent Deep. For a general primer on the deep sea, I often reach for and recommend Gage and Tyler's Deep-Sea Biology. Since 1992 it has been a bible for our field. However, in the last 15 years major advancements in deep-sea sciences have occurred. Koslow's book provides somewhat of an update to Deep-Sea Biology but also heads in new direction
The book is divided into three sections, 1. Early History of Deep-Sea Exploration, 2. The Ecology of the Deep Sea, and 3. The Human Footprint Across the Deep…
tqa | June 28, 2007
Both of this blog's regular readers have probably noticed by now that the blog hasn't been written regularly for a few weeks now. There are quite a few reasons for this, mostly involving the pleasures of relocation. Back on June 11th, which feels like an eternity but was just slightly more than two weeks ago, we closed out our quarters in Honolulu and got on a plane for Houston. (I'm never flying Northwest again, but that's another story.) Since then, we've been living in an Extended Stay America. The room is about 15' by 25', and is currently occupied by two adults (at least physiologically…
worldsfair | June 28, 2007I've been thinking a little about having another go at a Puzzle Fantastica, what with the first being kind of cool, and the second solved much too quickly. Along those lines (and because the previous post has that marvelous cover image), I was happy to discover that at one time (back in April of 2006), Bob Staake was preparing his own puzzle.
Called "Mysteryopolis" - it's really very pretty to look at.
Anyway, he writes:
What I'm working on now is another mystery. I had originally intended this to be a 4 page story in BLAB #17, but I've decided not to do that -- and expand on it instead as…
petnoyer | June 28, 2007
Scientists from around the world will attend a meeting in the Galapagos Islands at the end of June to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the deep-sea hydrothermal vent system. The meeting will address recent issues in vent science, including plans to mine remnants of these chemosynthetic ecosystems using deep-sea gold-diggers.
Hydrothermal vents introduced the idea of chemosynthesis as a precondition for life to a broad spectrum of society back in the late 70's when alternative lifestyles were gaining widespread acceptance. Before that time photosynthesis was the most…