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cmcclain | May 15, 2007
The answer is still no but read below if you care to know why you cannot eat monkfish (maybe better known as anglerfish).
In January, DSN praised the move by Wal-Mart owned ADSA to drop monkfish from their stores. Last week however several media outlets claimed Monkfish back on the menu & Monkfish no longer a fish to avoid! Fishupdate reports that ASDA is to lift is ban. What?
The problem is that several pieces of information have been confused.
Two species in the genus Lophius are marketed as monkfish, the Northeast Atlantic (off Europe) L. piscatorius and the Northwest Atlantic…
cmcclain | May 14, 2007 For the ultra rich in the next decade the Waldorf-Astoria is probably going to be a bit passe. "My pomeranians and I had spent every spring in the Waldorf, but now will it has become ever so cliche!" Luckily, this swath of society simply need to bookmark bornrich.org. whose "sole aim is to help you spend all your hard-earned money on the snootiest thingmazig around. Our people are working around the clock to find ways to empty your wallet and make you bankrupt."
Last week bornrich.org covered the Top 10 Futuristic Luxury Hotels. Of the elite list 4 are located in outerspace, 3 in warm…
petnoyer | May 14, 2007This is a play on words alluding to Andy Warhol's multimedia vents in the mid 60's. Like Andy's quote about 15 minutes of fame in the future, this dire prediction about the 'exploding' plastic inevitable has also come true. He was a strange oracle, indeed.
Best Life Magazine covers one of the most troubling trends in the world's ocean today- a North Pacific gyre where plastic outnumbers plankton by 6:1. The story chronicles the adventures of Charlie Moore of the Algalita Research Station and his researches in the open ocean toilet bowl for our contemporary society. This is one of the best…
jstemwedel | May 13, 2007In part II of the interview, my mother discussed her transition from mentor-ific undergraduate physics to a graduate physics program with no mentoring to speak of, not to mention astronomy courses that were described in the course catalogue but not actually taught. Here, in the final segment of our interview, she describes how she developed an exit strategy that took her closer to who she wanted to grow up to be, and reflects upon the lessons learned.
Part III: Making your graduate program work for you:
Was writing a masters thesis even a standard option in the physics program at City…
jjacquet | May 13, 2007The blog Eye on Miami posted yesterday an excellent post on shfiting baselines. They show a series of photos of Weeki Wachi Springs, Florida: alive in 1950 and more or less dead in 2006. Check out their blog post and a couple of the photos that were posted.
revere | May 12, 2007Suppose there were a stadium built with too few bathrooms (hard to imagine?). As the place became more popular, say 26% more people gathering there, 9% of the bathrooms disappeared and there were too few plumbers to keep them working. Suppose, too, that even though there are more people coming to the stadium, the number of seats had dropped 17%, so people used the toilets as a place to sit until a seat opened up. Most people don't go to a stadium to use the bathroom, but you'll have to admit, "when ya gotta go ya gotta go." It's an emergency.
That's the situation in US emergency departments.…
voltagegate | May 12, 2007We are still "in the lab" so to speak with the final results of the Blogger Bioblitz. All of the data crunchers and digital cartographers are involved in academia in one way or another and this is crunch time. So, stay tuned and we'll have the final tabulation in the next week or so.
In the meantime, Jenn has shared some impressive preliminary results of plants, fungi and mosses at the Google Group. You can read them below the fold.
Here is some metadata from our compiled BioBlitz records. This only includes data mailed out to us as of 5/5/07, and only includes plants, algae, mosses, fungi,…
grrlscientist | May 11, 2007The decomposed corpse of a German man was found in his bed after nearly seven years, said police from the western city of Essen. The man was 59 and unemployed, and probably died of natural causes on 30 November 2000, which was the date he received a letter from the Welfare Office that was discovered in the apartment.
"No one missed him. No missing person report was ever filed," the police said.
I worry that this will be my ultimate fate as well, although I am younger.
Cited story.
cmcclain | May 11, 2007
Kick 'em Jenny is a 1300m submerged volcano residing about 8km off the Grenada coast and the only live submarine volcano in the West Indies. In 1939 an eruption here rose 275m above the ocean surface (see image below fold). Eruptions have been both explosive and simply lava flows and domes in the summit crater. Nearby residents often hear deep rumbling noises. A team from WHOI installed a seismic monitor over Jenny 250m below the surface. The instrument package will be moored to a surface buoy with a high-frequency radio (and solar panels) to send data to the village of Sauteurs on…
nisbetmc | May 11, 2007I'm late to this news feature that appeared two weeks ago at the journal Cell, as others here at ScienceBlogs have already posted on the article. Quoted below is the section of the article that focuses on our Framing Science thesis and its relevance to science blogging:
The concept of scientists reaching out to a lay audience is not new. "Scientists are an opinionated bunch and they have given their thoughts on discoveries or events by speaking with journalists, writing letters to journals, authoring commentaries," says Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor in the School of Communication at…
cmcclain | May 10, 2007 One of the benefits of my office being on the shore is seeing this some mornings. The behavior of sticking one fin out of the water is called jug handling.
cmcclain | May 10, 2007 Each of these gastropods are from the deep sea in the North Atlantic near 1500m. Each is is a few mm in height.
cortex | May 10, 2007Let's say your plate is filled with three different foods: a turkey sandwich, some spears of broccoli and a chocolate chip cookie. Which food do you eat first?
According to Brian Wansick's new book, Mindless Eating, your birth order helps to shape your eating habits:
When we looked at the food questionnaires, we discovered that people who at the best food first [as opposed to saving the best food for last] shared one of two characteristics: they either grew up as a youngest child or came from large families.
The people most likely to save the best for last, on the other hand, had grown up as…
cmcclain | May 9, 2007I once had a corn chip that looked like Sammy Davis Jr. Unfortunately I was hungry and consumed it. I stumbled across this in my surfing around the web. Allah Fish!
Last year, in the U.K. an Oscar was found at a pet shop that resembled the Arabic Script for Allah. However, this is not the first Allah Fish. In 2003 a fish in India had marking on its tail fin with patterns resembling Arabic characters, on one side of the body reading "Laillah Illalah" (there is no God but Allah) and, on the other, "Sahni Allah" (warning from God).
cmcclain | May 9, 2007
In The Flamingo's Smile, a compilation of Gould's articles for Natural History, there is a lengthy discussion of the principle of decreasing variation within established patterns and the disappearance of .400 hitters in baseball. According to Gould the loss of .400 batting average reflects players getting better not worse. Imagine a range of batting averages whose mean is around .300, a very respectable value. Gould argued in the past that .400 was at the upper extreme of the batting average range. There were also many players who were quite below the average, resulting in a huge…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2007tags: Carnival of the Vanities, blog carnivals
The 242 issue of the Carnival of the Vanities is now available. This blog carnival links to the very best recent writing across the blogosphere, regardless of topic area.
grrlscientist | May 9, 2007tags: font type, font style, Helvetica
Did you know that today is the 50th birthday of that horrid font type, Helvetica? In honor of this seemingly auspicious occasion, Helvetica fans all over the world are celebrating (or reviling) it.
Those who love Helvetica claim that it sends a message of cool efficiency;
[Y]ou are going to get to your destination on time; your plane will not crash; your money is safe in our vault; we will not break the package; the paperwork has been filled in; everything is going to be OK.
However, those of us who strongly dislike it, see it much, much differently;…
mixingmemory | May 8, 2007From the proud papa.
First, the league's best right fielder:
He hasn't let a ball past him all year. Granted, no balls have been hit to him this year, but that's neither here nor there.
Next up, at the plate. Notice the bent knees, with the elbow up. That's pretty good form for a beginner (his Dad taught him that).
That picture is from his second at bat. In his first, he walked after looking at a 3-2 pitch in the dirt. That landed him on first (I don't think the first baseman is very happy with him):
From there he made it to second on a single, just beating out the throw from the center…
tqa | May 8, 2007
I saw my first political TV ad of the 2008 season last night while watching Countdown. It was a Mitt Romney ad, and it really changed the way I see him. Before I saw it, my impression was that Mitt's a guy who is willing to jettison any belief, change any position in order to win the Presidency - in other words, a younger, better-looking John McCain. After watching the ad, my impression shifted a bit - from "typical politician" to "what a frigging tool."
If you haven't seen it, the spot in question is available on Romney's website. Personally, I wouldn't recommend it, but you should go for…
tqa | May 8, 2007
I'm guessing (hoping) that some of you might have noticed my lack of recent blog activity. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is that since very shortly after my my wife got home, we've been in a state of military life known as "PCS."
For most people, "PCS" is the acronym that Sprint uses when it describes its cell phone network. For those in the military, it means something different: Permanent Change of Station. PCS combines all of the wonderful fun of moving with the joy that comes from repeated adventures into the Kafkaesque military bureaucracy. At the best of times, a…