Uncategorized
grrlscientist | February 8, 2007There are a few people out there whom I want to thank for their kindnesses. First of all, I want to thank Dave Rintoul for giving me the honor of showing some of his photography on my blog as the "Image of the Day". As if this was not enough, he also sent me a birthday gift of books .. two books by the amazing poet, Mary Oliver, House of Light and Dream Work, along with another book that I have wanted, Prospect, by his partner, Elizabeth Dodd. (Perhaps you remember this stunning photograph and accompanying poem, Impression, that they donated to my blog awhile ago? If not, you should check it…
tqa | February 8, 2007PZ Myers reports (and the report is confirmed on both CNN's and Richard Dawkins' websites) that tonights episode (Thursday, 8 Feb, 8pm Eastern) of Paula Zahn Now will revisit the story of the atheists, and replace the uninformed panel discussion with an interview of Richard Dawkins. As much as I'd love to think that this is due to my call for a boycott (and the dozen or two responses that it's already accumulated), the real credit for this one goes to others. In particular, credit is do to PZ for spreading the news - his post on the original story was widely linked to, and widely read - and…
cortex | February 8, 2007Another week, another fascinating seminar over at Mind Matters. The paper in question concerns a topic near and dear to me: decision making. Here's the abstract:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as…
grrlscientist | February 8, 2007I found this nifty little quiz that tries to diagnose where you are from in the USA based on how you pronounce certain words. Okay, I show you my results below the fold, so the least you can do is show me yours, too! By the way, I am curious to know how the Aussies and Brits score on this quiz, too, so don't be shy!
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Northeast
Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell…
cmcclain | February 8, 2007
The sea cucumber, Scotoplanes globosa, at 1500m in Monterey Canyon.
Just Science Entry #4
Not giant squid or man eating sharks...megafauna, those organisms those organisms large enough to be caught in trawls or seen in photographs or video. (fish, crabs, lobsters, starfish, urchins, sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, etc.). This is different than the macrofauna (those organisms retained on a small screen mesh sieve, cannot see them with the naked eye) and meiofauna (really small organisms you cannot see with the naked eye like forams, copepods, nematodes).
For more than a century the ocean…
tqa | February 7, 2007Update: It appears that CNN will be re-airing the story at 8 pm Eastern tonight (Thursday, 8 Feb). The original panel will be replaced by an interview with Richard Dawkins.
A recent CNN story on atheism has sparked a great deal of outrage from the online atheist community. The story, which was broadcast on the January 31st edition of Paula Zahn Now (transcript) (video) detailed the plight of two families of atheists who say they were ostracized from their communities as the result of their beliefs - in one case, just for having identified themselves as atheists, and in another for objecting…
sb admin | February 7, 2007By David Michaels
The Bush Administration has been unsuccessful in convincing Congress to pass legislation rolling back public health and environmental protection, even when both the Senate and the House were controlled by Republicans. Some notable examples: attempts to gut the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act failed miserably.
With the Democrats in control of Congress, and less then two years left in office, the Bush Administration has evidently decided to end run Congress and use executive power to handcuff the public health and environmental agencies. Thatâs not just my…
cmcclain | February 6, 2007
From JAMSTEC, Chimney of "Blue Smoker" at a depth of 1470 m
Just Science Entry #3
Hydrothermal vents appear from ruptures in the newly created basalt along mid-oceanic ridges. At fractures the surrounding cold water penetrates the crust and mix with red-hot basalt. This mixture emerges through three types of hot springs seafloor.
In some cases the liquid simply emerges through a crack or crevice at temperatures ranging from a cool? 5-250 degrees C. At black smokers (270-380 degrees C) and white smokers (100-300 degrees C) the vent liquid is hotter The vent liquid emerges forming structures…
pharyngula | February 6, 2007So Scott Adams shouldn't be too irritated at this amusing depiction of his mental state.
tqa | February 6, 2007Representative Dave Weldon (R-FL) recently issued a press release that has been getting a little bit of play at a couple of blogs on the political right. In the press release, Weldon accuses Democrats of taking money from NASA to fund other projects, including AIDS relief for Africa:
"The raid on NASA's budget has begun in earnest. The cuts announced today by House Democrat leaders, if approved by Congress, would be nearly $400 million less than NASA's current budget," said Weldon.
"Clearly, the new Democrat leadership in the House isn't interested in space exploration. Their omnibus proposal…
revere | February 6, 2007When the witches in Shakespeare's MacBeth assured the great war captain that "...none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth", the Thane of Glynis didn't take into account that his undoing, MacDuff, was "from his mother's womb/ Untimely ripped," that is, born by Caesarian section. Today's MacBeth would have thought of it.
For today MacDuff would not be an oddity, when childbirth is becoming decidedly unnatural. The Caesarian section rate hit a record high in 2005 (latest year for which we have figures), up nearly 50% in ten years. Now almost one in three babies (30%) come into the world…
grrlscientist | February 6, 2007Three amateur paleontologists discovered more than 100 fossilized eggs of dinosaurs in a remote area in a central Indian state, a news report said. The explorers also found footprints of the dinosaurs through which they could also trace the "track way" of the now extinct animals, said Vishal Verma, one of the trio of paleontologists.
The eggs, approximately the size of a softball, were found in a single nesting site in the Kukshi-Bagh area, some 95 miles southwest of Indore, a key city of Madhya Pradesh state.
"These animals used to come from far away areas to lay eggs on the sandy banks of…
grrlscientist | February 6, 2007This newspaper article (below the fold) proposes the $100-million question and then conveniently forgets to answer it. However, I am curious to know what you think;
[ ..] those who run intensive poultry farms are keen to point out that they protect their livestock from disease coming in from outside, by keeping them in sealed sheds, with carefully monitored ventilation.
They are also in a better position, they say, than farmers with free-range birds, to monitor their health and administer medicine if necessary.
[ .. ]
However, some farmers with free-range flocks are adamant that their…
cmcclain | February 6, 2007
Just Science Entry #2
[For the second day of Just Science, I asked Henry Ruhl, fellow MBARI'ian and deep-sea ecologist to discuss a new project he is involved with]
Much of what we know about temporal variability in deep-sea ecology comes from only a few locations and most timeseries studies extend back less than two decades. Comprehensive understanding of both natural variability and anthropogenic impacts will require longer datasets. Providing some certainty about the spatial extent of any observed trends will require the inclusion of currently under-sampled locations such as the…
tqa | February 5, 2007A couple of years ago, when I was just starting on my graduate career, I decided to investigate the possibility of studying a feral population of rock wallabies that lives in one of the valleys above Honolulu. I (finally) wound up deciding that these animals weren't the best group to use to study the questions I was interested in, but along the way I had a hell of a lot of fun hiking in this valley, picking up wallaby droppings for use in genetic work (John Wilkins took some fairly incriminating pictures of me as a result).
Like many things that are involved in actually doing science, the…
tqa | February 5, 2007Looking through the few months worth of posts here, it occurs to me that I haven't done a lot with one of the first categories I set up - the "An Incomplete Autobiography" one. I'm going to try and start to use it a little more - it's the place where I'm going to put the various little stories about how I got to be who (and where) I am today. It should surprise nobody who knows me to discover that a lot of these stories are going to involve me looking dumb, and almost all are going to be a bit on the strange side.
In part, that's because the strange stories are really the only ones worth…
tqa | February 5, 2007Texas governor Rick Perry's recent decision to mandate that all 6th grade girls in Texas be given the new HPV vaccine has a lot of people up in arms. What I just don't understand is why the absolute jackasses who are objecting to this are being treated as if they hold a legitimate point of view that is somehow worth debating. Yet that is exactly how this is being presented. I'm watching MSNBC, and various flaming jerks are being given equal time to advocate for their sick and twisted perspective. It really doesn't reflect well on our society that this could be considered to be a "debatable"…
cmcclain | February 5, 2007Just Science Entry #1
Kim didn't miss much. She went into Final Jeopardy with $15,000 and won the match by a scant $1 by correctly identifying the world's largest invertebrate (answer: "What is a giant squid?").
But was she right?
There seems to be considerable debate about this.
Steve O'Shea (giant invertebrate expert extraordinaire) says this (with his permission)...
Architeuthis is frequently reported to attain a total length of 60 ft. The largest specimen known washed ashore on a New Zealand beach, Lyall Bay (Wellington) in the winter of 1887. It was a female and "in all ways smaller…
j7uy5 | February 4, 2007Part whatever. It is hard to pay attention to detail with the TV
on. I'm making all kinds of mistakes doing this live-blogging
thing. It is not as easy as I thought it would be. The game
is only half-over and I have run out of ideas. Nothing to
say. It's the old "nothing in, nothing out" syndrome.