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grrlscientist | November 23, 2006
A group of wild turkeys tried to make a break out of town yesterday afternoon. The turkeys were spotted with the New Jersey transit surveillance cameras standing on the platfom at Ramsey, which is approximately 20 miles northeast of New York City, appearing to be waiting for the train (above).
"For a moment, it looked like the turkeys were waiting for the next outbound train," said Dan Stessel, a spokesman for NJ Transit. "Clearly, they're trying to catch a train and escape their fate."
A Ramsey police dispatcher said they had received three calls about the turkeys who also were blamed…
tqa | November 22, 2006"On Thanksgiving Day all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment - halftime."
--Anonymous
Back to science quotes tomorrow. Enjoy the holiday.
grrlscientist | November 22, 2006I know that there are hundreds of people out there who are wondering what happened regarding today's court date because I have been innundated with comments and email -- all of which I love!! -- so I'll give you the short news and then provide more detail: The hearing was postponed for one week.
We -- the team leader, who is a shrink, my own shrink, who is a resident, my medical student, and a mental health aid along with a security guard and me -- left the nuthouse at 930 am. We drove across Manhattan to Ward's Island in a state van to a large and truly scarey-looking high-security…
grrlscientist | November 22, 2006I see words as providing people with a deeper and richer meaning to their emotional and professional lives, especially because much of our lives rely on words. So not every word that I use in this little feature is completely unfamiliar to you, or at least I hope it isn't, because teaching you obscure words is not my primary intention, although I do sometimes do this to give you some fun.
Instead, my goal is to demonstrate the beauty, versatility and subtlety of the English language and to acquaint you with the many wonderful languages that have contributed to English. And of course, I hope…
grrlscientist | November 22, 2006I am normally very shy about sharing my poetry but today, i'll make an exception for this quick (but not very good) poem that I wrote for you last night about my impending court date that is designed to involuntarily commit me to a long-term mental health facility, a court date that has kept me awake and nauseous most of the night. This is a scheduled posting, so I can't even give you an update as to where I am located at this precise moment or what I am doing at this point in time. But I can tell you that I will be thinking of all of you, dear readers, all of you from around the world and…
tqa | November 22, 2006There's an article in Friday's Washington Post about the ongoing strike by Houston, Texas janitors. (The same folks who were getting trampled by police horses the other day.) Part of the article tells the story of Ercilia Sandoval, a Salvadorian immigrant who is one of the striking workers. If we take a look at her story, it becomes very easy to see who the real winners and losers are in right to work states. It should come as no surprise if I tell you that the losers outnumber the winners. It might surprise you if I tell you that you're probably (if you live anywhere in the US) one of the…
tqa | November 21, 2006In part to counteract the limited amount of time that I have available to write posts, I've decided to start a "quote of the day" series. Most of the quotes will be related to science or academics (or any of the other central issues I talk about here). Some may be chosen because they seem to be relevant to something going on in the world today; most won't be. The quotes will usually be short, but this first one isn't. Feel free to use the comments section of this post as an open thread, to talk about whatever.
Knowledge has been accumulating at an ever increasing rate, and knowledge, once it…
grrlscientist | November 21, 2006Well, if any of you out there ever fantasized about knowing a lunatic, a real honest-to-god lunatic, well, you know one now: me.
All my attempts to negotiate a discharge date with the hospital were flatly rejected, so I am making a court appearance tomorrow morning at a courthouse somewhere in Manhattan (they won't tell me where it is or what time the hearing starts so my friends cannot attend). Basically, I am fighing for my life; fighting the state's expressed desire to lock me up for a very long time in a state psychiatric ward -- very possibly for the remainder of my life.
Needless to…
lborkowski | November 21, 2006by Liz BorkowskiÂ
After posting about the global water and sanitation crisis, I learned via Gristmill that rap star and Def Jams president Jay-Z has aligned himself with this important cause. On a recent world tour, the star visited Angola and South Africa and witnessed firsthand what life is like for the more than one billion people who lack access to clean drinking water. MTV will air a 30-minute documentary about Jay-Z's trip on Friday (a two-minute "Diary of Jay-Z in Africa" clip is available on MTV's site).
"In my business, we like to say we're from the hood,"Â Jay-Z told the AP…
tqa | November 21, 2006As many of the other Sciencebloggers have already mentioned, Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute is up to his usual stupidity. In this particular instance, he's attempting, in a typically inept fashion, to fisk Carl Zimmer's recent article in National Geographic. So far, I haven't chimed in, mostly because everyone else has done such a good job that there wasn't much to add.
Today, though, Karmen pointed out a passage that I'd somehow missed the first time I read Luskin's piece. In the first part of his "rebuttal," Luskin wrote:
The article called evolution a "simple" process. In our…
grrlscientist | November 21, 2006I see words as power: words provide people with a deeper and richer meaning to their emotional and professional lives, especially because so much of our lives rely on words. So not every word that I use in this little feature is completely unfamiliar to you, or at least I hope it isn't, because teaching you obscure words is not my primary intention, although I do sometimes choose obscure words to give you some fun as well as improving your vocabulary.
Instead, my goal is to demonstrate the beauty, versatility and subtlety of the English language and to acquaint you with the many wonderful…
purepedantry | November 21, 2006I am getting on a plane today, so here is some interesting reading from throughout the web to tide you over til tomorrow:
The Neurophilosopher has a fascinating article on how parasites affect the behavior of their hosts, sometimes even burrowing into their brains -- just like pod people!!!
The Scientist on a scientific approach to diversity programs.
The Economist on the floundering European climate change abatement program, and an appeal for the legalization of kidney sales.
Science Fiction Book Club has the top 50 best science fiction books of the last 50 years.
lborkowski | November 20, 2006by Dick Clapp
Atul Gawande is well-known around Boston because of his skills as a surgeon, but also for his books and articles in the New Yorker, and his interviews with local media. He was a recipient of one of this yearâs MacArthur grants, in recognition of his work. I got one of his books, "Complications," as a gift and read it and liked it a lot.  He's an incredibly talented writer, and he has ahumane surgeon's view of medical practice.  My father was a surgeon too, so his book resonated with me.
IÂ have another response to Atul Gawande, though, based on an article he wrote for the…
grrlscientist | November 19, 2006I have finally gotten back on track with my book reading and daily search for my word-of-the-day. As you might have guessed, I find these words in my regular everyday reading, instead of picking them out of a vocabulary list somewhere. I found this under-used word in the articulate polemic, The Republican War on Science, by my friend and fellow SciBling, Chris Mooney, which was recently re-released in trade paperback. If you haven't read this book yet, now is the time (I've read it once already in hard-cover, but never reviewed it, so I am going to rectify that oversight in the near future by…
grrlscientist | November 18, 2006This test supposedly predicts your "luck quotient", but I am not sure I believe it. My own results surprised me, especially considering my life these past three years, which has been rather unlucky. Anyway, you can take the luck test yourself (and hopefully share your score with me!) and you can see my score below the fold.
Your Luck Quotient: 51%
You have an average luck quotient.
There's been times when you've been extremely lucky... but also times when you've been very unlucky.
You probably know that you can make your own luck in life, if you're open to it.
So listen to your…
grrlscientist | November 17, 2006Quite a few readers have been writing with questions regarding my hospitalization. For awhile, I was writing private email to those who wrote, telling you the highlights (or perhaps I should refer to them as "lowlights"?) of those events that have transpired over the previous 100 days. I will tell you a little bit about what i've been experiencing, and answer any questions that you might have in comments or in email, depending upon the nature of the question. This particular issue is a topic that I will be exploring more on this blog, so it seems fitting that I say something about it…
pharyngula | November 17, 2006Awww, it's a romance made in the blogosphere: Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette, my two very favoritest physics bloggers, are getting married. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
This calls for some romantic imagery.
tqa | November 17, 2006Over at the ARN blog, Denyse O'Leary has a four-part article up attacking the peer-review system. Rob Crowther, of the Discovery Institute's
Media Complaints Division, has chimed in with his own post on the topic. There's a great deal of humor in watching anti-evolutionists try to dismiss peer review as not worth the effort anyway. It bears an amazing resemblance to this really cute old fable about a fox, but I'll be kind and pretend that there is actually something more to the O'Leary and Crowther rants than good old sour grapes.
Their major complaint about peer review is, of course, that…
stoat | November 17, 2006The AMS has a Draft statement on climate change, vn 7.0. I found it via RP Sr, who dislikes it, for the obvious reasons: it fails to reflect his hobbyhorses: which are, as ever, downplaying the role of CO2 in favour of land-use changes, aerosols, etc (of course it does mention them, but naturally enough after GHGs). I find his "I reproduce a summary below of findings that have been reached on the weblog Climate Science (http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/main-conclusions/ ) which should be discussed in the AMS Statement." quite shameless self-promotion. It will be interesting to see if the…
lborkowski | November 16, 2006by David OzonoffÂ
My new Pump Handle blog colleague, "Revere", has posted on NIH's proposal to limit the Research Plan section of Research Project Grant applications to 15 pages, down from the current 25. He/she/they (Revere's blog, Effect Measure, is ambiguous as to how many Reveres there are) also gives a peek into the NIH grant review process, something people are often curious about. As Revere says, it's a bit like seeing how sausages are made. You might not want to know. In any event, since Revere opened up the topic and since this site is more pitched to public health professionals…