Vanity
evolgen | September 28, 2008
Every year, the best science blog posts are collected in a book, the Open Laboratory (here are the 2006 and 2007 editions). Last year's edition included my cartoon, The Lab Fridge. It wasn't my best post of the year, but it filled one of the niche categories published in the book.
Bora has been soliciting submissions for this year's edition of Open Lab. I've dug through my archives and found a few posts that I think are worthy of submission. Unfortunately, I'm the worst judge of my own writing, so I need some help. I've provided links to the short list of my best blogging of 2008 (up 'til…
evolgen | July 18, 2008Until yesterday, there was a span of about two weeks in which this blog laid dormant. I did that on purpose because I didn't want to give you all the blogging you crave. All three of you who may crave my blogging. And I'm guessing not one of those three even noticed the silence. Ah, the joys of insignificance.
Besides being a lazy dick, I actually have a valid excuse for my silence: I was moving. Or, rather, I am moving (my move is not yet complete). Where am I moving? From grad-school to post-doc. It also happens to be a move from one city in the middle of nowhere to another city in the…
evolgen | May 28, 2008Chad's in town for the DAMOP meeting. What that means isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. But it did give us a chance to have a blogger meet-up. So, I grabbed Professor Steve Steve and Kevin (of Deep Sea Nudes and the Unimportant 95%), and we met Chad for some dinner and beers.
Kevin's posted another version of the picture.
evolgen | May 14, 2008I can officially claim myself as a member of the ivory tower elite. At least, that's what they tell me.
evolgen | April 14, 2008I think I'm cursed. Or I have bad luck. Or conference organizers think I'm a morning person. Alright, so maybe I really am a morning person. But that's besides the point. Because it sucks to give a talk on a Saturday morning. Saturday mornings should be reserved for things like Belgian waffles, homemade hash browns, made to order omelets, and mimosas. Not for 12 minute talks about my research. How much can you fit into a 12 minute talk? Not much. And you end up speeding up at the end when you realize you've got about 1 minute to make it through four slides. It's either that or go over 12…
evolgen | March 6, 2008Apparently, ScienceBlogs is loaded with white people. Hell, the whitest person I know blogs in this very domain. That got me thinking. Sure, we may look white. But are we really white? I mean, really white. So white that we like the stuff white people like.
We do have someone who really likes graduate school:
And we've got a Canadian:
And someone who likes to study abroad:
We look pretty white, huh? Well, it gets whiter. We've got a lawyer:
A dog owner:
Guys who like living by the water:
And marathon runner:
Man, we're the whitest group of whities I've ever been blinded by when the sun…
evolgen | March 1, 2008I'm easily annoyed. A lot of things piss me off. Here are the things that irked me today:
Fake St. Patrick's Day. A large drinking school schedules Spring Break the same week as St. Patty's Day, and they do it two years in a row. This pisses off the students because it costs them an official drinking day (they'll be drunk on spring break regardless if it's St. Patrick's day). So, the students schedule their celebration of St. Patrick's day for the weekend before Spring Break. There's a few hundred drunk douchebags walking around town in green shirts and stupid hats today. It's goddamn…
evolgen | January 2, 2008
I can't draw for shit. And I've got crappy penmanship to boot. All in all, I don't end up with aesthetically pleasing creations when I put pen or pencil to paper. So it's ironic that my one blog post selected for the 2007 edition of the Open Lab is a comic that I made. It's called The Lab Fridge, and it's a play off of a PhD Comic. Thankfully, I had Illustrator at my disposal in creating the comic.
I don't think it's my best post of the year, but it is the best (and only) comic that I drew this year. For those of you looking to make it into Open Lab next year, go for one of the niche…
evolgen | November 21, 2007I hate vanity posts -- who the fuck outside my mom cares how I'm doing, and she don't read this -- but I feel somewhat obliged to explain the lack of activity on this unread blog. This is especially important in case my Seed overlords stop by and notice a stark absence of any recent posts and a deficiency in posting regularity over the past couple of weeks. Aside from the few regular visitors, I doubt anyone has noticed the near death of evolgen.
That said, here's what I've been up to instead of blogging. I'm in the middle of that clusterfuck known as the last year of grad school. Those of…
evolgen | September 26, 2007Over a year ago I threatened to perform some original research and publish it on my blog. I got as far as writing an introduction to the project, but I never actually posted any data. I know, I suck.I had hoped to make the project simple enough that people could follow along. The problem was the available data were not in a form that would be accessible for most readers. So, I've held off until now. But the appropriate data have now been deposited in Genbank, so I can continue the series.
Over the next couple of days I'll post the previously published entries, and they will be followed by the…
evolgen | September 1, 2007Shelley's posted some pictures of nerd cakes. She calls 'em geek cakes, but I see no headless chickens. Anyway, I've got my own little nerd cake:
We had it made for a party we threw during recruitment weekend for our grad program this past spring. Sadly, the icer responsible for the art couldn't spell, so I put a sprig of something green on the cake for the missing "C" in Lamarck. And if you don't get it, see here.
evolgen | July 19, 2007Bill Hooker has taken Nature editor Maxine Clark to task for her claims about the open access status of the online features offered by the Nature Publishing Group. Maxine points to the various free online services offered by Nature -- including Nature Precedings, Nature Reports, Nature Network, Scintilla, and the journal Molecular Systems Biology -- in claiming that Nature has "many open access projects and products". Bill disagrees. You should read his entire post, but the punchline is that Clark is redefining Open Access to fit Nature's model and to be used as a marketing device.
A big…
evolgen | July 10, 2007Dave wants to know whether we biologists have physics envy, as the physicists often claim. I'm quite happy being a biologist and I wouldn't want to study physics, but there are certain skill sets I wish I had. My envy is not for the questions other fields address, but for the tools other people in my field have at their disposal.
Enough with the foreplay; here are my answers to Dave's three questions:
What's your current scientific specialty?
Evolutionary genetics, in general. Specifically, the molecular biology and evolutionary dynamics of genomes.
Were you originally pursuing a…
evolgen | July 8, 2007I'm fucking sick of blog memes. Not only do I find online surveys totally lame, I also never get tagged. Boohoo, nobody likes me. Now, John Logsdon orders me to tell you eight things about me. I'm only doing this 'cause we had dinner together last week. Here are the rules:
We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don't forget…
evolgen | May 17, 2007I'm working on a few graphs for a presentation. In a previous incarnation, I distinguished two partitions of my data using the colors red and green. This made sense intuitively (the red ones had something broken, and the green ones were a-ok), but I realized that people with red-green colorblindness would not be able to distinguish the different graphs. I switched the color scheme to white and gray, which should enable everyone to distinguish the two groups.
I also have a second way of partitioning the data, and I don't want to use the same color scheme for both. I initially used blue and…
evolgen | April 12, 2007Because everyone else is commenting on it, I must as well. After all, I'd jump off of a bridge if everyone else were doing it.
I don't read science fiction. Sure, I've read a couple of the classics (ie, Ender's Game). And I was really into Stephen King for a couple of years, starting in fifth grade (which seems just about right considering the level of his writing), but he's not really a science fiction author. Neither is Dean Koontz, whom I became infatuated with after I abandoned King (whom I think I was most interested in because of all the sex in his stories).
But here's where I'm going…
evolgen | March 4, 2007The word on the streets is that there used to be a blog at this URL (pronounced like the mountain range separating Europe from Asia). If this were a blog, however, it would be updated often and definitely not left dormant for over two weeks. All I can say is that meth is a hell of a drug. But fear not readers, I have reemerged from a research induced vanishing act, and I'll be blogging with some vigor for the near future (the specific amount of vigor cannot be guaranteed or measured with anything resembling an acceptable level of accuracy). In fact, I've got a long post -- filled with all the…
evolgen | February 15, 2007
Those kooky Canucks at the Science Creative Quarterly have started a new club: the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique. Anyone is free to join, provided they're not a teetotaling, lying, world-dominating, badge-hater, 'cause they're really into badges. To profess their love of badges, the Science Scouts have produced quite a collection, some of which I feel qualified to wear on my Science Scout Sash. You see, these badges aren't handed out by some higher authority; you simply claim all the badges that apply to you and post them on your website, like so…
evolgen | February 14, 2007In honor of all the snow being dropped on the Northeast US, I give you "Things that rock & things that suck." Cue the theme music...
Things that rock: Snowfall measured in feet.
Things that suck: Freezing rain.
Things that rock: Showing up to class/work on cross-country skis.
Things that suck: Cancelled classes.
Things that rock: Watching ill-prepared undergrads try to navigate an unplowed path or snow drift.
Things that suck: Navigating an unplowed path or snow drift.
Things that rock: Riding your bike in the snow.
Things that suck: Snow removal services that plow snow onto bike…