terrasig | December 2, 2008[Point of clarification: I was delighted to use this post to congratulate my friend and blogging colleague, Dr Chris Patil, on his contributions to this paper from the laboratory of Dr Judith Campisi discussed below. As the formal press release notes, "[c]o-authoring the paper with Campisi were Jean-Philippe Coppé and Christopher Patil, members of Campisi's research group in Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division, Joshua Goldstein, now with the Novartis Research Foundation; Francis Rodier and Denise Muñoz of the Buck Institute; and Peter Nelson and Yu Sun from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer…
terrasig | November 30, 2008Just clearing out the family e-mail account that has tons of old messages from various things I've signed up for over the years when I found a series of e-mails from Virginia-based singer-songwriter, david m bailey. I first saw david play at an event for people living with cancer about eight years ago - he's kind of a cross of old Cat Stevens and Jim Croce but very heavy on the inspiration he draws from 12 years of living with cancer.
For background:
The son of Presbyterian missionaries Dr Ken and Ethel Bailey, david spent his childhood in Beirut, Lebanon. He learned his first chords in 7th…
terrasig | November 29, 2008Okay, my friends. My two years of imprisonment are up. I love my Treo 700p but it is time for me to make a change. Any reviews of new Treos I've seen tell me that I need to attend a funeral.
So, if I am to change, let me tell you first what I love:
1. a good synch-able scheduling function - I look back at this schedule when composing my annual report of scholarly activities for The Man. I like to synch it with my personal computer but NOT with the corporate Outlook.
2. keeping my personal stuff far separate from my business stuff (but I like the real-time push of business e-mail)
3. a real…
terrasig | November 29, 2008Okay, so kill me - I'm posting The Friday Fermentable on Saturday morning. I just couldn't get it together yesterday and the US Thanksgiving holiday has my timing all screwed up.
I noted earlier this week that the proprietors of our community treasure, Wine Authorities, were to be interviewed on the local NPR affiliate, WUNC-FM, in (guess where?) Chapel Hill, NC, USA. Frank Stasio, a remarkable gentleman in his own right, spoke with Craig Heffley and Seth Gross on his noontime show, The State of Things. The interview was preempted Monday by the economy-related cabinet appointments…
terrasig | November 26, 2008The recent passing of Studs Terkel and my conversations with African American colleagues after the Obama victory has given me pause to think about our life stories, especially the life stories of our elders. For example, I lost all of my grandparents before I could get their life stories on videotape, digital recorder, or writing - I also said I was going to do it during some visit home. My grandparents had some incredible stories about The Great Depression, the World Wars, even the history of my hometown that was farmland in the middle of factories only a dozen miles from one of the…
terrasig | November 25, 2008We had one of our most active comment threads the other day when I posted my thoughts on drdrA's own superb post about what is most important to her in being a woman in science. I noted my own desire to listen to and understand as completely as possible the issues of my women colleagues and discuss, in an upcoming ScienceOnline'09 session with Zuska and Alice Pawley (Sat 17 Jan, 11:30 am, session C), how they can enlist academic allies who have the traditional power and resource structure (i.e., white guys like me) to establish partnerships in working toward fair and equitable treatment of…
terrasig | November 24, 2008Salamanzar and the Grand Poobah Wine Swami (Seth Gross and Craig Heffley) of the nationally-recognized wine merchant and community resource, Wine Authorities, will be appearing today on the local NPR affiliate.
Here is the official word from the boys themselves:
Wow! This coming Monday, the 24th, we're going to be on the air with none other than Mr. Frank Stasio on WUNC/NPR's "The State of Things" radio show. This is possibly the highlight of our professional careers thus far! We love this show. So tune in online or on the radio this coming Monday (November 24th @ 12 noon) of Thanksgiving…
terrasig | November 21, 2008Recent Wine Experiences - Mediterranean (and nearby) Island Wines
by Erleichda
Sweetpea and I enjoy (gentle) hiking vacations, and we share this fondness with a small group of other likeminded hiker friends. I attempt to steer our selected destinations to places where grapes grow, and this has brought us, so far, to Sicily and the Greek islands. So when the theme for the latest gathering of Jim's Disciples were wines of the Mediterranean and nearby islands, I was excited by the opportunity to explore some wines not heretofore tasted, and whose origins might provide the basis for future…
terrasig | November 20, 2008Just a quick reminder of who you're really supporting when you come by and click on this humble blog.
It's no secret that joining Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs.com can bring the blogger(s) a very small amount of compensation based upon grades of site traffic - depending on your traffic, this could be about as much as paying for your monthly highspeed internet connection at the house. But over the course of a year, this ends up being more money than I donate personally to my public radio station.
Anyway, when I started Terra Sig at the old joint and was invited to join Sb, I was in a…
terrasig | November 18, 2008DrDrA at BlueLabCoats has returned with an outstanding post, entitled, "I want you to hear me, I don't care what you see...," that she wrote out longhand during her recent travels:
In my absence I picked up a whiff of a lot of chatter about what women scientists wear to work... or talk/write about wearing .... going on in the blogosphere. . .
You see- the struggle I'm in daily in my own life and career is not about appearances, and it is not about symbolism or femininity- and it is not about who I am as a person, my likes and dislikes etc. It is a struggle to be heard and taken seriously…
terrasig | November 16, 2008As if I don't already have enough to do, Comrade PhysioProf tagged me with this meme last night. I was also fortunate to be tagged by Isis the Scientist in her new digs at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess. So, since these folks seem interested, here goes:
5 Things I was Doing 10 years Ago:
(1) Gleefully watching my first PhD student complete and defend her dissertation.
(2) Liberating myself from a demonic, parasitic spouse.
(3) Starting a long-distance relationship with PharmGirl.
(4) Releasing my first co-authored book.
(5) Preparing my tenure dossier.
5 Things On My To-Do…
terrasig | November 16, 2008Picking up the Sunday paper after walking the PharmBeagle, I saw Dr Misha Angrist of the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy featured on the frontpage of the local fishwrapper. Ace higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, put together a lovely article on this local hero. As Misha notes elsewhere:
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it…
terrasig | November 14, 2008While I'm still compiling and formatting yet another fabulous overseas wine experience from Erleichda for today's main Friday Fermentable, I experienced a bizarre convergence last evening after writing my post on my dissertation defense anniversary.
After plowing through my post, I was catching up on Google Reader and was pointed to the latest post by writer-bartender, scribbler50, and his new blog, Behind the Stick. You must go read his post on, "yet another annoying snobbery afoot in that place I like to call bar-land. . .the newly minted single malt connoisseur."
The post by scribbler50…
terrasig | November 13, 2008For whatever reason, I woke up really depressed and exhausted today - pretty much for no reason, I think.
I checked my schedule on my Treo - today marks 19 years since my dissertation defense.
I remember being really depressed throughout writing my dissertation thinking, "is this all I have to show for this many years of public support for my training?"
My defense was on a Monday so I spent most of Sunday practicing my seminar in the room where I'd give it - it sucked so badly that I couldn't even get through it once.
When the time came, it was the most incoherent performance I had ever…
terrasig | November 12, 2008Via Robert A Guth at the Wall Street Journal, I learned yesterday of a great new feature from Google.org, the arm of the search giant dedicated to the use of information and technology for the global good.
Google Flu Trends is a joint effort with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the "prevention" part is always lost in the acronym, CDC). There you can track the number of influenza cases in the US and in your particular state, enter your postal code to find the nearest purveyor of influenza vaccines, and even download weekly raw data on regional flu cases (more detailed…
terrasig | November 10, 2008My long absence from home and the blog was followed yesterday by my lying on the floor and going through accumulated mail. These quiet times for "literature review," such as preparing the recycling and walking back from the mailbox, frequently provide me with blog fodder.
So I read with interest yesterday an Oncology Times article by Eric T Rosenthal from late last month on the Congressional appropriation of $4 million USD toward melanoma research:
Following passage by the House and Senate, and signing by President Bush, melanoma joined breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers as the only ones…
terrasig | November 7, 2008Please accept my apologies for not letting y'all know in advance that I'd be off to an undisclosed location for activities that would minimize or ablate my blogging for a few days.
In the meantime, I learned of a happy surprise just as I was leaving town: that Dr Isis received an invitation to join ScienceBlogs.com. You'll recognize Dr Isis as the author of On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, previously here and now up here with her inaugural post in the new digs.
Completely serendipitously, I wrote about Isis in my last post, many moons ago, about her commentary on a recent NEJM…
terrasig | November 3, 2008Is snarky honest real-time discussion of a paper's conclusions more constructive to the authors and the larger scientific enterprise than formal, reserved, and staid holding forth in the correspondence section of a classic clinical journal? Fact is that this discussion will be over even before the next issue of the journal comes out.
A really interesting interplay has been ongoing across the sci/med blogosphere following a commentary last Wednesday by Dr Isis on a NEJM correspondence, entitled, "Shifts to and from Daylight Saving Time and Incidence of Myocardial Infarction." (free full text…
terrasig | November 3, 2008Now THIS is frightening. A multitude of thanks to BrotherDrug for the gift certificate to their CafePress store, the DrugMonkey Blog SchwagShop. Seems that the good doctor has been rather generous of late toward his commenters as evidenced by other schwag showing up at JuniorProf and Dr Isis.
Isis claims that her sweatshirt runs larger than advertised by I'd have to say that my XL tagless(!) Hanes tee is perfect - I didn't show the back but it also has the large DrugMonkey logo over the grey monkey featured on JuniorProf's mug, similar to the back of Isis' hoodie but with DrugMonkey written…
terrasig | November 2, 2008If you haven't already heard it elsewhere, one of your favorite blogging physicians, Dr Val Jones, has recently hung out her own e-shingle at Getting Better with Dr Val. Many of you know Dr Val from her previous blog at Revolution Health, Dr Val and the Voice of Reason. Dr Val served there as Senior Medical Director and oversaw the growth of the consumer health portal as it grew to 120 million pageviews per month (!).
Here's how Dr Val describes her new digs:
Getting Better is the continuation of Dr. Val Jones' previous blog at Revolution Health: "Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason." The…