clock | May 11, 2007Happy birthday to Melissa McEwen aka Shakespeare's Sister, a great blogger and friend!
clock | May 11, 2007The 60th Skeptic's Circle is up on Infophilia.
The Carnival of Space #2 is up on Why Homeschool.
Friday Ark #138 is up on The Modulator
clock | May 11, 2007Oh, no, you are thinking that I was going to write yet another post about my own birthday. Fear not. This is a different kind of voyage that started on this day. On May 11th, 1820, that curiously important litttle ship, HMS 'Beagle', was first launched (via Beagle Project blog)
clock | May 11, 2007Sorry for the delay - I was exhausted and slept almost 10 hours straight ina deep coma once I got home....
Thank you all for birthday wishes both here, by e-mail and on Facebook.
I think I lost my fear of flying this week. Perhaps it was some magic in the little yellow pills that my wife gave me to take 30 minutes before take-off- but could the effect really last for 7-8 hours over two flights in each direction? Perhaps it was the nice, clear weather and prefectly executed flights. Perhaps it was my excitement about the trip itself. Perhaps it was cool people I sat with: a Siemens guy (…
clock | May 11, 2007Two years ago today, I posted this. One year ago today, I only linked to it, though I should have reposted it instead to start a tradition. Well, I'll fix that this year on this day - under the fold:
In exactly one year I will be officially old. Well, I may be old, but my memory is still in perfect shape.
I remember the dinosaurs. I had a baby Therizinosaur when I was a kid. With those long arms, he was great for hugging and for playing catch. But, that was 3500 years ago.
You should have heard how Noah was cursing the Big Contractor In The Sky! Too little time, too small budget. The…
clock | May 9, 2007A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.
- Paul Klee
clock | May 9, 2007Leaving RDU at noon, arriving in SF in the afternoon. If Janet remembers to bring her camera to dinner tonight, she'll post them on her blog so check it out later tonight or tomorrow. If she brings her laptop, I'll check my e-mail and comments (and of course my Sitemeter!) briefly - if not, I'll be back online on Friday. I have scheduled just a couple of little things to show up here automatically while I was gone....and you can always read the long post from earlier this morning.
I forgot, while there was still enough time, to pick up Professor Steve Steve, so he is not coming with me.…
clock | May 9, 2007Lots of interesting Neuro/Behavioral stuff came out lately, some really cool, some questionable...so you let me know what you think:
Brain's White Matter: More 'Talkative' Than Once Thought:
Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered to their surprise that nerves in the mammalian brain's white matter do more than just ferry information between different brain regions, but in fact process information the way gray matter cells do. The discovery in mouse cells, outlined in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, shows that brain cells "talk" with each other in more ways than previously thought. "…
clock | May 9, 2007Tangled Bank #79 is up on Epigenetics News
Four Stone Hearth #4 is up on Anthropology 2.0
118th edition of the Carnival of Education is up on NYC Educator
38th Carnival of the Liberals is up on That is so queer....
The latest Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Homeschoolblogger
clock | May 8, 2007Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
- Karl Kraus
clock | May 8, 2007I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will take you a couple of days to read through: a very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it.
Pigeons, crows, rats and cockroaches
I was born and grew up in a big, dirty city and I am not going back (my ex-Yugoslav readers have probably already recognized the reference to the good old song Back to the Big, Dirty…
clock | May 8, 2007It could be the seasonal use of pesticides, as this study suggests, or it could be seasonality in nutrition of mothers and infants, or seasonality of environmental stressors, or seasonality of mothers' hormone profiles. Most likely all or most of these and other factors play a role, and the relative importance of the factors differs between geographic regions, between socioeconomic strata, and between times in history.
But there is one factor that has been repeatedly demonstrated to play no role at all: the position of planets, moons and stars, as seen from Earth, at the moment of birth of…
clock | May 8, 2007If you are idle, retired or rich, if you live in (or are willing to move to) Oakland, California, if you have decent computer skills and if you want to help fight against Creationism, then this job is perfect for you:
From the National Center for Science Education:
Information technology technician needed by the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools, to maintain and expand NCSE's web presence, including maintenance of hardware platforms, determining software needs, and overseeing migration of content to a…
clock | May 8, 2007An Ancient Bathtub Ring Of Mammoth Fossils:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory geologists have put out a call for teeth tusks, femurs and any and all other parts of extinct mammoths left by massive Ice Age floods in southeastern Washington.
The fossils, in some cases whole skeletons of Mammathus columbi, the Columbian mammoth, were deposited in the hillsides of what are now the Yakima, Columbia and Walla Walla valleys in southeastern Washington, where the elephantine corpses came to rest as water receded from the temporary but repeatedly formed ancient Lake Lewis. PNNL geologists are…
clock | May 8, 2007Mendel's Garden #14 is up on Epigenetics News
Grand Rounds, Volume 3, No 33 are up on The Blog That Ate Manhattan
Carnival of the Green #76 is up on Eco-Worrier
clock | May 7, 2007Yup, I am teaching my accelerated BIO101 class tonight again. It is all about figuring out what is really important, stripping away everything else, trying not to fry the students' brains, and keeping one's own sanity in the process. I'll probably spend about 30 minutes on cell division and DNA replication, about 45 minutes on development, about 30 minutes on genotype and phenotype and about an hour on evolution, taking breaks between each two topics. In the end, if there is time, I may show an old movie. How old? Well, Steve Jones is in it and he looks young and he talks about his -…
clock | May 7, 2007Chris and Matt just announced their tour as well as a scienceblogs.com page dedicated solely to Speaking Science 2.0. You can check out the original blogospheric responses here (there have been only a few comments since I quit updating that post - most of the debate was highjacked by the interesting, but unrelated, discussion of the fight between religion and reason).
clock | May 6, 2007
This is going to be a challenging post to write for several reasons. How do I explain that a paper that does not show too much new stuff is actually a seminal paper? How do I condense a 12-page Cell paper describing a gazillion experiments without spending too much time on details of each experiment (as much as I'd love to do exactly that)? How do I review it calmly and critically without gushing all over it and waxing poetically about its authors? How do I put it in proper theoretical and historical perspective without unnecessarily insulting someone? I'll give it a try and we'll see…