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grrlscientist | August 22, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 4520 - 1770 - 1483 - 1190 - 1114 out of 511 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. Many tens of thousands of votes have already been cast in this competition, so if the people who have cast their votes already decide to change them, they can significantly affect the outcome of this competition. The top four…
gregladen | August 22, 2009What the heck is that? Who cares!?!? Just go look at the totally rad graphics Matt has invented out of pure theory.
grrlscientist | August 21, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 4435 - 1759 - 1473 - 1176 - 1114 out of 511 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. Many tens of thousands of votes have already been cast in this competition, so if the people who have cast their votes already decide to change them, they can significantly affect the outcome of this competition. The top four…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009So…anybody with an institutional subscription care to send me a copy of this paper? My university's subscription only lets me see articles in this journal after they've aged for a year.
Smith HF, Fisher RE, Everett ML, Thomas AD, Randal Bollinger R, Parker W (2009) Comparative anatomy and phylogenetic distribution of the mammalian cecal appendix. J Evol Biol. 2009 Aug 12. [Epub ahead of print]
Already got it, thanks everyone!
gregladen | August 21, 2009Last night on a conference call she asked for radical action on a state by state basis, implying that states who do not want health care reform should take arms against the government. Or something like that.
Source: Rumor. So far. If I get more I'll let you know.
grrlscientist | August 21, 2009ScienceBlogs has indulged in a variety of online experiments to help make science and scientists more accessible to the public. On one hand, many scientific fields are complex and difficult to explain to the public, but on the other hand, scientists possess a lot of practical knowledge and skills that are useful to the public and, if asked, they can help the public think creatively and proactively about the many problems that face modern society. In my opinion, one of the best of these online experiments is the fledgling blog, Revolutionary Minds Think Tank. Besides having lots of fun blog…
gregladen | August 21, 2009I just came across the following video, which brought back certain memories.....
The particular memory this brought back has to do with those stars you see all over the walls and ceiling at the beginning of the video. After the three day long party, a hand full of us cheerfully cleaned up the room, and one of my main jobs was plucking stars and planets and other celestial bodies out of the virtual sky and sticking them back onto the paper they were originally shipped on so they could be brought to Las Vegas and re-applied to the Skepchick's party room there.
I think that after TAM in Las…
gregladen | August 21, 2009Feminist Majority Foundation reports on a positive development in a case of true over the top sicko right wing Republican offensive crapola. A law had been passed in the somewhat backwards state of Oklahoma requiring that prior to an abortion, the woman be subjected to a subjective description of her embryo/fetus by a doctor, based on an ultrasound.
Unfortunately, the law was struck down for good legal reasons but for irrelevant social reasons. Similar to a bill passed here in Minnesota a few years ago allowing any bozo to carry a gun any time and anywhere, this bill had multiple…
gregladen | August 21, 2009Apropos this, a repost:
The bodies of civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found after they had been missing for six weeks in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Mississippi, on this day in 1964.
From the bbc report of the time:
The three young men had left the CORE office in Meridian six weeks ago to investigate the destruction of a black congregation church in Longdale, Neshoba County because it was used as the site for a "freedom school".
The school was set up by Mr Schwerner as part of a wider civil rights campaign in Mississippi teaching black…
cortex | August 21, 2009There's an excellent and thought-provoking column in the latest Nature, arguing that basic neuroscience research will be weaponized unless researchers are vigilant. It is, of course, a scary prospect to imagine: a fleet of biological and chemical weapons targeted at the brain, and benefiting from decades of research into the details of our cellular pathways:
In October 2002, Chechen rebel fighters held more than 750 people hostage at a Nord-Ost production in a theatre in Moscow. The siege was broken only after special military forces used what the Russian Health Minister, Yuri Shevchenko,…
mspringer | August 21, 2009In the last post I made an offhand mention of wave dispersion, which is the phenomena of different wavelengths propagating a different speed. In general this does exactly what it sounds like it should. It disperses the light. If you start off with a tightly grouped bunch of runners, the pack will spread out as soon as they start running and the fast ones pull away and the slow ones get left behind.
If you're a physicist and your paycheck comes from making tightly-bunched pulses of light, this is a pain in the neck. You perform miracles of science with beautiful and tremendously expensive…
grrlscientist | August 20, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 4331 - 1753 - 1456 - 1172 - 1114 out of 506 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With only 6 weeks remaining, voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. The top four vote-getters are receiving most of these votes, so I need your votes more than ever to recapture first place, so please ask your friends and relatives to vote for me now! Further, there have been many tens of thousands of votes cast in this competition, so if…
gregladen | August 20, 2009Apropos recent news events, a repost
Scene: Berkeley, California, April 1986. A bar. Five conference attendees, myself included, grabbing a hamburger and a beer in a fern-bar on or near Telegraph.
All eyes are on the TV's mounted over the bar, where we watch footage of an air strike against Libya. This is the retribution by Ronald Reagan against Insane African Leader Muammar al-Kadafi. The White House was issuing statements about al-Kadafi's involvement in bombings in Europe, the OPEC oil ministry kidnapping, linkage to the infamous Jackal, and so on. Nikki, a friend and colleague,…
cortex | August 20, 2009The Netflix Prize will soon be over: it sounds as if the team "Bellkor Pragmatic Chaos" will be granted the million dollar prize, awarded for improving Netflix's own algorithm by more than 10 percent. As a heavy Netflix user, I certainly appreciate the design of the website, which does a masterful job of framing my DVD options. Although Netflix has hundreds of thousands of DVD's, I rarely feel overwhelmed by the abundance, since I'm constantly being bombarded with suggestions. Did I just add Season 6 of the Sopranos to my queue? Perhaps I should try the Shield, since I also liked The Wire?…
gregladen | August 20, 2009I and the Bird #107 - We and the Bird ... is in full flight at Liza Lee Miller's Blog. CLICK HERE. Read it, digg it, stumble upon it!
jwilbanks | August 20, 2009I wrote this up on the request of a colleague who heard my talk recently on open data. I'm posting it here for comment and adding some hyperlinks...
Moving from a Web of documents to a Web of data (or of Linked Open Data) is an oft-cited goal in the sciences. The Web of data would allow us to link together disparate information from unrelated disciplines, run powerful queries, and get precise answers to complex, data-driven questions. It's an undoubtedly desirable extension of the way that the existing networks increase the value of documents and computers through connectivity - Metcalfe's…
cwilcox | August 20, 2009You might have noticed I've been posting a little less frequently. In part, this is because being a grad student is far more busying than being on vacation. But another part is that I've started really using Google's Shared Items. Instead of writing a ton of posts on everything I find intriguing, I pass along some of the stuff that other people have written well about. So if you're looking for even more super science news or interesting tid-bits, subscribe to my Google Shared Item's Feed (click on the "atom feed" on the right hand side).
I also re-tweet interesting articles or items that I…