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gregladen | December 18, 2008We've been doing a lot of math in our house lately. Amanda is working out the relationship between ATPase production and force in muscle (turns out that requires piles of math) and Julia is learning Algebra. Meanwhile, I've mainly been cooking dinner. Like this:
OK, OK, so that one does not work so well. This one is infallible:
gregladen | December 18, 2008
Actually, it's Lefortovo Tunnel, Russia.
Don't go to Russia. And if you do, stay out of the tunnel.
sb admin | December 18, 2008I received an email today from Leo Gerard, the Int'l President of the United Steelworkers, the 850,000 person-strong union of men and women employed in Canada and the U.S. who work in the metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and the service industries. His email simply read:
Excellent video celebrating 60th anniversary of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Please watch and remember how powerful it is to treat every human being and our planet with dignity. Regards, leo.
Dear President Gerard. Thanks.
Watch it (00:04:31)
Here are the "lyrics."
Every man, woman…
grrlscientist | December 18, 2008tags: annual science communication conference, ScienceOnline'09, SciO09, Sigma Xi, Research Triangle Park, science blogging conference, nature blog writing
Okay everyone, you may be aware of the fact that I will be co-hosting a session about writing about nature on a blog at the upcoming ScienceOnline '09 conference in North Carolina. As you can tell from the official schedule, I and my colleague, Kevin Zelnio, will be hosting our session first thing on Sunday morning, 18 January 2008. Of course, my goal is to make this a useful and productive time for all of you, whether you attend in real…
grrlscientist | December 18, 2008Here's some newly published blog carnivals to keep you informed and entertained!
Carnival of Evolution, issue 7. This little blog carnival is really starting to get a readship as well as attracting some interesting submissions, so please go there and enjoy the submissions they have!
Carnival of Satire, issue 108. Yes, it's a fun read, so don't miss it!
sb admin | December 18, 2008by revere cross-posted at Effect Measure
The Holiday Season is upon us so we won't post daily on the Public Health Conversation series. But you can join in at any time, in two ways. Effect Measure and The Pump Handle, the two blog sites hosting the discussion, have comment threads for each post. You can make a comment at any time on any post. If you want to see all the posts on this topic, just click the Progressive public health category on the left sidebar on Effect Measure. We will put an appropriate tag on The Pump Handle posts as well. If you have produced a more polished piece…
drorzel | December 17, 2008
Barack Obama Defeats Barack Hussein Obama | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"Though few had heard of the freedom-hating extremist before, Barack Hussein Obama quickly garnered attention in several key regions of the country, and saw his popularity buoyed by conservative talk-radio hosts, mass e-mail forwards, and thousands of Americans riding on the backs of flatbed trucks."
(tags: politics US silly onion)
PhDinHistory: Social Darwinism or Meritocracy in the History Profession?
"Would you like to know where you will end up in the history profession? I have discovered a formula…
jwilbanks | December 17, 2008Keita Bando Mr. Komada has translated the SC video done by Jesse Dylan into Japanese. Keita told me about this and has used the service dotsub to add the subtitles to the video directly.
See what happens when you empower users?
(of course, if he's given us the slip like that Max Planck journal who published a brothel ad on their cover, consider me fooled!)
purepedantry | December 17, 2008Here is a cool idea. Researchers in Britain have come up with injectable bone:
"Injectable bone is the first delivery system for stem cells and growth factors that forms a material with the strength of a bone," said Robin Quirk, a pharmacist and co-founder of RegenTec -- the University of Nottingham, In England, spin-off company commercialising the technology.
...
Quirk said he hopes that injectable bone might one day reduce or eliminate the need for bone-grafts to repair skeletal defects and fractures -- which often require painful invasive surgery.
Not only does the technique reduce the…
sb admin | December 17, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
A couple of ideas are floating around in the comment threads as part of an initial conversation about public health. I'm not surprised they seem to be on different topics and have the feel of talking past each other. We are not used to discussing basic assumptions and have an immediate tendency to talk about what we know, what interests us particularly, what bothers us most or what is our particular preoccupation. Many of those things turn out to be really important for public health and there are plenty of reasons for talking about them.
Annie,…
gregladen | December 17, 2008Science Pundit sent me this cool movie:
Thank you some crazy Iraqui guy for giving us a way to remember George W. Bush that is as enduring as Fala the Dog and the New Deal for FDR, the "I am not a Crook" speech and Opening Up China for Richard Nixon, Winning the American Revolution even though you really started the whole damn half century of war at Monongahela (or was that Tanacharison) for George Washington, and The Emancipation Proclamation and his wife's strangely modern out of control shopping habits for Abraham Lincoln.
Except less balanced. Indeed, perhaps unbalanced.
May the…
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask.
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Genes and Genomes
Gene by PZ…
gregladen | December 16, 2008It is very interesting to watch the Canvasing board ... the Minnesota Secretary of State, a Supreme Court Justice or two, and so on, going over every single one of the challenged ballots.
The way they seem to be doing this is this: They are going through all of the Franken Challenges first. The Coleman challenges have to wait because Coleman's people fucked up their removal of some of the challenged ballots so their ballots will not be ready until tomorrow. So, they go to each ballot, and it seems that Ritchie makes a move to reject the challenge each and every time, and then the other…
pharyngula | December 16, 2008If you haven't been keeping up with the New Humanist Advent Podcasts, there are many new ones since I last mentioned them: Ben Goldacre, Martin Rowson, Chris Addison, Ben Miller, Andrew Collins, , Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and Laurie Taylor. I do have to mention that Eddie Izzard totally stole my suggestion of celebrating Isaac Newton, and turned it into a weird ramble about how intelligent people have bad parties where there is no bathing and no shagging going on. I think I am horribly offended, even if it is true that very few parties that I've attended have involved…
cortex | December 16, 2008When people ask for me tangible examples of how art and science can work together to discover new things - that's a theme of my first book - the first thing I mention is food. In recent years, chefs like Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz have demonstrated the possibilities of translating the lab techniques of modern science to the kitchens of fancy restaurants. And so you get things like the El Bulli "olive," which is actually a sphere of olive juice, encapsulated in a thin gel made from sodium alginate. Place an "olive" in the mouth, and a burst of briny liquid is released.*…