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cmcclain | June 1, 2008If you read Blogfish, MBSL&S, and DSN, I think you see that Rick, Mark, and I are not advocating a complete ban on eating seafood. To the contrary seafood tastes good, especially with lemon and butter, and tastes even better if harvested sustainably.
It is no surprise that the recent Cooking for Solutions event at the Monterey Bay Aquarium dedicated a session entirely to the Big 3. Rick Moonen, chef for rm seafood in Las Vegas and author of Fish Without a Doubt, noted that 60,000 lbs of shrimp are consumed daily in Sin City alone. However, eating bluefin tuna is like scarfing down…
pharyngula | May 31, 2008Is it biological or physical? It's a little unfair, you ought to be able to just click "physics" for everything and get a perfect score, but I managed to get 12 out of 12 by the simple strategy of calling anything interesting biological.
sb admin | May 30, 2008From April 12 to May 22, seven workers have been killed while working on antenna towers, many of which service our wireless communication system. One worker was killed in Wake Forest, NC; another in San Antonio; a third was killed in Frisco, NC; another in Moorcroft, WY; a fifth man was killed in Natchez, MS; another in Haubstadt, Indiana; and the 7th worker was killed near Miami. All seven workers fell from elevations. Â
I was alerted to this troubling trend on the website Wireless Estimator and in an article "Fatal Bandwidth" (Fortune, May 28, 2008 ) in which writer Philip Elmer-…
cortex | May 30, 2008I just wanted to thank everyone who came out to Water Taxi Beach last night to hear me, Dan Ariely and the Radio Lab team talk about the irrational brain. I had a great time. I hope you did, too. I'd never been to that "beach" before, but it's quite the spot to enjoy a beer, especially on such a lovely summer evening.
And if anyone has been to other Science Festival events, please put your comments below. I was especially excited about the creativity panel, with Ramachandran and Bill T. Jones.
Update: Pictures here.
cortex | May 30, 2008Before I became a writer, I assumed that some people (Nabakov, Updike, Bellow, etc.) were natural writers. They were born speaking in pithy prose, with taut sentences and interesting verb choice. But then, after reading all the usual Bellow masterpieces, I started reading his early novels. And I realized that even Bellow had to learn how to write. Nabakov juvenalia is similarly flawed. (Early Updike is still pretty fine, so maybe he's the exception.)
And then, once I started writing, I realized that writing is no different than any other craft or skill. It takes time and effort and the…
cortex | May 30, 2008Every science goes through several distinct phases. First, there is the dissection phase. The subject is broken apart into its simplest possible elements. (As Plato put it, "nature is cut at the joints, like a good butcher.") For neuroscience, this involved reducing the brain into a byzantine collection of chemical ingredients, from kinase enzymes to neurotransmitters to sodium ions. (Let's the say this phase began with Ramon y Cajal.) Then, there is the model phase. Scientists begin tentatively trying to figure out how these parts interact. Finally, once the models start to make sense,…
cmcclain | May 29, 2008
I am a big fan of Slinkachu out of London. The art is best described by the subtitle of the project itself "A Tiny Street Art Project...little hand painted people left in London to fend for themselves." Visit the blog to see more.
kevin z | May 29, 2008I really love that quote from Alex Wild, by the way.
Brian Fisher (my former Evolution T.A. from ye ole UC-Davis days) and Alex Smith make open access history by publishing a taxonomic paper in PLoS ONE. It doesn't matter that this paper is about ants, not deep sea ants either like those discovered from whale falls above. I mean really, everyone knows they are just derived crustaceans anyways, by extension they are honorary deep sea taxa. Some amazing blogger already discussed the paper anyways.
This is a huge step forward for taxonomy and PLoS ONE made the right decision to dive into…
cmcclain | May 29, 2008
8ft and 1 inch is the length of what is thought to be the largest fish ever line-caught fish. The massive halibut was caught by an angler in Norway. To bad Atlantic Halibut is on the Seafood Watch avoid list. Along with other Atlantic flatfish, halibut are still in decline. Moreover, the fishery often uses bottom trawling. The good news is you can eat Pacific Halibut as long as it is not gill-netted.
laelaps | May 29, 2008Even though my brain was a bit heat- and math-addled by the time I got home from class last night (I spent all day at a baseball game the organization I work for took us out to and then spent the time between 6 and 8:30 PM in math class) I still managed to add a few more historical tidbits to my book. (I didn't expect to get so sunburned at the ballpark. I seem to have developed a strange sort of countershading where my arms are red on top and white on the bottom.)
The first new section I added dealt with some of the earliest discoveries of fossil humans in Europe, particularly the "Red Lady…
goodmath | May 28, 2008 During my Haskell tutorial, I used balanced binary search trees as an example. I've had people write to me asking me to write about that in a non-functional
programming post, because the Haskell one got too tied up in how to do things
without assignments, and with tail recursion.
Binary search trees (BST) are another one of the really fundamental simple data
structures. They're conceptually similar to heaps - they're also a kind of size-ordered binary tree with O(lg n) performance - but they've got a different set of basic invariants to represent the different performance goals.
The goal…
mixingmemory | May 28, 2008After my call for puns, I got some really bad ones, but I think I may have found the worst pun ever, and its a science pun too (via toothpastefordinner.com
Ouch!
cmcclain | May 28, 2008
Here's a quiz for you kids. Which of the habitats above possesses the most microbes? A. Fresh Volcanic Basalt on the seafloor, B. Sargasso Sea Water, or C. Farm Soil
A recent study by led by Santelli in Nature provides an answer that may surprise you. It turns out at A and C are the right answer.
We demonstrate that prokaryotic cell abundances on seafloor-exposed basalts are 3-4 orders of magnitude greater than in overlying deep sea water. Phylogenetic analyses of basaltic lavas from the East Pacific Rise (96 N) and around Hawaii reveal that the basalt-hosted biosphere harbours high…
grrlscientist | May 28, 2008Well, nothing, really.
[NOTE: I put this commentary under the fold so it is not mirrored all over the intertubes by those four or five content-stealing sites out there].
Actually, I have been trying to get a few things straightened out in my life so I can once again focus on writing for you -- which is the only thing (besides my beloved parrots) that gives me joy.
Unlike most people, who can function in their personal and professional life under the most dire and bleak of circumstances (how do they do it?), I am ashamed to admit that I am not one of them. I sincerely wish I was. But when I…
gregladen | May 28, 2008Encephalon - 46th Edition
Grand Rounds, 4.36
Carnival of Political Punditry - May 25, 2008
Carnival of the Liberals #65: Skepticism and Politics
Gene genie #32 - googling the genie
Carnival of the Green #129
Carnival Of Homeschooling #126
kevin z | May 28, 2008Last night I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Chad Orzel, who just so happens to blog right here on SEED ScienceBlogs at Uncertain Principles. Chad is a physics professor at Union College and blogs on everything physics! He was in merry ole Penn State for a conference so RPM, who blogs at evolgen and is one floor above me, Prof. Steve Steve and I took Chad out for a night on the town. Copious rounds of beer (when their draft menu wasn't lying to us) were consumed an rambunctious conversations on string theory, blogging, publishing and science in general were conducted. Thanks for stopping by…
laelaps | May 27, 2008If I only averaged one new page each day, within a year I would have a whole book. My wife has said it over and over again and still I never feel quite satisfied with what I've written, almost as if I would expect myself to simply unload everything I knew in one sitting and have a book by the time I collapsed at the desk. I wish I had more time to read and write, but various errands, meetings, and other events have kept me so busy lately that it's difficult to find time to devote to my non-blog projects.
May isn't even over yet but I'm already starting to feel the pressure; I don't want to…