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jlynch | February 22, 2008Bruce Gordon is expectorating on Dan Brooks’ post on the ID conference (see here). Remember that Brooks received an email after the meeting "stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting,and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the edited volume of presentations, in about a year, and wanted all of us…
cortex | February 22, 2008Loyal readers know that I'm a big fan of Jason Kottke. His blog, aptly summarized as "liberal arts 2.0," is a consistent source of the best and smartest links from around the web. So I was really flattered to get interviewed on the site:
Kottke: Are there other books/media out there that share a third culture kinship with yours? I received a copy of Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences for Christmas...that seems to fit. Steven Johnson's books. Anything else you can recommend?
Lehrer: I've stolen ideas from so many people it's hard to know where to begin. Certainly…
cmcclain | February 22, 2008Currently a biodiversity crisis is underway, which many have termed the sixth extinction. E.O. Wilson in 1993 suggested 30,000 species extinctions occur per year, roughly three per hour. How many species are there on earth? That is a tough nut to crack. An extremely conservative estimate would be 3-5 million, but it's likely closer to 30-50 million. In the deep sea there may be as many as 10 million.
The other side of this crisis reflects our lack of knowledge of biodiversity on earth. Less than 2 million species have been described. By E.O.'s estimate we are losing species faster than…
cortex | February 22, 2008Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts:
Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Neither possesses the type of heavy industry that can be found in the West, or for that matter in Russia or India. Still, only the United States and China are responsible for greater levels of emissions. That is because tropical forests in Indonesia and Brazil are…
gregladen | February 22, 2008I and the Bird #69 is here, at Living the Scientific Life.
Also, check out this info on a new carnival, called "Carnival of the Cities."
cortex | February 22, 2008In my recent Seed article on science and art, I wrote about how we need to foster a new cultural movement:
If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement--perhaps a fourth culture--is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new…
cmcclain | February 21, 2008In this detail from a Landsat satellite image from 1999, individual vessels in the Gulf of Mexico can be seen as bright spots at end of sediment trails. Other bright spots are fixed oil and gas production platforms. More here. Hat tip to A. Creekmore
petnoyer | February 21, 2008
Leonardo Solaas is an artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina who invented a way for you to generate your own original digital art pieces based upon your input of a few keywords. Kevin generated the image above using the words "giant squid". It's one of a kind. Check it out, the software description follows.
Dreamlines is a generative drawing machine that creates a unique, ever-flowing painting based on words you choose. Related images are gathered from the Net and used as raw material for the construction of your "personal dream".
You can input words like "wandering albatross" or "talking fish…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Carnival of Cities
Now that I have finished putting together the 69th edition of I and the Bird (*whew* that's hard work!), I now am focusing my energies on another blog carnival that I am hosting next week: Carnival of Cities. This is a relatively new (to my readers) blog carnival, but that is alright because the 20 February edition was just published for you to read. So even though many of you are not familiar with this blog carnival, you now have the opportunity to read the most recent edition and get some ideas for your own blog entries that you can share with all of…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Tangled Bank
I have been so focused on putting together the blog carnival that I am hosting, the 69th edition of I and the Bird, that I have not yet mentioned that my favoritest of all blog carnivals, The Tangled Bank, is now available. Go here to read the 20 February edition, and don't forget that one of my contributions was included, too.
kevin z | February 21, 2008Rhizocephalan overlord,Peltogaster paguri (tubular thing sticking up on the right), infecting hermit crab. Photo courtesy of Jens Hoeg, used with permission.
Rhizocephala are curious creatures. They are actually in the Cirripedia, the group containing your friendly neighborhood penis-waving barnacle. They look nothing like a barnacle (in case you hadn't noticed). We know they are a barnacle because they share the same larval stages and characteristics only found in the barnacles: cyprid larvae. Below the fold are some pictures of a deep sea rhizocephalan from my own research.
This poor…
gregladen | February 21, 2008The current edition of this fairly new web carnival is here. It's interesting.
cmcclain | February 21, 2008Anoxic (extremely low or no oxygen) zones occur naturally in the oceans. Typically they occur below areas of upwelling such as off Chile. A naturally occurring anoxic zone also occurs off the western U.S. coast from around 600-1200m. The occurrence of this zone reflects ocean circulation in the Pacific that results in a very old and deoxygenated water mass circulated to the our coast. Coastal upwelling compounds this phenomenon. Anoxic conditions can also result from anthropogenic effects such as the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, where nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from the Mississippi…
cortex | February 21, 2008First, a warning: the video below is very disturbing. It's footage of cows being prepared for slaughter at Hallmark Meat Processing. This video, which was surreptitiously shot by the Humane Society, led to the largest ever recall of beef - 134 million pounds - although most of the recalled meat has already been eaten. (A big percentage of the beef went to the school lunch program.) The NY Times today had a good editorial on the whole affair.
I like to eat meat, too. I'm not a vegetarian. (Although I am getting increasingly vigilant about only eating humanely raised meat.) The reality, though…
cortex | February 21, 2008A fascinating, if macabre, interview with a man who intentionally cut off his hand:
BME: We've touched on it, but I guess now the big question -- "why"?
I'm one of those body-integrity-disorder (BIID) dudes. As long as I can remember, having two hands was a defect in my body -- something that was not meant to be. For me philosophically, it's totally different from body mods, which I also have. I don't think I had any choice. My right hand just didn't belong to my body. As a little kid, I soon learned that I was the odd one out, and that amputation was a bad thing. My parents reprimanded me…
petnoyer | February 21, 2008Congratulations to the US Navy for skeet shooting a satellite from ships at sea. You have to admit, its an impressive feat. But will it become a trend? One candidate isn't even off the ground yet.
Satellites used to fly instruments designed to do one thing, like measure ocean color for instance, but nowadays instruments are multi-tasking like the rest of us. In the scientific space race, this means some instruments suffer the cost of others. Space veterans tell me we're sending the technical equivalent of a Swiss Army knife into space rather than a simply designed, nicely weighted piece of…
cmcclain | February 20, 2008
Since my posts about the Black Swan, I have somehow made it on the Odyssey email list. Once a month or so I get an email about buying goods and artifacts. Admittedly, I find these emails extremely irritating. Like I got nothing better to do with my time than weed through a lot of junk email. Moreover, I am a post doc with limited funds. I will absolutely never have an extra $2500 laying around to purchase a Cathedral 3 Berry Pickle Bottle. I don't even like pickles.
Today's email from Oydssey completely hooked the consumer. Yes, I am a mindless drone and here is my money. I am…
cortex | February 20, 2008Michel Foucault wouldn't be surprised to learn that yes, even comedy is defined by power-relations. Here's Ellen Horne of Radio Lab:
Tyler Stillman, a psychologist at Florida State University, did a series of studies showing that laughter isn't always about how funny something is. He found that when a boss tells a bad joke to an employee, the employee laughs. But when the employee tells a bad joke to a boss, well, you can hear pin drop.
The Radio Lab team then decided to replicate the study in their own office. The joke really isn't funny, but it is funny watching the influence of social…
cortex | February 20, 2008Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified monetary reward. (The money is the incentive part of InnoCentive.) The questions on the site are astonishingly varied, and include everything from a food company looking for a "Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" (Reward: $40,000) to a research foundation looking for a "Biomarker for measuring disease progression in Amyotrophic Lateral…