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cmcclain | January 24, 2008I'm a huge Seinfeld fan and predictably this is my favorite episode. The second clip is a wonderful animated version of the same episode.
grrlscientist | January 24, 2008tags: Carnival of Feminists, blog carnivals
The 67th edition of the blog carnival, I and the Bird, is now available for your reading pleasure. They included a late submission from me, too.
cortex | January 24, 2008Are too many neuroscientists are trying to popularize the state of their science? Jason Zevin thinks so:
At best, most of what is known is more complicated than I'm able to understand--much less explain to a general audience. And at least some of what I know about any topic in neuroscience is liable to have been discredited by a recent article in Science or Nature. This makes me cautious whenever anyone turns to me for an authoritative opinion on anything regarding the brain.
This is why it is always so disorienting to talk to people who have just read or are reading anything by Steven Pinker…
pharyngula | January 24, 2008It's all about that goofy Abunga bookstore nonsense — I love how a couple of paragraphs and a few hundred comments can make the zealots swoon.
There are lots of comments there, too, most seem to either dislike Abunga's model, or are defending it on false pretenses: "we MUST maintain the integrity of our free enterprise system"!!! It seems to me that having a swarm of people using their rating system exactly as they designed it is perfectly fair and a fine example of free enterprise in action.
grrlscientist | January 24, 2008tags: SEED magazine, sciencebloggers, Universe in 2008
Have you read your February 2008 copy of SEED magazine yet? I have received my copy and discovered that I have finally been published in a magazine after years of rejection letters (yippee) because the editor included a few of my responses to two questions they asked that were included in their "Universe in 2008" piece (p 69). The questions;
What would you like to be blogging about in 2008?
What do you fear you'll be blogging about in 2008?
My responses (only a very very few of which appeared in SEED) are below the fold;
In 2008, I…
sb admin | January 24, 2008Yesterday, the American Association for the Advancement of Science â the worldâs largest general scientific society â announced its co-sponsorship of the Science Debate 2008 campaign (which we at The Pump Handle support, and blogged about here).
In light of recent economic events, the press release announcing AAASâs co-sponsorship focused on the link between science and economic success:
âScience and engineering have driven half the nationâs growth in GDP over the last half-century,â said AAAS CEO Alan Leshner, âand lie at the center of many of the major policy and economic challenges the…
cortex | January 24, 2008I'm sorry about the lack of posts: I've been traveling. (I'm currently in the surprisingly chilly and wet Los Angeles area.) Given the turbulence on Wall Street recently, I thought I'd repost something I wrote last year on the neuroscience of regret and financial decisions. The experiment, designed by the lab of Read Montague, was simple: each subject was given $100 and some basic information about the "current" state of the stock market. The "investors" then chose how much money to invest in the market. After making up their mind, the players nervously watched as their investments either…
petnoyer | January 24, 2008The New York Times has a nice investigative piece on mercury levels in your local urban sushi parlors that briefly restored my faith in mainstream science journalism. The Times performed what you might call a guerilla science action, hiring a pair of local professors to help to analyze bluefin tuna samples from 20 sushi places around Manhattan. Every city should do this. It's a great way to support local science labs, buying them lunch and funding research at the same time.
Researchers from Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School found 5 of the 20 metropolitan restaurants serve tuna…
grrlscientist | January 23, 2008tags: Nature GeoScience, online access
The newest addition to the growing plethora of Nature journals, Nature GeoScience, is now available for free, although how long this will last is anyone's guess. I suspect that, like any good crack dealer, the Nature people will charge you a lot of money to access this journal's content after you're hooked. That said, the cover image for the first issue is really really nice, don't you think?
grrlscientist | January 23, 2008tags: Carnival of Feminists, blog carnivals
The 52nd edition of the blog Carnival of Feminists is now available for your reading pleasure. They included a piece that I wrote, so I am happy. Well, sorta. This carnival should be much MUCH bigger than it is, but .. whatevah.
grrlscientist | January 23, 2008tags: Observations on Life, blog carnivals
The 23rd January edition of the Observations on Life blog carnival is now available for your reading pleasure. It's a big one, so there's plenty there to read.
cmcclain | January 23, 20081960: The diving submersible Trieste descends to the floor of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known place on earth. via Wired
Some pictures from Kevin sent along awhile ago from a "old" submersible chapter from Hill's The Sea from 1963. The chapter itself is authored by Dietz and covers bathyscaphs and other deep submerisbles for oceanographic research. You can read and see more of the Trieste here. Also check out Sphere and Cheerios & Alvin
grrlscientist | January 23, 2008tags: ScienceDebate2008, AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science, presidential elections
Hey, everyone. I know I have told you several times that things are really gaining momentum with regards to the proposed ScienceDebate2008, an idea that originated here on ScienceBlogs by my SciBlings, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirschenbaum, but here is yet more proof that the idea is gaining more appeal: the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that it has joined our effort to mount a presidential debate on science, technology and the economy.
"…
razib | January 23, 2008A few days ago I put up a post, Why red Indians aren't white, where I offered up a rough & ready model for why the indigenous peoples of the New World are relatively swarthy at the same latitudes as Europe compared to Europeans. Regular readers of this weblog know that I have somewhat of an obsession with skin color genomics, and am puzzled by some issues, both empirical and theoretical, and have been attempting to generate plausible explanatory scenarios for what we know, and what we expect. But in the process I assume a lot, so I'm going to hit the primary background assumptions in…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2008If creationists are going to be stupid, couldn't they at least be creative about it? Once again, they misunderstand the potential and limits of experimentation. By way of ScienceBlogling Greg Laden comes this summary by Texan Citizens for Science of the new creationistChristian perspective of origins* offensive against biology:
Here, briefly, is the distinction: ICR believes that there are two types of science: (1) physical science, including physics and chemistry, that Creationists term "experimental, empirical, or operation science" because one can perform experiments (i.e. operations) on…