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grrlscientist | March 9, 2006After a delay, the 181st issue of the Carnival of the Vanities was just posted by Daniel at The Global Perspective. Daniel was kind enough to include one of my pieces with all the other fabulous writing that is linked there.
The Carnival of the Vanities is the grand dame of all blog carnivals, it was the one that inspired all the others on the web, including the Tangled Bank, which I will be hosting here in six days.
grrlscientist | March 8, 2006Yes, it's me again, my peeps. I am once more reminding you to send me something for my issue of Tangled Bank, which will be published here on 15 March! I have already received half a dozen articles, but of course, I want more because the public is hungry to read and learn more about science!
Article Submissions: email links to your submission(s) to PZ Myers, or to the Tangled Bank host [at] tangledbank [dot] net by 14 March 2006. Please write "Tangled Bank" in the subject line. All submissions will be acknowledged by email within 24 hours, so if you do not receive a response from me in that…
stcynic | March 8, 2006AP has an interesting article that includes many quotes from Justice Breyer on the functioning of the new court under John Roberts. He says there's more debate behind the scenes now, which is not a surprise. Insiders had long said that Rehnquist allowed very little debate during the justice's conferences before assigning the opinions to be written. Scalia had long complained about that and lobbied for more open debate among the justices.
stcynic | March 8, 2006Orac has the story on the latest attack on the Holocaust History Project, a group that fights the efforts of holocaust deniers. After over a year of cyber-attacks on their website, now their building was victimized by arsonists. I urge folks to send a donation along to the project to help them rebuild.
stcynic | March 8, 2006David Berlinski may be one of the lesser known ID advocates, but he is surely the one who is easiest to dislike. The man has turned the striking of a pompous pose into an art form. If you want to see his gift for ignorance-fueled condescension on full display, check out this post where he interviews himself. If you can walk away from reading that without wanting to smack him (metaphorically, of course), I suggest you read it again. It would make a perfect example for Andrew Sullivan's "poseur alert" series. He sniffs, he sneers, he dismisses virtually all of biology and physics, and he says…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2006Kim, an emergency room and critical care nurse and the author of Emergiblog, has published the latest edition of Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 24 (week 76), for all to enjoy. Grand Rounds is a weekly blog carnival that compiles the best medical writing in the blogosphere. This issue is fabulous. It is packed with lots of great material, including a piece written by me.
stcynic | March 7, 2006One of the truly violence-inducing aspects of modern life is the inability to get an actual human being on the phone when you call any customer service number. You have to go through an endless series of prompts to push the right numbers, designed to make you hang up in frustration so they don't have to deal with you. This might help - the gethuman database, which has instructions for how to shortcut those prompts and get to a real live human being when calling hundreds of companies.
grrlscientist | March 7, 2006A word cloud is a visual depiction of content (words) used in a body of text. The words in this cloud, are arranged alphabetically and depict more frequently used words in progressively larger fonts. This word cloud (pictured) was generated from my blog. You can generate your own word cloud, from your blog or website, or from a favorite passage of text, and print it on a t-shirt, either for yourself or for your favorite friend blogger. I am almost tempted, myself.
[your results will vary]
stcynic | March 6, 2006DaveScot has a strange and rambling post about the 2nd law of thermodynamics that includes one statement that totally jumps out at me. He writes:
The layman's expression relating to this is you can't unbake a cake. The reason why you can't unbake it is it would violate 2LoT. However, that's not quite right because a sufficiently advanced intelligence can unbake a cake. Intelligence can accomplish things that nature cannot and that includes violating 2LoT in relation to information entropy.
This strikes me as a nonsensical use of the word intelligence. No intelligent being that we know of is…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2006What should you study in college? I think I gave this on-line quiz a run for its money, as you will see from my scores (below the fold).
Did you earn a different major than the one the quiz diagnosed for you? If so, what was the major you did get and the major the quiz says you should get? What did you think of the questions they used to determine your major?
I think this is a fairly decent quiz, all things considered.
You scored as Biology. You should be a Biology major! You are passionate about the sciences, and you enjoy studying cell growth and evolutionary concepts which enable…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2006
Hey everyone, Carnival of the Godless, issue 35, is now available and, amongst all the great links they published, they also included a piece written by moi.
tags: blog carnival
stcynic | March 6, 2006Here's an interesting new blog, Evolution 101. It's owned by Zachary Moore, a molecular biologist, and its purpose is to explain evolutionary theory and the evidence for it. He already has informative and useful posts up about junk DNA and the definition of "species". This should be very much worth keeping an eye on.
grrlscientist | March 6, 2006I already have two articles for my issue of Tangled bank, which will be published on 15 March, but I need more!
Tangled Bank is a Blog Carnival that is actively seeking submissions of your blogged essays, opinion pieces, poetry, and cartoons that present or discuss topics that affect the natural (biological) world. As such, the guidelines describing what is appropriate subject material are very broad: basically; your submission must be about science, nature or medicine, and it must have been published within the past two or three months on a blog.
I am pleased to announce that I will be…
stcynic | March 5, 2006One of the great things about the internet is that it provides a place for inexpensive self-publishing, acting as an amplification on the first amendment - anyone can speak their mind and get their views heard. The downside, of course, is that anyone can speak their mind and get their views heard. But sometimes the results are so mind-numbingly idiotic that it makes for a considerable amount of amusement and March's winner of the Robert O'Brien Trophy is no exception.
Michael Westfall, editor of a webpage aimed at "Conservative Worker's (sic) of America", is one of those delightful wingnuts…
stcynic | March 4, 2006Okay, now that I've had a nap and I'm reasonably refreshed and alert, I can talk some more about the rest of the conference. On Friday (the day I thought was Saturday), we had one guy come by the table who was a student at Cornerstone University and he was a young earther. He's not a teacher, but he's getting his degree in education and hopes to teach science someday. We can only hope that he doesn't.
Greg engaged him in conversation for a bit and asked him, just out of curiosity, what he had been taught at Cornerstone about the geological evidence for a 4.55 billion year Earth. His answer,…
jlynch | March 4, 2006This is a little wierd. I took that "What space crew would you best fit in?" quiz that some other Sbers have been posting on, and like PZ, afarensis, and Chris, I came out with Serenity (Firefly): You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.
I wish I knew what that stuff about the Reavers meant. I've never seen Firefly.
Orac is the only one so far who ended up with a different crew. Should we rename this Serenityblogs?
stcynic | March 4, 2006Okay, as weird as the real Friday report was, as the old saying goes, you ain't heard nothing yet. I had the morning from hell. I got up at 6:30, had breakfast at a little restaurant I used to eat at regularly when I lived in Lansing, and drove to the convention center. A cop happened to pull up behind me and we were headed down Michigan avenue for a good 3 miles. No big deal, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I had my seatbelt on, I wasn't speeding, and so forth.
Just as I was pulling into the parking lot to the convention center, the cop puts her lights on and pulls in behind me. She walks up…
grrlscientist | March 4, 2006Sent by a friend for your enjoyment.
Okay, this astonishing series of four photographs also falls into my new "Wow!" category and will appeal to those of you who like to feed birds on your back porch and other places. [I am not showing you ANY pictures from this particular link because seriously, it'd ruin the surprise for you]
grrlscientist | March 4, 2006Cashing in a few of its nine lives, this cat was lucky to be alive when it was rescued from its predicament.
"The cat was just hanging under there," said Bristol Police Lt. Nick Guercia, who was one of the feline's rescuers. "How this cat didn't get killed is just amazing."
Which leads me to ask .. how the heck did it get there in the first place??
This lucky kitty is currently under a veterinarian's care in Bristol, Rhode Island.
grrlscientist | March 4, 2006FINALLY! The polls are open to vote for the 2005 Koufax Awards. The purpose of this round of voting is to identify the top 6-10 semifinalists for each category. Voting is done either through email or by posting your choice in each category's comments. As you might recall, Living the Scientific Life was nominated for a few of these award categories, as follows;
Best Blog (non-professional)
Best Expert Blog
Best Writing
Most Deserving of Wider Recognition
Best Individual Post for Tsunamis and Mangroves: The Shrimp Connection
Most Humorous Post for My Living Will
Best Series for Birds in the…