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grrlscientist | March 3, 2006Josh Hosler has catalogued all of Billboard Magazine's number one songs since 1940.
So what was the number one song on the day you were conceived? The day you were born? The day you lost your virginity? The day you graduated? The day you were married? Or whatever other day that has some sort of special significance to you?
I'm game; the number one song on the day I defended (18 September 2002) was "Dilemma" by Nelly featuring Kelly Rowland. Honestly, I've never heard it and the lyrics are really stupid. Perhaps that is why things have not gone very well for me? I defended when the wrong song…
stcynic | March 3, 2006Okay, I feel like an idiot. I posted the "friday night report" on Thursday night and went all day today thinking it was Saturday. In fact, I didn't bother putting money into the parking meter because I thought it was Saturday, so when I came out to my car I found I had a parking ticket. Dan and I got into my car and I said I don't understand, I specifically checked to see that the sign said the meters weren't enforced on Saturdays. That's when Dan said, "It's Friday." DUH. Sometimes I'm an idiot.
Today was fairly uneventful, i.e. boring. No real creationists came by, but we signed up a lot of…
tlambert | March 3, 2006 Dr Free-Ride may have Friday sprog blogging and PZ Myers may have his Friday cephalopod, but only here at Deltoid do combine them both! Here's an old picture of one of my kids with a cuttlefish he found on the beach. He dismantled it with the help of his brother and discovered that they contain a lot of ink. Also after a few days they smell bad. Really amazingly bad.
stcynic | March 2, 2006Back at my brother's house for the evening after the first few hours of the conference. Rob Pennock and I met at the exhibit hall and got our booth set up with our banners and posters and a very nice set of hominid skull casts. We have chimpanzee skull, A. africanus, H. habilis, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens. As expected, they drew some attention, including several people who wanted to take pictures of them. The exhibit hall was only open for 2 hours tonight and tomorrow morning the real conference starts, so it will be much busier then.
After about an hour, Rob went around…
grrlscientist | March 2, 2006I and the Bird, issue #18, is now available. It is hosted by Rob, author of The Bird Chaser.
This issue is a wake-up call to the blogosphere because it takes the form of a news story that was published on this very day, but 30 years in the future. This story reviews bird-related blog posts (all of us!), thus providing a window into birding and human-bird relationships at the dawning of the 21st Century. Fortunately, I do have a contribution in this carnival (I overcompensated for my recent Tangled Bank faux pas by sending them two submissions, only one of which -- the first -- was accepted).
grrlscientist | March 2, 2006Normally, I don't talk about something as mundane as snailmail because I tend to receive bills, junk, bills, crap, bills and more bills -- certainly nothing worth mentioning. But not today: today was special.
Today was special because I received a book. A book that I had to sign for. Since I had to sign for it, you should already know, dear readers, that this is not just any book, noooo sirree. This is a special book; it is the new, hot off the presses "LabLit" book, Intuition (2006, Dial Press), by Allegra Goodman, that I am going to review here. The book is due to be released on 7 March,…
stcynic | March 2, 2006I'm leaving in a couple hours to attend the Michigan Science Teacher's Association conference in Lansing. Michigan Citizens for Science has a booth there to recruit new members and get science teachers involved in the battles over science education in public schools. Rob Pennock, Greg Forbes and I will be acting as carnival barkers, trying to pry their attention away from all the corporate displays. Step right up, folks, step right up.
It should be a fun weekend, actually, as it always is hanging out with those guys. My buddy Dan is coming tomorrow to lend a hand as well and, presumably, to…
jlynch | March 2, 2006Still busy here. Grading and stuff, so it will probably be a few more days before I can blog on matters scientific. Took a break off last night to go see the legendary Buddy Guy play in Mesa. Take it from me, this is one blues guitarist you need to see before you die. Excellent show .... probably all told the best show I've ever been to.
stcynic | March 2, 2006This is pretty cool. You can see Timothy Sandefur deliver a speech on the subject of eminent domain on C-SPAN on Saturday morning. For more information, go here. If I had TIVO, I would set it up to record the show as I will be out of town at the time.
stcynic | March 2, 2006It seems that yesterday's post with the press release was a bit dated. An actual FTC complaint has been filed and you just have to see it. I'll post the entire thing below the fold, along with the "evidence" they attached to it, which amounts to an interview where Aiken kinda sorta denies being gay. Their complaint is that the record company conspired to create a public image that was different from his private life. Why this is the least bit surprising to anyone with more than basic brain stem function is beyond my ability to understand. I hope they don't find out that all that time that…
grrlscientist | March 1, 2006Hey everyone, I was busy working on my CV and on a class that I will teach soon, so I forgot to tell you that Tangled Bank (TB), issue #48, is available!
TB is hosted by blog sibling, Aetiology. Tara, the blog author, decided to design TB around the hypothetical scenario; "songs by groups that may have been in my iPod in high school (if iPods had been invented then)." Tangled Bank is a celebration of the best science, nature and medical writing recently published on a blog. There is plenty of good writing there to keep you busy during your lunch breaks. Unfortunately, I was a dork and FORGOT…
stcynic | March 1, 2006Brett O'Donnell, the coach of the Liberty University debate team, was on the Colbert Report last night on Comedy Central. He actually talked about how great it was to beat Harvard and with all the talk of how Liberty is "better" than Harvard and Dartmouth and Northwestern, etc, not once did he even hint at the fact that they are #1 only because they send a lot of teams to weak regional tournaments as well as enter lots of teams in novice events. They really are playing this meaningless #1 ranking up to a ridiculous degree. The NDT is coming up the end of this month at Northwestern. I'd be…
tsmith | March 1, 2006Welcome to Tangled Bank #48! Tons of good stuff to share with you today. I considered a number of themes, including the invisible theme (aka, none at all), but decided on "songs by groups that may have been in my iPod in high school (if iPods had been invented then)." Not that I have an iPod now, either, but y'know--hypothetically. Enjoy.
Don't Drink the Water
On the microbiology and infectious disease front, Sandra at Digital Bio fills you in on a project at Johns Hopkins, getting students involved in examining the microbial diversity all around them.
My own blogging has focused way…
stcynic | March 1, 2006This guy is quite a piece of work. He's kept up his string of lies over at BigC's blog in this comment. He writes:
Ed B has now expanded upon his original argument, and speaks against these people being treated as authorities - but that wasn't my original point, and isn't what he orignally said, either. Read his post again, if you will. He implied in his last paragraph that the list was worthless not because their position was a minority one, but that it was worthless due to the presence of engineers and chemists.
And he wonders why he's been "insulted" - he's been insulted because of his…
stcynic | February 28, 2006dlamming is back with yet another post where he waves his hands frantically to distract from his own distortions and misrepresentations. He begins:
Well, after a number of back-and-forth comments, Ed Brayton finally said "I don't believe that educated people in general have a good idea what evolution is about." If that's not elitist, I don't know what is, so I think I've proved my point.
Except that he hasn't shown me to be wrong in my claim that most educated people don't have a good idea what evolutionary theory is all about. How exactly is it "elitist" to point out that people who may be…
grrlscientist | February 28, 2006Here is a prehistoric album ("prehistoric" because it's vinyl) to separate UK bird lovers from their hard-earned funds. It is currently on sale on eBay in the UK (click image to be magically transported there). After you buy it, be sure to burn a CD for me.
Thanks, Ian!
stcynic | February 27, 2006You gotta love this. dlamming has a new follow-up post wherein he makes this highly amusing statement:
I called this position the absolute worst form of elitism. Now, Ed Brayton has a new post up, in which he admits he might be elitist, but he thinks that's ok.
Actually, I didn't say anything about whether I might be elitist in that post. What I did say was that the idea that what I said was the "absolute worst form of elitism" is idiotic rhetoric. And indeed it is, but apparently not enough so that dlamming won't repeat it here as though it hadn't been quite reasonably shown to be so already…
stcynic | February 27, 2006Jon Rowe has an excellent essay on the concept of natural law, its influences on the founding of this country, and the problem with taking Aquinas too seriously in this regard. Well worth reading.
stcynic | February 27, 2006Via another blog I found this post by someone named dlamming responding to my post about the DI's infamous list of "dissenting" scientists. Unfortunately, dlamming spends most of his time attacking a straw man version of what I said and presuming that I meant something far stronger than I meant (or said, for that matter). He quotes my statement that most of the scientists on the DI's list are not trained in evolutionary fields and then says:
In my opinion, this smacks of the absolute worst form of elitism. Taking this conclusion to its logical extreme, only evolutionary and developmental…