bushwells | March 16, 2007
When I was a little kid, I frequently snuck into my older brother's room and read his collection of science fiction books and pulp magazines (see previous post on SF&F books). My mother, who was (and is) a big fan of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (a lovely book and recommended) thought I might benefit from reading some fantasy so she bought The Hobbit for me when I was 12 (6th grade; 1966, yes, I am that old) which I happily read. My brother, who was a college student at the time, then brought home The Lord of the Rings in 1968, and I devoured it. I re-read The…
bushwells | March 16, 2007C'mon, Mr. Wasp. You know you want it. You know you do.
Many thanks to my longtime (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Internet friend for getting this past the porn filters on my computer. This lovely orchid resides at the Krohn Convervatory in Cincinnati, OH.
bushwells | March 14, 2007After all my previous squawking about women reading science fiction and fantasy, OK, I mean hottus scientificas chicas who do or do not read the genre, I can't believe I missed this. Well, maybe I can. I am a near geriatric, after all.
Here are the various responses from my SciBlings: Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last Fifty Years.
The list is below the fold, and the books which I have read are in bold text: 36 of 50, if I counted right. My brother, 10 years my senior, is an avid science fiction and fantasy fan, and not only had many of these books in paperback form, but…
bushwells | March 13, 2007Long time no see.
I took something of a hiatus from the hootacular environs of the Refuge due to the Most Wonderful Time of the Year at DOPI:* performance reviews for 2006 and objectives setting for 2007. I know. I shouldn't whine and bitch about this, seeing how much work you academics put into the grant writing process in the unending effort to suck at the NIH/NCI/NSF/IYAH** teat, and I can appreciate how difficult that is. After seeing my grad advisor lose a significant grant (since regained) during the heyday of Ronnie Reagan years when 0.0000037% of all NIH grants were funded, I…
jfiore | February 20, 2007I've already mentioned the amazing amount of snow that's hit places like Redfield, NY, some 40 miles from us. For Utica, this winter is proving to be one of bizarre extremes. January turned out to be the warmest on record and over 4 degrees warmer than usual. In fact, I was running comfortably outside in shorts in the early-mid part of the month. Then, it turned bitterly cold and February greeted us with amazing amounts of snow. Barely two weeks into the month, Utica smashed the all-time monthly snow fall record, set in January 1890 at 59 inches, with a total of 63.1 inches. The 30 days up to…
jfiore | February 14, 2007I mentioned the intense amount of snowfall in Redfield, NY the other day (131" record breaker event, and enough for the Colbert Report to quip that there was so much snow that identical flakes were beginning to fall). Well, we're all getting pelted again (like the rest of the Northeast), but when you already have so much on the ground, a storm of this magnitude is just, well, goofy.
Consider some of the following links. Here's a list of closings in my town. The list does not include schools and similar public buildings (every single one is shut down). Kinda funny that so many churches are…
bushwells | February 14, 2007I took a pretty circuitous path to becoming a biochemist.
When I was six, I wanted to be a paleontologist, influenced by the "dinosaurs are cool" factor and my older (much older) sister's college textbooks which I attempted to read, trying to get a grasp of evolution. Then, I wanted to be a zoologist, specializing in mammology. Next, I imagined that I would be an astrophysicist (my brother's a physicist...not an astro- kind but a solid state physicist), and by the time I was in high school, I thought I'd be a good psychiatrist what with all my angst-ridden teenaged friends coming to me for…
bushwells | February 13, 2007As the grizzled matriarch of the Chimpanzee Refuge, it behooves me to call attention to tonight's Nova: The Last Great Ape. Our close cousins, Pan paniscus, the bonobos, are featured.
The PBS site's interview with Frans de Waal is worth checking out, and if you have yet to read his book, Our Inner Ape, de Waal's responses are a nice prelude to his expanded posit that we Homo sapiens, possess a little chimpanzee and bonobo within us.
I'll also take this opportunity to mention that today is my birthday, so I eagerly await my grooming session, and hope to see a lively bout of penis fencing…
jfiore | February 11, 2007After what was a mild and low-snow start of the winter, the past few weeks in upstate New York have been nothing short of blanketing. The town of Redfield has just broken the all-time accumulation record for a lake effect snow event. They beat the old record of 127 inches recorded at Montague in 2001 with a total of 131 inches, or nearly 11 feet of snow. The event in question is perhaps better termed as non-stop lake effect ribbons of snow over the course of days. In the past few days these bands have been scarcely more than 20 miles wide, but they haven't moved much. Redfield is probably no…
jfiore | February 10, 2007One thing I want to dispel immediately is that this is about normal "handedness". Sure, you can pick up a ball and throw it with your non-dominant hand/arm and experience the sensation of a "chicken-arm", but that's not the point under investigation. No, this has more to do with skills that are shared unevenly across the body (or even directionally on a side). Consequently, the attempt at a mirror image action produces sub-par performance in both the dominant and non-dominant sides. Secondly, we expect that repetition of an action will lead to better performance of that action, so repeated…
jfiore | February 9, 2007Owing to an overuse injury that has curtailed my running, I find myself gravitating toward my other main avocation, the drums, in order to maintain my sanity. These two things are at opposite ends of the spectrum: one is all about fitness, the other, skill. In the past couple of weeks I've been performing a little experiment on myself. I'd like to invite other Sciblings and readers to consider joining in with their own self-experimenting and report back their initial findings and then again weeks or months down the road. This could be interesting.
It all has to do with the body asymmetry of…
bushwells | February 9, 2007These otherworldly blossoms have no genus and species so I'll reach back to my plant taxonomy class and name them Chihuliensis fabulosa.
These were spotted at the Dale Chihuly exhibit in the New York Botanical Garden last fall.
For more realistic glass flowers, if you're in Cambridge MA, be sure to check out the glass flower collection, which receives a four pant-hoot rating on the Bushwellian scale of cool and unusual things to see in the Boston area, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History:
This unique collection of over 3,000 models was created by the glass artisans, Leopold…
bushwells | February 7, 2007 Mr. Beck's evocative text...
Then the overdressed fitness-jogger types carrying gallon jugs of water or grog, huffing like crazy and staring grimly at the ground. I'm not sure if I was last, but I do know that my not-so-novel strategy of trying to escape my morass of perambulatory incompetence by swinging my arms in furious, powerful arcs resebling George Foreman uppercuts didn't do shit for my pace or standing.
...deserves an illustration:
There are three more panels of this cartoon, a rare Bushwellian original, but there are bad words and stuff used in the dialogue. Wouldn't want to…
bushwells | February 6, 2007There's a little corner of the Internet which I stumbled across several weeks ago, a personal blog in which a young writer, her educational background in biopsychology, recently dissected an expansive and bizarre post-modern Milgram-esque experiment which occurred at fast-food chain restaurants throughout the United States during the span of 2000 through 2004, at which time a suspect was arrested, and the hoaxes ceased. The story, as reported originally in the Louisville KY Courier-Journal, A hoax most cruel in October 2005, outlines the history and consequences of a series of abuse by an…
bushwells | January 31, 2007Way back when I had a time to maintain a freshwater aquarium (pre-career and pre-children), my favorite fish were a pair of firemouth cichlids, Thorichthys meeki. This happy couple reproduced and guarded their eggs faithfully, only to have the plecostumus hoover 'em up when Mr. and Mrs. Meeki let down their guard one night. Cichlids are fascinating, and seem to me to be among the more intelligent and "personable" of home aquarium fishies.
Biologists at Stanford have confirmed my suspicions that cichlids aren't just a pretty scale or two. Logan Grosenick et al. report in the January 25…
jfiore | January 25, 2007At the beginning of each semester I give my new students what I've come to call "the metric lecture". Since we do everything in metric units and many of the freshmen have only a vague knowledge of the topic, I tend to go on a tear. Many years ago I put this all down in an essay for them to peruse (and hopefully, gain a little insight along with some humor). I recently updated it and present it for your own use or amusement.
Thoughts on the Metric and English Systems
Consider the following: The United States of America is the only country of any economic consequence on the planet that still…
bushwells | January 18, 2007Last Sunday, my son, who is home for his rapidly waning semester break, and I met a couple of friends in New York City where we enjoyed breakfast at good enough to eat followed by a visit to the nearby American Museum of Natural History. We dedicated ourselves to the fossil halls on the fourth floor of the museum. The halls were teeming with families. While we stopped in front of one of the big cladograms, we overheard a young father matter-of-factly telling his young children that "birds evolved from dinosaurs" as he gestured toward the dino family tree. Even if the museum was…
bushwells | January 13, 2007I just can't get enough of arachnids these days! Maybe I am unwittingly engaged in exposure therapy for my phobia.
This parody gives a nod to Peter Witt's research on spiders' web weaving abilities while under the influence. For a legit example, see A. Christiansen et. al (1962), "Changes in spider webs brought about by mescaline, psilocybin and an increase in body weight," Journal of Pharmacology And Experimental Therapeutics, Vol. 136: 31-37.
Hat tip to Kevin's mom for passing along the video link!
Note that the film was created by The First Church of Christ, Filmmaker, whose delicious…
bushwells | January 11, 2007Let's see, the Biz shot its right foot with the Vioxx debacle, then its left foot with Zyprexa (and others, but that's a recent one), so now it must look for another site for further damage of its tattered n' shattered image. Hmmm, how about lobbing off a couple of fingers? The FDA's approval of Slentrol, Pfizer's new chemical entity (NCE) for treatment of obese dogs ought to do the trick. Zing! There go the fingers.
As a minion of the dark overlords, I have to say that the announcement made me cringe for a number of reasons, the primary one being that this further solidifies the…
bushwells | January 11, 2007As an arachnophobe (see Do I Get a Badge for This?), the title alone, Spider Cries Out During Sex, was enough to give me a powerful case of the heebie jeebies. Then I started reading the article from Live Science:
While mating, female Physocylus globosus spiders emit high-frequency squeaks to let males know what they should be doing, a new study finds.
Called stridulations, the shrill cries sound like squeaky leather and are made in response to the rhythmic squeezing actions of the male's genitalia from inside the female during sex.
But wait! There's more! You can listen to the audio of…