jfiore | June 14, 2006I just saw a few minutes of Fox's Bill O'Reilly being interviewed by Matt Lauer on The Today Show regarding President Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad along with other issues of the Iraq war. Undoubtedly, there will be some folks who will parse and critique every word that Matt and Bill uttered, some positive, some negative. There will be the Fox minions who hang on O'Reilly's every "non-spun, fair and balanced" word as well as those who agree with Keith Olbermann's ongoing assessment of BO'R as a multi-time candidate for "Worst Person in the World", whether it involves gross distortions of…
jfiore | June 12, 2006Sometimes the little things mean a lot. I normally get out of bed around 6:00 AM. In the foothills of the Adirondacks in mid June, this means that the sky has been light for an hour. I like this. For whatever reason, my brain just doesn't want to fully engage in the morning when it's dark out. This makes the winter months a drag, but come summer, I'm in heaven. Mind you, I don't need it to be light at 4:00 AM so I am a big fan of Daylight Savings Time (DST). I love the extra hour of sun in the evening, seeing the final rays disappear well after 9:00 PM.
One of the ideas behind DST was energy…
bushwells | June 11, 2006 I have the great fortune of attending yet another protracted managerial development class for the entirety of this coming week. I can't tell you how delighted I am to be doing this. Do I need to add another scoop to the pile of steaming sarcasm? Most scientists I know in the corporate world view such management training with biting world-weary cynicism although we pony up and check off the boxes by enrolling in the classes. However, the marketing and sale types enthusiastically feed off these corporate training buffets for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The scientific aspects of my job are…
bushwells | June 10, 2006Yikes! An "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question already? Well, had I been a SciBlog some weeks ago, I would have quickly answered in response to the question (paraphrasing here), "Which modern technology should not have been invented?" My answer: pantyhose. They are the garments of pure unadulterated torture. Oh, wait, now what is today's question? Here we go:
"Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
In an alternate universe with stretched time and dollars, I would be a botanist…
bushwells | June 9, 2006What a day! Between the scintillating launch of the new blogs (really, I am all aquiver) and doing my best to be irksome in my actual day job, I am more than ready to knock back a dry vodka (Grey Goose, preferably) martini at my favored watering hole in Einsteinville.
Part of my job is to pass judgment on protein targets gearing up for screening campaigns. "Screening" refers to high throughput screening which is the bread and butter of discovery research in Big Bad Pharma. It's an automated process in which the general idea is to increase that needle in the haystack factor. This is…
bushwells | June 8, 2006So here we are, ready and willing to amiably groom our readers or grimace at them in fierce display. But for now, we are pretty darned excited to be here, and hence, the pant-hooting.
In January, I slapped up some commentary pertaining to Science Blogs, advertising, and Leonardos on my now rapidly senescing blogspot. I was intrigued, and maybe even a little intimidated, by the offerings in Science Blogs as noted in this excerpt of my 01/20/2006 entry:
The Chimp Refuge may never qualify as a lofty enough addition to Seed's select group. After all, our contributions are a bit scurrilous…