grrlscientist | March 21, 2006
Horrors! The Martian Landers, Spirit and Opportunity, are filming on the planet Mars RIGHT NOW with their electron microscope-cameras, but not sharing this important information with us. However, my army of spies found a classroom biology documentary from the future that you will enjoy (follow the link or view the embedded video above by clicking on the little arrow). Why? Because it is all about sex. SEX SEXX SEXXX.
(There, that should increase my traffic, ha!)
I must warn you, dear readers, there is some clay monster nudity, along with simulated stop-motion sex in this film. This film is…
grrlscientist | March 21, 2006
The sun and the moon over the North Pole.
Photographer: Unknown.
I am teaching a graduate journalism class at NYU today, so I won't be back at the keyboard until this afternoon or evening. Today's lecture? The wonders of writing about science on a blog. This will be an interesting experience for me because I am not a journalist and also because blogging is such a rapidly evolving cultural phenomenon that I think it is difficult to speak coherently about it.
So I will leave you with this lovely photograph that a friend sent to me to share with you. If you click on the image, a much larger…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2006
Do your eyes deceive you? Can you really trust your senses, or do they sometimes deceive you? Take this quiz to find out! It's a lot harder than you think. This quiz also includes an explanation for each question that helps you understand how your brain is "tricked" by your senses.
My score: 14/20. I guess all that Anatomy and Physiology teaching served me well! (i got 19/20 on the second try -- that line graphic is tricky).
I found it interesting that a crying baby is so danged loud (I thought my perception was simply a measure of my own annoyance level) -- nearly as loud as a pop concert…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2006So, dear readers, it appears that there is a movement underway to convene a congressional hearing to investigate the current administration's hostility towards scientists whose data are not in harmony with the party line. Do you know of any examples of scientists who have been muzzled by the current administration? Or perhaps you are one of these scientists? If so, please contact legislative assistant, Heather Parsons, or Dan Pearson, a democrat on the Science Committee.
grrlscientist | March 20, 2006
The Good News: Not extinct -- YET!
Portrait of the Sumatran Rhinoceros, Didermoceros sumatrensis.
Photo by Alain Compost (WWF-Canon).
For those of you who like to read about endangered species that have somehow managed to survive despite our best efforts to exterminate them, I have some good news! A small but apparently viable population of the Sumatran rhinoceros subspecies, Didermoceros sumatrensis harrissoni, is now confirmed to exist in the northeast state of Sabah on the island of Borneo.
The Sumatran rhino is comprised of several subspecies that are thought to be extinct throughout…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2006The Seed Media Offices recently sent a book to me to review. This book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (2006, Harper Perennial) is edited by John Brockman, publisher of Edge. The book is a collection of essays written by more than 100 scientists and other leading scholars in response to the question, "What do you believe even though you cannot prove it?" Each essay is blog-length, ranging between five and approximately 800-1000 words, so it makes for interesting thought experiments that you can easily read and contemplate while…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2006
This graph shows what two links from Daily Kos and one link from Instapundit in the span of two days can do for your blog traffic. For those of you who don't know, Daily Kos is a high-traffic politically liberal team-written blog, whereas Instapundit is a high-traffic politically conservative single-author blog.
This graph depicts traffic to Scientific Life during the previous 30 days, and the numbers along the x-axis denote the dates for the end of February through the middle of March. The green area shows the number of visitors, or "hits", and the purple area shows the total number of…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2006This was sent to me by a friend so I rewrote it a little and posted it here because I thought it might be useful to my blog sibling, Afarensis, in particular;
Anyone who has been job-hunting will probably agree that the interpretations for these bullet items (written in bold) that you typically see in job ads are (sadly) accurate;
Competitive Salary: We remain competitive by paying our employees less than our competitors.
Join our Fast-Paced Company: We have no time to train you and you'll be stuck introducing yourself to your co-workers.
Seeking Enthusiastic, Fun, Hard-Working People…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2006
Do you remember how, at some point in the recent past, I wished that the Harry Potter online quizzes were more challenging? Well, someone heard me. Because this Harry Potter quiz relies on questions written by readers, it nicely confirms my working hypothesis that the most difficult quiz/exam that could ever be written is the one composed by the students themselves. [flash required]
Since I spent most of last night watching Harry Potter DVDs, I thought this quiz would be easy. Oh, how wrong I was. Besides the fact that the questions are written by a bunch of 12 year old HP fanatics, these…
grrlscientist | March 18, 2006This is another in a long line of on-line quiz silliness.
You Are New York
Cosmopolitan and sophisticated, you enjoy the newest in food, art, and culture.
You also appreciate a good amount of grit - and very little shocks you.
You're competitive, driven, and very likely to succeed. (GrrlScientist note: um, yeah, whatever you say)
Famous people from New York: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Tupac Shakur, Woody Allen
What American City Are You?
What other possibilities are there? So far, I found Austin, Boston, and Miami. Oh, and Los Angeles.
tags: online quiz
grrlscientist | March 18, 2006
Does this picture remind you of anything? This clip came from a video that I have been enjoying this morning. The linked video by Texmachina depicts the opening credits for the The Simpsons television program using real life characters [runtime: 59 seconds] . There are other videos available on the linked site that you also might enjoy.
tags: The Simpsons, humor
grrlscientist | March 18, 2006In a few days, I will be speaking to a graduate student journalism class at NYU about science blogs and blogging and, because you are the experts, dear readers, I would like to ask you a few questions. I have already asked you what you do, where you live and your age (but please do tell me these things if you haven't already), but now I would like to ask you about blogs in general. Why do you read blogs? What is it that you get from blogs that you do not get from the media, books and email/IM? What other reading do you do (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.)? Do you also watch TV? What would…
grrlscientist | March 17, 2006Well, it's day two of jury duty. I have been sitting here in the juror lounge, trying not to freeze to death even though they are running the air conditioning on a 35-degree day, and I am spending more money than I am paid each day to access the internet so I can answer email and post little messages to my blog. Yes, my peeps*, it has been an interesting two days so far, and I have learned several important things as a result.
Lesson One: the people who are here with me for jury duty are really interesting. This leads me to ask; is this always the case, or did I just get lucky? Where'd they…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006
Carolina Parakeets, Conuropsis carolinensis, (also known as Carolina Conures)
Click image for much larger version in its own window.
Painting by John James Audubon (1785-1851).
Birds in Science
What is responsible for the brilliant coloring in birds? Kevin McGraw heads a group of researchers studying the function and evolution of bird coloration. McGraw focused his initial research on parrots, which are unusual among birds in their ability to display brilliant colors with little variation between species. Most animals appear to be incapable of synthesizing cartenoids, which make reds,…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006Okay, are you ready to feel like you really do deserve that drinking bout you've been contemplating recently? Well, let me help you make that decision with this little article.
If I wasn't cranking away at Birds in the News right now, I'd be joining you at the local watering hole five minutes ago.
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
-- Carl SaganA trio of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis.
Adult male (left) and female (lower right).
Painting by John James Audubon (1785-1851).
With every day that passes, the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker looks more like an apparition or, more likely, a case of mistaken identity. Bird artist and ID expert, David Sibley, and several of his colleagues, Louis Bevier, Michael Patten, and Chris Elphick, published a rebuttal that was released today at 2pm EST by the top-tier journal, Science (this rebuttal should be accessible…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006Peeps noun (sing.; peep): (1) short, soft, high pitched sounds or utterances, like those of a baby bird; chirps. (2) A shortened colloquial term for "people", referring to those people who live in one's neighborhood, now often denotes people with whom one is familiar and fond of; friends. (3) A colloquial term used by birdwatchers to describe small North American shorebirds, usually when they form a group comprised of a variety of species; sandpipers. Sometimes erroneously applied to any small brown bird species that is difficult for the observer to identify. (4) Product name for soft…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006I managed to get wireless access from the courthouse, yippee! So I am checking in to let you know that the blog carnival, I and the Bird, issue #19, is now available. It is hosted by my blog pal, Bora, author of Science and Politics. This carnival focuses on the best writing about birds and bird watching in the blogosphere that has been recently published and it is jam packed with all sorts of fascinating articles. Bora was so kind as to include a piece (well, a rant, actually) that I wrote, too!
tags: blog carnival
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006Thanks to the IT peeps at Seed Media for this nifty "scheduled post" feature because I have been playing with it all week long (I have used it only rarely since February after my initial disappointment when several scheduled messages didn't show up as scheduled. But I later learned that this featured was not enabled then).
Anyway, as I was saying, I love this "scheduled posting" feature and I am using it right now, in fact. As I write this, it is Wednesday night at 8pm. I am sitting in a local Starbux, peering out the windows while I piggyback on a free wireless connection and pretend to be…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2006One thing I try to do really well is promote any issue of a blog carnival that I host. I am certain that everyone does this, but because I did win a "biggest blog whore" award recently, I like to believe that I am somehow special in this respect (one disclaimer: the "Best of Blogs", or BoB, awards are limited to low- to moderate-traffic blogs, so you can think of them more correctly as "the best of the rest" awards). So let me toot my own horn for a minute because this issue of Tangled Bank (TB) has been linked since this early morning by several of the "Big Boys"; Glenn Reynolds at…