grrlscientist | February 19, 2006
I finally escaped domestic misery (laundry; a necessary evil that, in NYC during the winter, requires cross country skiing gear, assorted pocket warmers lest my digits freeze off, and a pack animal -- I prefer a llama because they are cute and fuzzy, and can climb stairs) and discovered that the Carnival of the Godless, issue 34, had been published today. This biweekly anthology of godlessness actually included a piece that I wrote so long ago that I forgot all about it. Well, sorta.
tags: blog carnival
grrlscientist | February 18, 2006Today, I received a book about Darwin in the mail that is hot off the presses (release date: 7 march 2006). I will post a review of this book sometime late this week. I also just finished browsing "the big three" journals (Nature, Science and PNAS) for the week so I will have some cool science to tell you about very soon. But until that time, I have something that you might enjoy (click on the image to stream).
Thanks, Dawn!
grrlscientist | February 18, 2006Thanks, Cheri, for making me smile.
Reasons that it is good to be a woman:
1. We got off the Titanic first. 2. We can scare male bosses with the mysterious gynecological disorder excuses. 3. Taxis stop for us. 4. We don't look like a frog in a blender when dancing. 5. No fashion faux pas we make could ever rival the Speedo. 6. We don't have to look at the opposite sex to amuse ourselves. 7. If we forget to shave, no one has to know. 8. We can congratulate our teammate without ever touching her rear end. 9. We never have to reach down every so often to make sure our…
grrlscientist | February 16, 2006
Bald eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus.
Click image for larger view in its own window.
Birds in Science
A fossil of one adult Psittacosaurus dinosaur surrounded by 34 juveniles (pictured), has provided the most compelling evidence to date that dinosaurs raised their young after hatching. But what makes this 125-million-year old fossil find from Liaoning province more convincing is that the skeletons are complete, and crowded together in life-like positions with their legs tucked under and heads raised, indicating that they were buried alive rather than swept together after death. âIt looks…
grrlscientist | February 16, 2006The 2005 Koufax Awards for "Best Expert Blogs" have now been compiled for your reading pleasure. This category seeks to honor those who bring particular expertise, by way of knowledge, experience, or academic achievement, to a particular topic. As the years have passed, it's become more difficult to compile as many bloggers have essentially, through their own work and research, become the "experts" we know and trust for our information on important topics. However, outside of the blogosphere, the meaning of "expert" is more proscribed, and so the people administering the Koufax Awards are…
grrlscientist | February 16, 2006
Hey everyone, I and the Bird, issue #17, is hosted by Wild Bird on the Fly. In honor of this issue of the I and the Bird carnival, Amy presents the first annual bird festival, an online celebration of good food and wild birds, including a wonderful poster designed by Amy especially for this occasion (above). The carnival links to 25 or so essays, including one written by me.
If you love birds, please consider writing and publishing an essay about them on your blog and sending the link to the next I and the Bird host, Rob, before 28 February. The next issue will be published on 2 March at…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006After complaining nearly ceaselessly to the good peeps at ScienceBlogs.com about the font, I went ahead and changed it myself to Garamond Georgia for the post body. Despite my inexperience with MovableType, inexperience that led to problems with the overall format of the blog itself, I actually did intend to accomplish this one teensy thing. I like this font. Then, at the request of one reader, I also changed the font for comments to Garamond, but I do NOT like that. Do you?
Hopefully, I will have something more substantial for you to read tomorrow (and definitely by Friday, when Birds in the…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006The 2005 Koufax Awards have finally compiled a list of all their nominees for Best Writing and I am included. As usual, there are approximately a bazillion nominees, but you can find me between the top and the middle of the list as "GrrlScientist". They present the nominees so you, dear readers, will have a chance to read at least some of them before voting has commenced. Apparently, there will be several "rounds" of voting before the final award winners are named. They claim that "round one" voting will begin sometime next week (or at least sometime before 2007 has arrived).
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006
A friend, Ian, sent me a link for yet another Harry Potter Quiz so of course, I had to share it with you! I really liked this quiz because, unlike most web-based quizzes, this one is top rate, featuring wonderful graphics and music. I only have two complaints; they should ask more questions and the questions should be harder!
What was your score? My score is below the fold ..
As you correctly predicted, my quiz score was 100% -- LOTS better than my US geography quiz scores and better even than my Asia geography quiz scores (GASP!).
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006Okay, I am back in business after finally resolving the coding issue on my blog, thanks to kind advice from my blog sibling, Tim.
Several blog carnivals have been published recently that will interest you. First, my favorite blog carnival, Tangled Bank, issue 47, was published by Kete Were. 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. They also included a piece that I wrote.
The granddame of them all, that blog carnival that started off all blog…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2006
Happy Valentine's Day to all my readers, especially those of you who, like me, are alone today. As an added bonus, you can print out this valentine, tape it to your desk and tell everyone it is from a secret admirer!
grrlscientist | February 13, 2006 Okay, I want to brag. One of my most favorite-ist stories among all those that I've written was noticed and appreciated by the gods from the Church of the Flying Electrons, dear readers. I just hope that history repeats itself. Soon.
Unfortunately, I had no clue this was going to happen, so I began my template modification project in earnest this evening, shortly before the link was made, so things are rather untidy here right now.
grrlscientist | February 13, 2006
The Big Apple Blog Festival (BABF), issue 25 is now available. The BABF is a representative roundup of the previous week's posts by NYC bloggers, and it is packed with lots of NYC goodness! Also, I am pleased to tell you that one of my pieces was nominated to this festival (you will have to go there to learn which one).
The Big Apple Blog Festival likes to go on tour so if you have a NYC blog or you blog about NYC and would like to host an upcoming BABF, let the peeps at A Guy In New York know. The next BABF will be on February 20, 2006 and will be hosted by Harleys, Cars, Girls &…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2006Today is the anniversary of Charles Darwin's 197th birthday. Besides the fact that Darwin was a gentleman naturalist, he was also a prodigious writer and was quite popular in his day due to his travel books. But it was not until he was 50 when his most influential book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, was published. This was a seminal work that formally describes the theory of evolution and was followed by several more books by Darwin that further developed his ideas of how evolution occurred.
Darwin was…
grrlscientist | February 11, 2006
There is another new online biology journal out there, Biology Direct. This journal is particularly interesting because its stated policy is to provide authors and readers of research articles with a novel system of peer review. This system includes making the author responsible for obtaining reviewers' reports via the journal's Editorial Board; making the peer review process open rather than anonymous; and publishing the reviewers' reports along with the articles, thus increasing both the responsibility and the reward of the referees and eliminating sources of abuse in the refereeing…
grrlscientist | February 10, 2006
How well do you know the USA? I have linked to two quizzes that test your knowledge by having you place each state on a map of the USA. This quiz is especially difficult.
After you've taken that first quiz, try this one. My scores are below the fold ..
My scores:
first quiz; 62%, average error 104 miles 368 seconds.
second quiz; 96% average error 22 miles 296 seconds
Hardest state to place? Wyoming.
tags: Quiz, geography
grrlscientist | February 9, 2006
Mountain Owlet-Nightjar, Aegotheles albertisi .
Photo by Bruce Beehler.
Click image for larger version in its own window.
Birds in Science
A team of 25 American, Australian and Indonesian scientists flew by helicopter last December into the midst of a large tract of uninhabited tropical forest in New Guinea where they discovered a "lost world" brimming with new wildlife. Permit me to brag just this once, but I wrote a story about this that you might enjoy.
Congratulations to a colleague of mine from grad school, Brian Walker, because he made the front page of the NY Times Science section…
grrlscientist | February 9, 2006Reader demographics based on 100 visitors.
While I take a brief break from writing this week's issue of Birds in the News, I want to mention that I am proud to say that once again, nearly half of my visitors are from outside of the United States. Not that I have anything against Americans, because I do not, but it pleases me to think that the topics that I write about have an international appeal. Since I have your attention, I am curious to know where you are from? Is this your first visit to Scientific Life or to ScienceBlogs? How did you find ScienceBlogs/Scientific Life? What do you like…
grrlscientist | February 9, 2006
Transmission electron micrograph of
Avian Influenza Virus.
(click image for larger view in its own window)
I just received a message from ProMED-email regarding the appearance of the avian influenza virus that was just identified in Nigeria. ProMED-email is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases that serves to keep medical personnel and other professionals up-to-date on emerging diseases around the world. In this message, Debora MacKenzie, a writer for NewScientist.com news service, points out that;
The article [in NewScientist.com] was posted before we found out the…