loom | October 16, 2007If you live anywhere near my home town of Guilford, Connecticut, I'd be delighted if you could join me Thursday at 7:30 at the Guilford Free Library for a talk, "Will Global Warming Redraw the Map of Life?" (flyer pdf) I'll be discussing extinction projections, assisted migration, and more.
loom | October 11, 2007
It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values which are in the interior of one of the subdomains of the connectedness locus, the Julia set is a Universal Curve. To me this represents the structure unifying chaos (since Julia sets are chaotic) and order (since Universal Curves act as a sort of catalog of all planar curves).--Aaron
The tattoos…
loom | October 11, 2007We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly's wings. But a lot of nature's intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker's yeast that makes bread rise and beer ferment. At an audition for a David Attenborough documentary, a yeast cell guzzling away on sugar is bound to do a lousy job. ("Thanks, don't call us; we'll call you. Send in the King Cobra!") But the intricacy of its metabolism is no less impressive. What's more, scientists know…
loom | October 10, 2007Science writer Jessica Snyder Sachs has an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times, explaining why you should get your flu shot and skip the chicken pox parties. It's a taste of the material in her excellent new book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for the book.)
loom | October 10, 2007Chris Sloan, a senior editor at National Geographic Magazine, points me to a cluster of new blogs he and others at NG have just launched. Sloan's own blog includes a refreshingly frank discussion of the forged-fossil controversy NG was involved in a few years ago.
Science Blogs meanwhile continued to absorb blogs in Borg-like fashion. Among the new additions is one I've followed for a while, Laelaps, which covers stuff like fossil horses, human evolution, and such. Long live the organisms.
loom | October 8, 2007Last week I appeared on bloggingheads.tv, talking about life in all its weirdness with science writer John Horgan. The folks at bloggingheads.tv wondered if I'd come back, perhaps bringing along a scientist to talk to. I said, Of course. The scientist I've invited along is Craig Venter.
In the 1990s Venter pioneered methods for sequencing the human genome, racing government scientists to finish the first complete draft. Last month he and his colleagues published a highly accurate read of his own genome, including both sets of chromosomes he got from his parents. He and his colleagues have…
loom | October 5, 2007In January I'll be running a workshop for science graduate students at Yale about how to write about science for non-scientists. It's going to be the second time around for me; last year's trial run was a wonderful experience, which confirmed to me that scientists-in-training these days want very much to be engaged in the public discussion of the stuff they do. Information about the workshop and how to register has just been posted on the Yale Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology web site (poster pdf) I'm told the slots are filling up fast, so if any readers at Yale are interested…
loom | October 4, 2007
"Just wanted to jump on the bandwagon with my own tribute to my scientific style. This is a tattoo of the word for Body, Spirit, Person, People, and Life in Owens Valley Paiute, written in International Phonetic Alphabet. I am a Linguist that specializes in Endangered languages and thought I needed this tagged on me."--Russ
Will tattoos be all that remains of some languages? Something to ponder as you peruse the science tattoos I've posted on Flickr--76 and rising.
loom | October 3, 2007I just installed a new banner from Carl Buell up top. Sort of 2001 meets parasitoid wasps. It's making the rest of the blog act funny for reasons I cannot divine, so the tech gods have been appealed to.
loom | October 3, 2007Last week I groused about having trouble with MySpace, which led others to leave some nasty comments of their own. In the interest of full disclosure, I should now report that I figured out the problem: I was not entering my password correctly. I apologize to the folks at MySpace for blaming them for my own blundering.
Of course, you wouldn't know that I'm back on MySpace by looking at my page, which is as dull as ever, but that's just because I haven't had the time to figure out how to embellish it. (Suggestions welcome!)
loom | October 1, 2007Good news--I've just won the National Academies 2007 Communication Award. Each year the prize is given out jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Engineering, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in three categories. The category I entered was writing for newspapers, magazines or the Internet. I decided to submit stuff I've written for newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Here are the stories I submitted (with links to my blog posts about them):
"A Fin Is A Limb Is A Wing." National Geographic, November 2006. An article on the…
loom | September 29, 2007My talk with John Horgan on bloggingheads.tv is up. I'm sure the fact that the label "weird life" appears directly over my head was an accident (right, John?). Anyway, we had a good talk about parasites, aliens, and how to handle hype in science. I may have made some mistakes--feel free to fact-check in the comment thread. Unfortunately, I can't strike out my spoken errors, but we can make the best of it. (If you hanker for more scienceblog/bloggingheads encounters, see these talks by PZ Myers and Chris Mooney.)
loom | September 27, 2007
"My tattoo is from an Irving Geis illustration of DNA. I was attracted to his attention to the molecular detail while also drawing in a representational spiral that doesn't ignore the basic beauty of the double helix. This particular sequence (I've BLASTED) is too short to be specific to only one gene, but one human gene it's found it is the 5' UTR of one of our tight junctions."-Matthew MacDougall, 4th year medical student
Is there no end to the science tattoos out there?See the 70 I've gotten so far at the Flickr set.
loom | September 27, 2007I'm going to be appearing this weekend on the strangely addictive show bloggingheads.tv. If you're not familiar with it, it's a show composed of two talking heads staring out of your screen at you, holding forth for an hour on whatever topic they choose (politics, television, science...). Actually, each speaker is staring into a computer camera and talking on the phone to his or her partner in chat. On Saturdays, two of our most provocative science writers, John Horgan and George Johnson, take to the tubes.
Horgan asked me to join him this week. I've known Horgan for several geological eras,…
loom | September 27, 2007It is a day to write about Giardia, and I am happy to say that I cannot do so from firsthand experience. Friends of mine have suffered infections of Giardia in their gut, but they haven't been terribly forthcoming about the details. It's not fun, they assure me, and it can last for months. Unpleasant as it may be up close, though, Giardia is one of the most fascinating, most enigmatic creatures on the planet (from a safe distance). Scientists do not yet quite know what to make of this single-celled parasite, but one possibility is that Giardia holds secrets to some of the key steps in the…
loom | September 26, 2007A while back I mentioned I've gotten a Facebook page and a Myspace page. They've been fun to toy around with, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're a harbinger of how we will all trawl for online information in the future. But to those who are asking to be friends at Myspace, leaving messages for me, or just wondeirng why the page is just so lame, I'm sorry to report that I haven't been able to log in for a few days. If my kids were just a couple years older, I'm sure I'd have all the tech support I needed to deal with this. But for now, or at least until the MySpace minions come to my aid,…
loom | September 21, 2007It's a brave new world for us book authors. Today's case in point: PZ Myers assigned some of his students to ready my book Soul Made Flesh, which chronicles how humanity figured out what the brain is for. Some of his students have bravely agreed to post their reports on the book on Myers's blog Pharyngula (here and here). The comment thread has turned into a wide-ranging book-club discussion. I'm chiming in from time to time too (here and here, for example). I'm definitely enjoying it and will check in as long as the discussion goes.
loom | September 20, 2007
Mark sent this picture in, with this explanation:
I don't quite have a science tattoo, but I have a math tattoo. That's close enough, right?
Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.
What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer…
loom | September 19, 2007The Scientist recently asked me to name the three best life-science blogs. I just sent them three ones I enjoy and read a lot--I find this sort of ranking to be interesting but fundamentally artificial. (I'd recommend all of the blogs on my blogroll on the left of your screen.)
I didn't realize that the request was actually part of a bigger undertaking: the Scientist is asking all of its readers to pick the best life-science blogs. If you want to help make the selection, click here forthwith.
loom | September 17, 2007
My first book, At the Water's Edge, was graced by illustrations by the marvelous Carl Buell. He's got a lot of irons in the fire these days, including Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, which publishes this month. Paleontologist Donald Prothero is the author, and it's packed with illustrations such as this one, which shows mammal-like reptiles that were increasingly more closely related to the first mammals. While you wait for the book to arrive, you can peruse his Flickr pages.
[Illustration couresy of Carl Buell]