ksharpe | January 25, 2007Flickr user estherase presents two views on labware: lyrically beautiful, and...another way, beneath the fold.
ksharpe | January 24, 2007Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid
By Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey
McSweeney's Books
64 pages
$18
"You have purchased this book and now you will learn. My name is Dr. Haggis-on-Whey and I am a scientist. I will not pretend to be your friend. We are here to study animals of the ocean and I will not mince words. If you pay attention I will be less dissatisfied."
So begins Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid, the third in McSweeney's HOW Series, 'Dedicated to the Exploration and Dissemination of Unbelievable Brilliance.' (Warning: Everything about the HOW…
ksharpe | January 23, 2007His January 24 lecture in Toronto is sold out, but Steven Pinker fans can get a sneak preview of the cognitive scientist's forthcoming book, The Stuff of Thought, and his current work on metaphor, indirect speech, and the the neuroscience of swearing, in this Toronto Star profile.
From the article:
"As it turns out, people swear in five different ways. That's why it took me a while to figure this out," [Pinker] says.
it's not all prurient interest. Pinker's work on salty language serves to get at the role of metaphor in human thought and expression. Far from being the province of high-school…
ksharpe | January 17, 2007Few would dispute that the internet is a communication medium of awesome (in the old sense of the word) proportions. Many would recognize the internet's tendency to function as a massive echo chamber. Interesting stories are picked up and relayed from point to point, and blog to blog, at breakneck speeds, often with bloggers relying on other blogs as their primary sources.
Sometimes a little bit is lost in the frenzy of the internet news cycle. For example, the old journalistic impulse to trace information back to its point of origin, and to verify facts for oneself.
In the January 17…
eanthes | January 15, 2007
This Wednesday, the world will officially creep closer to nuclear apocalypse, according to the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
The symbolic Doomsday Clock counts down the minutes to midnight, which represents the moment of global disaster. The Clock is currently set at seven minutes to midnight and will, presumably, move forward on Wednesday.
"The major new step reflects growing concerns about a 'Second Nuclear Age' marked by grave threats, including: nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing…
eanthes | January 12, 2007Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary's school of business, knows why you procrastinate. And he's got the formula to prove it. Steel has just published his mathematical model for procrastination, and it looks a little something like this:
Utility = E x V / Î D
Where utility is the desirability of a task, E is the expectancy someone has of succeeding at it, V is the task's value, Î (the Greek letter gamma) is the task's immediacy, and D is an individual's sensitivity to delay. (The formula does not, alas, seem to account for such factors as the likelihood of being e-mailed a…
ksharpe | January 10, 2007
Question: What's sleek, as multi-functional as a digital Swiss Army knife, available in June for "as little as" a cool $499, and sure to be coveted by a technophile near you?
Answer: It's the iPhone, of course.
Check out what ScienceBloggers Bora, Dave, Josh, and David have to say about it.
ksharpe | January 10, 2007
Science education + sixties mod design sense = funkily compelling artwork from the inside of a childrens' biology book.
Captured by Mohawk, a photographer and Flickr user from Liverpool, UK.
(Source)
ksharpe | January 8, 2007A Psychology Today article linked from today's edition of Arts & Letters Daily,entitled "The Loopy Logic of Love," discusses the mental tricks that lovers play when evaluating a potential mate.
The article's author, Kaja Perina, writes that men and women in the first flower of a relationship delude themselves in typically gender-specific ways. Men overestimate a woman's degree of interest in them, while women defensively assume that men are just looking for sex (even more than is actually the case, that is).
In the most interesting part of the article, Perina suggests that our society's…
ksharpe | January 5, 2007
New maps put out by the National Arbor Day Foundation, depicting plant "hardiness zones" that gardeners use as a guideline for figuring out which species they can plant, and how early, shows evidence of real climate change in the United States over the past 15 years.
Has your region changed?
Don't miss the Foundation's animation of the migrating zones.
ksharpe | January 4, 2007CNN has the story of a mysterious falling object that punctured the roof of a home in New Jersey on Tuesday evening, damaging bathroom floor tiles on impact before bouncing and lodging itself in a wall. The object is metal; lab tests will determine whether or not it is a meteorite.
Steinn covers the story on ScienceBlogs, with a link to a site running guidelines for meteorite identification. Who will figure it out first, cops or bloggers?
Image: This meteorite fell on Wisconsin in 1868. (Source)
ksharpe | December 21, 2006
Over the holidays, we'll be rerunning interviews with the ScienceBloggers, beginning with Suzanne Franks of Thus Spake Zuska.
What's your name?
Well, originally my name was Suzanne Franks. Then I married someone, and just because I said I wanted to, my name became Suzanne Shedd. Ten years later, it took a lawyer and a court order and a "petition to retake former name" to go back to Suzanne Franks. And there's still a utility company and a credit bureau that thinks my social security number belongs to Suzanne Shedd. Let that be a lesson to you young women who think it's a good idea to…
ksharpe | December 15, 2006What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
ksharpe | October 13, 2006A reader asks: Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?
ksharpe | October 4, 2006What's an antioxidant, and why are they healthful? I thought oxygen was supposed to be good for you!
ksharpe | September 27, 2006The 2006 Nobel Laureates will be announced on Monday, October 2. Any early guesses as to who this year's honorees will be?
ksharpe | September 21, 2006Why do men have a longer period of fertility, relative to their lifespan, than women? (Bonus: is this true of other species as well?)
cmims | September 14, 2006Stoat
Categories: Planet Earth, Policy & Politics
William Connolley lives in Coton, UK, and works at the British Antarctic Survey as a climate modeller. In a former life he was a mathematician at SEH. He specializes in climate change in general and Antarctica in particular. He describes himself as a long-haired, sandal-wearing, weird non-conformist dedicated to staunchly defending the science on climate change--armed with logic, facts, and reasoned arguments mostly. The stoat (Mustela erminea) is a small mammal also known as the ermine. The fur of its winter coat is associated with…