John Wilkins and I have been at the Edges and Boundaries of Biological Objects workshop here in Salt Lake City for the past few days. John live-blogged some of the talks, so you may want to check his posts out. Lots of interesting stuff was discussed about populations (here and here), the fossil record (here), ecosystems (here and here), system dynamics and boundaries (here and here), DNA bar-coding (here and here), species, rank-free classification, and homology. All in all some really thought-provoking ideas that will take me a good while to digest.
Discussions are likely to continue at the Philosophy of Biology Cafe.
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So, the Big Day has finally arrived - the inauguration of the new SEED scienceblogs homepage and the addition of 24 new bloggers to the stable, including me - yeay!
Before heading off to the Charleston Conference last week, I blogged about the big announcement of Pierre Lassonde's big $25 million donation to York to found the Lassonde School of Engineering.
Just a quick update on the progress of the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon:
We've just received news that last night the Senate unanimously confirmed our friend and colleague, Dr. David Michaels as an Assistant Secretary of Labor -- specifically, Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He starts sometime next week.