Administrative
evolvingthoughts | September 28, 2008I note with alarums that nobody has nominated any of my posts for the forthcoming Open Laboratory 2008 book that Bora and others are preparing. Maybe my quality has dropped, but if you think there's one worth including, do nominate it using the button at the bottom left.
pharyngula | September 25, 2008I should be flying through the air right now, on my way to Los Angeles for another long travel weekend. I was also out of town last week, and to my shame was too busy to post a Friday Cephalopod. I will not make that mistake this time: in recompense, tomorrow I will post THREE (3) Friday Cephalopods and recite 10 Hail Cthulhus while lashing myself with a wet tentacle. The latter will, of course, be done in private, but look for my public penance on Friday.
evolvingthoughts | September 19, 2008
Actually I'm not. The Sea of Faith In Australia crowd are very nice and easy to get on with folk, and many of them are your garden variety humanists, atheists and skeptics. Lawrence Krauss is a very nice guy with a good patter in anti-ID; nothing I haven't heard before but, and this surprised and educated me, something that few of the audience seemed all that familiar with.
One thing that has been very useful to me is to get a cross bearing on what interested and intelligent folk know and do not know. That will help me be a little more clear in the future. My talk is tonight, so we'll see…
evolvingthoughts | September 18, 2008
Okay, so in the AM I am off to drizzly Melbourne, my old home town, to address a conference on the implications of the project of naturalising religion, especially in terms of evolution, to an audience that may, or may not be religious. So if you never hear from me again, I was probably burned at the stake. By the atheists...
Anyway, I get to meet Lawrence Krauss. Yes, that Lawrence Krauss. He's going to be a keynote speaker, as I am (preen, preen). So assuming they make me actually work for my meal, no blogging for a few days. No doubt something great will pop up in the interbugs while I'…
laelaps | September 16, 2008One of the most rewarding events I have ever attended was last year's Annual Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina. I got to meet a number of my favorite bloggers, made lots of new friends, and definitely enjoyed speaking about science blogging as a student. Now registration is open for ScienceOnline'09 (the 3rd annual meeting for science bloggers in NC), and I definitely would encourage you to attend. (I have already signed up.)
There is at least one important difference from the previous meetings, though. There is so much to do that the organizers have added a second day of talks,…
pharyngula | September 16, 2008The counter on the page is ticking upwards to the millionth scienceblogs comment — we're less than 50 comments away, so the winning submission might be right here on this thread — so it's a good time to remind you Minnesota region residents that Greg & PZ's Excellent Party will take place the day after tomorrow, Thursday, at 7pm. You are all required to attend and make a comment.
laelaps | September 15, 2008
From Garfield Minus Garfield.
The beginning of classes has marked the start of a more chaotic daily schedule, one that often puts me in no mood to write. I want to work on the book when I have the time, but at the end of most days I feel like I've been trampled by a horde of freshmen (which isn't too far from the truth, as a matter of fact).
In any case, I more than doubled the material I had for the new version of my birds/dinosaurs chapter. This might not be especially impressive given that I had only three pages to start with, but I intend to keep up with the updates through the rest of…
evolvingthoughts | September 15, 2008
Mohan Matthen, a philosopher of biology, has a very nice takedown of Thomas Nagel's qualified support for teaching creationism on his blog. Hat tip Leiter.
Richard Losick has an excellent piece on the problems of using cultured lab strains when studying microbes, at Small Things Considered.
A new blog on politics and science, A Vote for Science, has started up at the mothership. Hopefully, when the present unpleasantness in the US has concluded for four years, we can get onto some wider and more interesting matters.
Wesley Elsberry has a plaintive cri de coeur about the joys of sleep…
laelaps | September 12, 2008I was really looking forward to attending the annual SVP meeting in Ohio this year, but after mulling things over I don't think it is possible for me to go. I simply can't afford the cost of the trip. I am very much saddened by this, particularly since I was looking forward to meeting so many people (and a owe a few folks a beer for their kindness to me over the past year), but it looks like I'm going to have to sit this one out.
If you are a paleo blogger and are attending, though, head on over to Julia's blog as there are plans to organize a plaeo-blogger breakfast. I'll be sad to miss it,…
pharyngula | September 11, 2008Just because I'm doing a lot of traveling this weekend doesn't mean I can't check in on the blog now and then. I notice that a particularly vile misogynistic troll, the cowardly Ostiarius, was emboldened by my absence to start make lots of nasty comments. He has been banned.
Trolls, you are on notice. This isn't an opportunity for you to play.
I am seriously thinking of enabling comment registration, though…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2008
I just checked the spam comments folder, and there, amidst the sea of Envall crap, were some legitimate comments. So I have revived them, and this may explain some discontinuities and duplications in various threads. My apologies to the victims.
laelaps | September 8, 2008For some damn-fool reason I decided to reorganize the living room the other day, a project that (two days later) is still not fully completed. Moving the furniture wasn't the problem; it was finding a home for the ever-growing library that threatens to overtake the entire apartment. I only have to clean up a little bit now, but it was the sort of project that needs to be done all the way or not at all.
On top of that, there are two new kittens that need some special attention. One foster kitten, Gia, I expected to have, but the other, Owen, I did not. (My wife named him after the anatomist…
pharyngula | September 5, 2008I just noticed that it is September — we need to pick a new Molly award for August. Leave a comment and let us all know who you thought was a noteworthy, commendable, interesting commenter here on Pharyngula over the last month. I'll enshrine the most popular name at the end of the month weekend.
laelaps | September 5, 2008Those of you who are regular readers know that I have been yammering about my book-in-progress for quite some time now (at least since March, if not before). I am pleased to say, though, that as the weeks and months have rolled by I have attracted some new readers, but some of them have expressed their frustration that they don't know what the hell I'm talking about in the "Book Progress" posts. This post should serve as a temporary conceptual anchor for the "Great Book Project," and I hope that this description will clear things up a bit.
Two years ago I took a course at Rutgers about…
evolvingthoughts | September 4, 2008
Once again I have manflu, the most despicable disease known to man (and to women, who also suffer indirectly from it).
So blogging is patchy. Also, I have to do some teaching stuff, which involves thinking about what the essays say.
I am writing, slowly, a piece about the recent paper on ratite origins first author of which is my friend and occasional sparring partner John Harshman. As this means I have to learn stuff first, it's taking a while, but I want it to be a good one. Be patient, and in the meantime read this.
laelaps | September 3, 2008It was slow going, but I was able to write the first three pages of the new iteration of the dinosaur/birds chapter. (It is called, for good reason, "Footprints (and Feathers) in the Sands of Time." At least for now, anyway.) Although it contains some of the same points as my previous attempt, I have added a lot of new material. The mythological introduction is a little circuitous, but I think it works.
I had planned on working on a number of other, smaller projects over the next few months, but I think I am going to primarily concentrate on getting my proposal for this book together. I'll…
laelaps | August 30, 2008
My wife and I reading while dinner cooks on the fire. Taken at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware this past May.
So much work to do, so little time. The summer whizzed by at a rate faster than I expected, and now I'm just two days away from the start of the fall semester. (As my wife commented the other day, I'm continuing my education in spite of the university's best efforts.)
There has been a lot to keep me busy. Outside of working on my book, I have been putting the finishing touches on a proposal for a paper about Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a chimpanzee (although, if accepted,…
laelaps | August 26, 2008
From Garfield Minus Garfield
I did it. The whale chapter has been put on the editorial chopping block three times, and I'm going to move on to other things for a while before coming back for the final cut. I'm particularly vexed by the last section of the chapter, which focuses on the evolution of cetacean intelligence due to sociality. The topic is contentious, and being that I'm not an expert on cetacean neuroanatomy or cognition I want to tread carefully. I've asked for professional help so I can make sure what I have written is accurate, but even so I still have mixed feelings about…
laelaps | August 24, 2008It's funny how editing is such a different process from the construction of a chapter. When I began writing the chapter on whales the more pages I could add, the better. When my wife asked me about my progress I would say "I wrote [x] more pages today." Now that I'm editing I usually reply "I pared it down by another page or two."
At present I've gone through the whale chapter twice and it is 29 pages long, but I'm going to go through it one more time. At that point I'm going to give it a rest and work on another chapter, as taking a step back and working on something else might help me come…
laelaps | August 22, 2008As it stands now, I have the first 15 (of 31) pages of the whale chapter edited to my content, but the second half poses more of a challenge. Much of the first half is historical narrative, which pretty much writes itself. I can get creative with my prose but I generally don't have to "think" about what I'm doing so much as tell a story.
The second half, by contrast, is more about "how we know what we say we know." It is much more difficult to edit because there are no parameters for what I'm doing. There are several ways in which I could organize my arguments, but I want to make sure I have…