blog
revere | September 21, 2009One of my healthier, but alas more expensive habits, is that I walk a mile or so several times a week to my neighborhood shopping area and visit one or another bookstore. I live in a college town, so my neighborhood shopping area has some of the best bookstores anywhere. Not just a university bookstore (which, like many, is part of the Barnes and Noble College Division and not independent), but also what I consider the best independent bookstore anywhere. Since the Reveres try not to reveal any of our locations, I don't get to give it a plug except to say it has the name of a prestigious…
revere | September 14, 2009This morning we reported some hopeful news about the desperately poor country of Malawi, where childhood mortality is incredibly high but being slashed. It's still too high. Way, way too high. And in response I found this very sad post from another blogger, this one a doc now in rural Canada, but once in Malawi:
Malawi in the news
The good: Malawi made a top ten list.
The bad: It was top ten child mortality, in the world.
The good: Malawi is doing something to change that.
In 2000, under five mortality was 225 per 1000. Tireless work by various groups have more than halved this number and…
razib | September 9, 2009Will Wilkinson points me to an interesting paper with some interesting figures, Income, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll:
razib | September 6, 2009This comment is funny:
Just because it is lower in calories doesn't mean that it doesn't have poison in it (toxins such as high fructose corn syrup). Read the labels people.
First, watch this video attempting to dispel the myths about high fructose corn syrup:
Now check out this spoof:
razib | September 3, 2009ScienceBlogs is going to be adding user registration. This should be a nice, as I can't flag certain commenters as approved anymore since the "upgrade." They're taking a poll on features you'd like. I'm keen on a vote/starring system. Some readers have awesome comments. Some do not.
razib | August 30, 2009Over at Living the Scientific Life an update on the quest to go to Antarctica. Turns out you can "reassign" your vote. Also, if you haven't voted, please do. Again:
Voting ends at noon EDT on 30 September 2009, and the Official Quark Blogger will travel to Antarctica in February 2010 to blog about the experience, chronicling the action, the emotion, and the drama as this polar adventure unfolds.
razib | August 28, 2009Addendum to my two posts below, here's Michael Behe's side. He notes:
...and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on the site feature discussions between people who agree on many things). Rather, I suspect the folks at the website weren't expecting the vitriolic reaction, began to worry about their good names and future employment prospects, pictured themselves banished to a virtual leper colony, panicked, and…
razib | August 23, 2009If you haven't, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds weblog. Good for browsing and sampling.
grrlscientist | August 15, 2009It is rare when I manage to break my own blog. Like most people, I have managed to break my blog by doing truly stupid things like deleting the main template, for example, but I've never managed to break it by adding a plugin to Firefox, so this is the reason I mention it here: so no one else will do the same thing I did and then find themselves dead in the water for a couple days as a result.
The Sage-Too plugin -- an RSS blog and newsreader -- was the culprit. The strange thing is that adding this plugin not only destroyed my ability to publish blog entries using Firefox, but it also…
revere | August 15, 2009If the Reveres fished, they'd put up a sign that says, "Gone fishin'". But we don't fish, so that wouldn't be true. By now everyone probably knows the Reveres are at the beach, allegedly on vacation. Since only one Revere writes at a time, I will use the first person here (it's easier), but I am speaking for the non-person composite that goes under the name revere/Revere. And the first thing "I" want to say is that the internet is eating me alive. Thanks to its magic I can now be connected to work 24/7. And I am. It's making me crazy (crazier?). It has to stop.
I suffered through a couple of…
revere | August 12, 2009The Reveres are at the beach. It's not our natural habitat, but the generic Mrs. R. loves the beach so here we are. We often write in the morning (after emerging from our small flat in Hilbert space) but today we were otherwise occupied and then went to the beach and baked our brains out. Then we tracked sand into our rented unit ("Next time you vaccuum!") and now as we sit down at the keyboard we sense a distinct absence in neuronal activity. Our neurons, that is. Your neurons may be firing with alacrity, in which case you will want to go elsewhere. Because baked brains are a meal best…
revere | August 2, 2009Somewhere around mile 500 of the Revere tribe's 1000 mile trek to the beach for an alleged vacation -- long digression that interrupts the clear meaning of the sentence: if I'm on vacation, what am I doing writing about it? That's what Mrs. R. asked, as she headed to the beach, leaving me in air conditioned online splendor in a rented condo that could have been anywhere in the world, as long as it had high speed internet connection -- as I was saying, around mile 500 driving our new-ish car journey, CDC went live on a completely redesigned website for its novel H1N1 (aka swine flu) info. I'…
revere | August 1, 2009The Revere troop is still on the road (we arrive at our beach destination later today), and while WiFi in motels is convenient, it's not so easy to blog without the usual creature comforts (a library, good coffee, my own workspace and lots of unread/half read papers with great sounding titles that might become blog posts). However I do have Mrs. R. for company and our old and hobbling dog is along to be a literal creature comfort for both of us. So I'm going to reprise an oldie but goodie from the archives (January 2007), this one the follow-up to an earlier post asking "why are man hole…