Sep 09 2008
By the time you do something, it’s going to be too late
Still driving that SUV to work?
Sep 08 2008
A Little Politics
The latest A Softer World comic:
PZ Myers points to a video of Sarah Palin telling an Assembly of God church that the Iraq war is “a task from God.
Obama answers some important questions about science and policy.
Dooce tells Republicans to live up to those compassionate principles:
Because Leta was diagnosed with plagiocephaly when she was two months old, she cannot qualify for private insurance until she is thirteen years old. So the only insurance we can get her is high-risk insurance that costs us upwards of $300 a month. Just for her alone. And even then that insurance won’t cover anything until she has reached a $3000 deductible. I am fortunate enough to have grown up in a white, middle class family who could afford to send me to college, as did my husband, and we have enough work experience to run a business that makes it so that we can afford this insurance for our daughter. We don’t have to make the choice between buying food or insuring our daughter. We are really fucking lucky.
Edge of the American West points out some problems with Palin.
The BBC interviews Republicans. I’m very very embarrassed to share a country with the people interviewed: ["My belief in the Bible informs my politics."] Really embarrassed.
Sep 06 2008
What I’ve Noticed
Indexed expresses a little anger with an awesome Venn diagram.
Hollywood’s five saddest attempts at feminism. [via Feministing] Lays out how those “strong” female characters are so very disappointing.
Some Iraqi’s have no hope left:
do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?
Unsurprising news of the day: Many women leave the church because of its “’silence’ about sexual desire and activity, and because of its hostility to single-parent families and unmarried couples.” [via A Spritely Oolong]
Sciencewomen point to an awesome statement by Michelle Obama:
I was raised to believe I could do it all, and that was very empowering. Then I got into the work force and realized there was really no support for me to do it all. … We either have to fix that or be honest about it.
An awesome video - my new crush raps about the LHC.
Sep 01 2008
Citation managers
I have to read a lot of papers for work, and every once in awhile I write one of my own. Keeping track of all the papers and then citing them and building bibliographies can be pretty time consuming. Citation managers make the job a lot easier. I’ve been using RefWorks for the past year, but recently switched to Zotero after reading about it at Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist.
Zotero is much faster and easier to use. The integration with Firefox is flawless and importing references is effortless. For databases without automatic RefWorks export options for their citations, I had to download a citation file, then import it into RefWorks in a separate (tricky) step. I say tricky because I had to choose several options on the import that were different for different databases and often not very intuitive. This doesn’t happen with Zotero.
The biggest problem I have with Zotero is that it doesn’t work with Microsoft Office 2008 yet. So I’m using both RefWorks and Zotero until the new plugin gets built. Hopefully that will be soon. I’m excited about not using clunky RefWorks anymore.
Aug 30 2008
What I’ve noticed
Lots of interesting science this week:
- Here’s an incredibly interesting experiment that shows how easily our brains can be fooled into disowning our own bodies. [via 3QD]
- Cows have a compass!
- In addition to killing birds, wind farms are killing bats. Wind farm mortality is nothing compared to the damage this strange illness (likely related to climate change) is causing bat populations, though.
Le territoire des sens featured this beautiful image recently:
And John Hagee tells men that taking care of their children will earn them a toasty spot in hell. (via Feministing)
Aug 04 2008
Fieldwork
I took a course this summer that required quite a bit of fieldwork. Toward the end of the class, we split into small groups and planned our own projects. My group wanted to ask about forest succession. We went on an exploratory jaunt through the Michigan State University’s Experimental Forest the first day of the project. It was not very successful.
First of all there were MOSQUITOES. I put that in all caps because I have never seen such a high density of such hungry insects. I would have eaten DEET to keep them away. Jenny was stung by a bee and was quietly disgruntled about having been “bitten on her bum” for the rest of the afternoon. Joanna made the mistake of sitting down and was treated to a large number of very irritated bug bites in awkward places. I ended up bleeding from a briar with my face in poison ivy.
Overall it was kind of terrible, but we bonded over the experience and were better prepared the next time we went out.
Jun 17 2008
What I’ve noticed
Monitor Mix is complaining about the same music being redone. Have you ever heard of Cilla Black or Sandy Shaw?
Doing science in a nutshell at Seeds Aside:
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t correct those mistakes you’re doing it really wrong. If you can’t accept that you’re mistaken, you’re not doing it at all.
Pandagon discovers that voter ID laws have prevented a woman who has voted in the last 19 presidential elections from registering to vote in Arizona. And I believe it. I had to try 4 times before I’d given them all the paperwork and information they wanted.
The Edge of the American West presents “Things that it has been empirically demonstrated academics do not know,” including
Asking a question is not the same thing as giving a speech.
This is painfully evident at departmental seminars.
A video of McCarthy you should have seen over at The Edge of the American West.
Some plants can recognize genetic relatives and modify their behavior based on that information. Full length explanation at A Neotropical Savanna.
Hottonia inflata is now on the list of plants I have to see in person.
May 01 2008
What I’ve Noticed
Temperatures are expected to be a bit cooler in the next decade due to natural cycles, but after that, the current too-fast rate of warming will continue. Hopefully people pay attention to articles like this instead of saying “well it’s been really cold the last few years so global warming can’t be a problem.”
Some scary things have happened on the supreme court in the past few years. Do something about it.
Nuclear power has some serious problems. Like nuclear waste. Also, it’s got a wicked high carbon cost.
The new poll tax.
Dave Neiwert on Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and things Americans don’t like to talk about:
It’s human, of course, to want to think of yourself as a good person, and your country as a good country. Which is why it’s human of white Americans — the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who perpetrated these atrocities — to want to forget that these things happened. And they want to believe that because these events were in the past, and they took some initial steps toward reconciliation 40 years ago, the issues should have gone away, and if they haven’t, well, it’s the victims’ fault.
Choosing to buy bottled water may lead to having to buy bottled water as our municipal water supplies go bad. So don’t buy bottled water.
This is definitely what those crazy churches’ retreats are like. It’s terrifying that there are so many people who’ve been taught not to think.
And in the same vein, religion is child abuse.
Good science education is important for everyone. An English TA comments on a student paper: “I personally have lots of reservations regarding evolution (even scientifically).” This is appalling. As one scientist put it
“Imagine a teaching assistant writing, ‘I personally have lots of reservations regarding the fact the Earth is round.’”
You may have heard Ben Stein recently claiming that “science leads to killing,” specifically that it led to the Holocaust. A powerful refutation of his nonsense.
My period might save your life.
Someone needs to tell the Swiss government that plants could care less about their dignity.
Compassionate conservative Douglas Bruce calls immigrants “illiterate peasants.”
Obama and Clinton tap into anti-intellectual sentiment.
In Britain, donkeys get more government support than women.
Apr 27 2008
Scientific Understanding
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Theoretical physics and molecular biology are acquired tastes. The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.
Apr 22 2008
What I’ve noticed (more than last week)
Sara Robinson writes about John McCain’s betrayal of the troops and how he’s paving the way for an army no one wants to see at Campaign for America’s Future.
Drive by botany in New South Wales at The Reluctant Botanist.
A short report on breast ironing in Cameroon at current tv.
How drunk do you have to be to fall asleep with a knife in your back?
At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says.
After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance.
…
Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will.
“We were drinking and what doesn’t happen when you’re drunk?” he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.
IPCC estimates of sea level rise are way too conservative.
Turning food into gas for your car makes people starve.
The very best explanation of the infuriating, demoralizing subtleties of sexism I’ve ever read.
Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.
Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
Best science class ever.
