For the next several days (26-30 Oct), I will be back in the Triangle Area (Raleigh, North Carolina) pretending to be a science writer. I kind of hope nothing gets done around here while I’m gone – would make me feel needed.
Category: Notice Board
Sometimes you wanna go…
…where everybody knows their genomics. Bum bum bum.
Which is as far as I’m taking that, because I have the bad feeling that y’all would suggest that I’m the Cliff Clavin around here (I’m so the Carla).
Technology willing (let’s all take a long, suggestive look at Mike for a moment), we will be doing a live Google Hangout to talk about the ENCODE project tonight (Tuesday, 11 September) at 9PM Eastern. We’ll chat about what it means for science, “junk DNA”, and who (if anyone) actually knows what they are talking about.
Oh yeah, it is BYOB until we get that whole virtual liquor license thing sorted out.
*Leave a comment here or tweet @joshwitten or @finchandpea if you are interested and need a hangout invite.
Kuhn book club rescheduled to Tuesday
For those of you who were missing the Structure of Scientific Revolutions book club yesterday, we’ll have to reschedule for Tuesday. Business intervened, including paper proofs and a Washington University Inaugural Symposium of the Center for Biological Systems Engineering at which I saw a video of a Pavlovian locust (yes, old grasshoppers learn new tricks – locusts can learn to associate new odors with food). And of course the ENCODE stuff came out.
So take the extra time to finish Kuhn’s book, and we’ll talk about chapters IX – XIII on Tuesday.
Happy Birthday, Mike!
Please join me in wishing Mike – co-founder of The Finch & Pea, my former co-indentured servant of Barak Cohen’s lab, nice guy, sci-fi guru, and irritatingly talented piano player – a very happy birthday. Remember, buddy, its not how old you are, it’s how old you feel – we are going to need a lot of candles.
. . .AND MANY MOOOOOOORRRRREEEEE!!!
Pea Green Boat
pyrofibonacciology, n, the study of Fibonacci sequences created using flaming objects
Unlike me, you may not have an encyclopedic memory of all my writings. So you may not recall the time I evaluated the Fibonacciness of Katy Chalmers‘ golden fire spiral.
Apparently, it was enough to convince the folks at the e-zine Pea Green Boat that I knew something about patterns in nature. As a result, you can now read my responses to their questions (formatting removed the questions and turned it into a, hopefully, more coherent piece) in the latest issue, entitled “Ascend”.
I think this apparent problem may be driven by the fact that patterns in nature are not always reliable. Sometimes that twig snapping is a harmless deer. Sometimes its a leopard* about to pounce. It is probably a better evolutionary bet for us to have brains that are willing to believe in the pattern that a twig-snap almost always precedes a pouncing leopard, even if it almost always the deer.
*I think my obsession with the idea that leopard predation was a major evolutionary pressure on the human species was the result of having read 2001: A Space Odyssey just a bit younger than is advisable.
The Finch and Pea 