This one may be a little out of date, but the years of my PhD was the a real purple patch for anyone who could coax a computer into drawing a scale-free hairball of whatever “interactome” you could get your hands on.
You can get your own “Being a Scientist” template here and create your own, you crafty bastards you.
Over at SF Signal, a post on the post-post-apocalypse by author David Moody:
We’re taught from early days that all stories must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Take my genre of choice – post-apocalyptic fiction. You have the beginning – the event – then the middle as our cast of characters inevitably have to fight to survive in what’s left of their world, but what about the end?…
I get frustrated by the lack of development in much zombie fiction…There’s a blatantly obvious issue which usually gets totally overlooked, and that’s that the zombies are rotting. They might be a deadly threat today and tomorrow, but what about in six months time?
Science has a news piece asking Is Motherhood the Biggest Reason for Academia’s Gender Imbalance?.
Well, I don’t know if it’s the biggest reason, but this issue is certainly huge – it has been an issue in every lab in which I have worked, and in ~90% of the labs that I observe around me. Which is why I don’t understand the pushback from some researchers quoted in the article, such as this:
“I think [the issue] does have merit, for a subset of women, during one part of their lives,” Nelson says. “However, it has not uncovered a problem which, when solved, will create an equal environment for women.” Nelson says it would be unfortunate if departments “were to invest millions of dollars in things like in-house daycare centers” only to find that such investments improved conditions for “a relatively small number of women.”
Seriously??? In-house child-care and other investments to help mothers in academic science would benefit only a relatively small number of women? Walk into just about any science department at any research university in this country, and you will quickly be disabused of the notion that this is an issue for a relatively small number of women. Continue reading “Motherhood vs the Lab”
If you haven’t been following the dust-up over science publisher Springer’s announcement of a volume by creationists, you should head over to the Panda’s Thumb and follow the latest, if only for its entertainment value.
While you’re there, check out the slide from John Sandord, a creationist who claims that he’s a geneticist at Cornell*. He plots human lifespan as a function of centuries born after Noah, and gets an impressive R^2 of 0.90. I’m sure this is going to upend the field of lifespan genetics.
*As is usual, this is not quite what you think it is.
When I first started listening to Youth Lagoon‘s Montana I didn’t think too much of it. The opening is simple, and I was working on something else. I’d mostly stopped paying attention moments after it started. It built itself slowly, though, and completely caught me off guard. Suddenly I wasn’t writing at all but staring out the window completely absorbed in the song. Continue reading “Youth Lagoon, Polanyi and seeing the forest and the trees”
The Finch and Pea 