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Visiting professorships

8 Aug 2011 at 5:10 pm

Life has an interesting symmetry to it. No I'm not talking about bilateral symmetry or any Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I've just completed my orientation for a 1 year position at my undergraduate alma mater, where I'll be replacing the person who got me into lab work. In fact this is being typed on his computer. Very, very strange. I believe I'll have to track this experience.

First off-

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Lightspeed Magazine: Sci Fi and Reality collide

12 Aug 2010 at 10:08 am

There's a slick new online Sci Fi rag called Lightspeed. I like this one because they also publish nonfiction pieces that are relevant to their fiction stories. Ok I'm a bit biased because they asked me to write a nonfiction piece for them. In the same issue there was a story called Manumission by Tobias Buckell, which used intentionally created memory loss as a plot device for a story that is

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Top 15 science hotties and labia-punching

19 Jul 2010 at 6:22 pm

I'm putting this post under "education" because I define a new term at the end of it. Which, of course, qualifies it to be educational.

By now you've probably picked up on the Sexiest Female Scientist list being passed around by some atheist guy, so I won't bother to link to it and drive up the turd's traffic. I will, however, give my quick 2 cents on this particular brand of sexism.

Sheril

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7th graders discover scientists are just like everybody else

12 Jul 2010 at 5:21 pm

Even kids in jr high can figure out that we've been spoon-fed some misconceptions of how scientists look and act. I wonder where they get these ideas from. Certainly not the media. They would never create caricatures of real people.

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My Official Farewell

7 Jul 2010 at 4:42 pm

Sci has just tendered her letter of resignation to the Overlords at SEED. This was a very, very hard decision, and it hurts Sci more than she can say. Sci would like to let you know, though, that she hasn't given up blogging!!! She has merely moved back to her old digs. You can find her at Neurotic Physiology, her old place. Please do drop by and visit!

As for my reasons, well, I just want

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I'm afraid I've been thinking

7 Jul 2010 at 1:56 am

A dangerous pastime, you know.

If you've been around the blog for the past day, I'm sure you've seen that there's been a new...blog...from PepsiCo. Sci's not sure what she thinks of it, but it's not positive. I know we had GE and Shell and stuff...but that felt different, somehow. Being as Sci has recently been looking in to a lot of food and reward related mechanisms and issues associated w

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Zombies get philosophical

1 Jul 2010 at 2:46 pm

You may not think of our flesh-eating diseased brethren as being the thoughtful types. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.

As Sci mentioned, I'm gonna be holed up in the Costco for a while so I got time to think about it. They're the slow-moving-undead zombies, not those ultra-quick "infected" (I hate those creepy bastards). I rolled down those big steel doors, barricaded them with anything

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A simple way to get the antiscience crowd to come around?

27 Jun 2010 at 1:58 pm

Chris Mooney- a man with his heart in the right place and absolutely no idea what do do after that. Don't get me wrong, I like the guy. He's a force for good when dissecting a scientific issue for the public. But Mooney has been trucking out this same "communication" bullshit for a few years now. As usual, nothing much is offered other than "listen to them". I agree, communication is importan

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Solving the Abortion Issue.... BP style

5 May 2010 at 10:55 am

I was thinking about the difficulties that women have defending their reproductive rights, and the constant intrusion from a predominantly white-male-run government has slowly eroded women's ability to control what happens to their own bodies. Ok, ok, maybe birth control and abortion are all too radically new for a country that just allowed women to vote a mere 90 years ago, and men just aren't r

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Hey President Obama: Want to pay tribute to Sen. Kennedy?

26 Aug 2009 at 11:23 am

Then quit jerking around with Harry Reid and force him to pass meaningful health care reform with a public option included. The House would back it. Make the Senate get off their asses.

It isn't rocket surgery.

/rant

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Best. Modelling Paper. Ever.

17 Aug 2009 at 8:27 pm

The abstract says it all:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with nume ... read more

 

Journal Editor Speaks about His Experiences

10 Aug 2009 at 11:52 am

(I had this whole post ready talking about flexible representations, but now my computer is borked -- stupid monitor! -- so this is going to have to do.)

Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution links to a piece by a former editor at American Economic Review telling all about how papers are accepted for publication. In economics this process may be slightly different, but I found the piece addres

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Obesity is not a myth

30 Jul 2009 at 10:01 pm

There is a great conversation going on at Megan McArdle's blog with Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth. I say great because it give me the opportunity to show how astonishingly wrong Campos in suggesting that the obesity at the lower end of the BMI spectrum -- not just morbid obesity -- is not bad for your health. Frankly, contrary to his statements, the data is definitive, and I am amazed

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You might not be ready for college if...

24 Jul 2009 at 10:03 am

You attended 5 classes of your Brain and Behavior course out of an 8 week summer session that meets daily, and stop going after the first exam. Which you failed. Repeating the exact same pattern from the previous semester when you were in my class.

And then.... your MOM shows up at my class to fight your grade battles for you, without you even being aware of it.

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Imaging a Superior Mnemonist

15 Jul 2009 at 12:53 pm

In neuroscience, we spend most of our time trying to understand the function of the "normal" brain -- whatever that means -- hence, we are most interested in the average. Under most occasions when scientists take an interest in the abnormal neurology, it is usually someone with who has something wrong with them -- has brain damage or a disorder of some kind. In these cases, we try and understand

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