Random Thoughts

Dear gentle readers and the lovely and talented Scientific Blogging/Science 2.0 community, You may have noticed that I have not been around much lately, and I felt I should let everyone know what has been going on. I have recently left Boston *wiping tears*, this time transplanting to Tallahassee, Florida for a yet-undetermined period of time. I am starting a few new ventures and projects which are quite exciting, so this was a necessary move right now.  I apologize for the lack of new posts lately, as I have been trying to orchestrate this whole move as swiftly and efficiently as…

Crying is a waste of perfectly good water. So why we do it? I have no idea, so I would like to hear your ideas. To get the ball rolling, here are eight hypotheses, each surely inadequate and probably false. (1) Purple Haze: When the tears “well up” under the skin, even before overflowing, the skin changes color, darkening and becoming purplish. Given that our color vision may have evolved for seeing skin color changes (do a Google search of “primate rump” but without the scare quotes to find my paper on this), one wonders whether tears are all about changing the skin’s color while still under…

Scienceblogs.com stalwart Bora Zivkovic has bid farewell to that site, the latest in a series of defections they hyper-dramatize as a 'diaspora' due to recent events, but he says it isn't about Pepsigate, just a general change in the overall climate. He'll certainly be missed there.   He is (was) their cultural junkyard dog, taking on anyone who dared to write non-corporate-media science on the Internet and implementing their Borg mentality toward bloggers. His article is thoughtful and detailed but he still manages to take some shots at other sites in classic Bora style, writing: Nature…

University of Arizona (UA) scientists have announced their success in genetically altering mosquitos to be immune to the single-celled parasite that causes malaria. Professor of entomology Michaiel Riehle led the UA research team hoping to stop the spread of malaria worldwide by replacing wild mosquitoes with laboratory-bred swarms unable to act as vectors of the disease because they are completely resistant to infection by the organism called Plasmodium that causes it. Their new research will be published July 15 in the journal Public Library of Science Pathogens. Riehle's team designed…

Making the rounds today is a utility written by Coding Robots that analyzes your prose and then matches it with famous (note: not necessarily someone you like) authors. Among the blogosphere outside Science 2.0 I have seen 4 Margaret Atwoods, 3 Dan Browns, 2 Stephen Kings.  Only 1 Asimov but I bet his was all about robots or something. Who did I get?   Dan Brown, which is sure to make my wife chuckle, since I read the first hundred pages of "The DaVinci Code" and had two notebook pages filled with blatant errors or inventions he made even with my limited grasp of religious history,…

"Eighty percent of success is showing up" W.Allen

The ChatterBox Index Index to articles published in the ChatterBox. The ArcticGlaciersThe AntarcticArticles about iceArctic Ice May 2010Arctic Ice May 2010 - UpdateArctic Ice June 2010 Arctic Ice June 2010 - UpdateArctic Ice June 2010 - Solstice UpdateArctic Ice July 2010Arctic Ice July 2010 - Update #1 Arctic Summer 2010 - Hot Or Not?What Is A Tipping Point ?Arctic Tipping Points - #1: Background And Recent HistoryArctic Tipping Points - #2: Some Feedback MechanismsArctic Tipping Points - #3: More About FeedbackArctic Tipping Points - #4: The Broken Bridges Of NaresArctic Tipping Points - #5…

'Show her your love is as bag as the whole solar system' sounds like a schlocky sales pitch, right?  Well, it is but the Laura Cesari, a.k.a. Chain of Being, Solar System Necklace is just too awesome not to be schlocky about. Now, there is a big Scienceblogs.com kerfuffle about them turning over the site to profit- and non-profit institutions for money so before anyone thinks the same thing is happening here, I will say right up front I am not getting any money to promote this thing.    It is just cool.  It is essentially a beaded model of our solar system and each bead is…

This is a post that has nothing to do with physics or other sciences, for once. I just report here my thoughts as a father upon allowing my 11-years-old son to go spend a day to the beach alone with his friends. Is it too early ? Is it about time ? Perhaps I should qualify my description of the whole business, since the data above are of course wholly insufficient to answer the question. Filippo (on the left in the picture below, taken last year in Klagenfurt) today left our home in Venice a bit before noon, walked 10' to the boat station, got in a boat directed to the Lido of Venice (a half-…

Though I have been gardening less and getting back to freelance writing, my wondering about invasive species has been growing like a weeds, like Creeping Camanula perhaps. Creeping Campanula (a.k.a. Campanula rapunculoides or Creeping Bellflower) can seem to take over a garden bed overnight after a drenching rain. But its purplish-bluish petals are adding tasty beauty to the daily, free, green weed salads I toss together.   I am wondering: Could leaving invasive plants and animals alone, or even cultivating some, turn out to be better and more do-able in the long run than our…