Liz's Bloglet - Monday 25 September 2006

Fancy hotels suck. A certain federal agency which very nicely provides fellowships for graduate students sucks. Having to hang the gigantic poster presenting my research at knee level sucks. _
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07:54:22 AM, Monday 25 September 2006

If Zach Braff is the voice of my generation, can't someone please crush his larynx? _
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08:20:20 AM, Sunday 24 September 2006

A cool new blog from a high school biology teacher (especially for Matthew, but others will find her cool, too) _
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08:40:07 AM, Thursday 21 September 2006

Institutions Hinder Female Academics.
...anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage. _
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08:49:49 AM, Wednesday 20 September 2006

Someone who is very emotional about an issue may also be right. The real question is the merit of the person's argument.

Several feminist bloggers have offered to answer questions about feminism, if they are asked respectively. Here, Happy Feminist answers the old "Why do women get so upset when I say they're being overly emotional?"

For example, a man may not get as worked up discussing issues of sexism against women because these issues don't cut to the core of his very self-worth or ability to function in society the way they might for a woman. Thus, the man may be better positioned to treat an argument about such issues as a parlor game whereas for women they may be deeply serious.

Okay, no more excerpts. Go read the whole thing now! _
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09:19:12 AM, Sunday 17 September 2006

Eric Wagoner, who used to sell us veggies in Athens (Thursday afternoons at Big City Bread), makes the ultimate REM post on Metafilter. _
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09:11:57 AM, Saturday 16 September 2006

Ann Richards died of cancer. In a better world, she would have been president. In this crappy world, she lost her governorship to an over-priviledged son of a Connecticut businessman, who was himself, in her great words "born with a silver foot in his mouth." While governor of Texas, Richards appointed more women and minorities to positions in Texas government than all of her predecessors combined. Among the actions that likely lead to her defeat, she vetoed a gun bill permitting concealed carry and armor-penetrating bullets, and legislation that would have doomed the aquifer which provides drinking water for most of Texas. She was strong, tough, smart, and refused to sit down and be quiet.

Asked once what she might have done differently had she known she was going to be a one-term governor, Richards grinned. "Oh, I would probably have raised more hell."

"I did not want my tombstone to read, 'She kept a really clean house.' I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, 'She opened government to everyone."

And she did. And we all owe her.
Update: Two awesome rememberances, one from Salon and one from (Richards' close friend and great Texas columnist) Molly Ivins. _
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09:02:25 AM, Thursday 14 September 2006

It's raining. I've got too much reading to do. My sidebar is updated. _
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01:34:39 PM, Wednesday 13 September 2006

Hi. My name is Artemis. Can I eat your toe? _
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01:24:12 PM, Wednesday 13 September 2006

Donors choose is a way for public school teachers in the US to raise a few hundred dollars for their classroom. Many of the proposals are to fund supplementary projects or technology, but there are also heartbreaking proposals for $300 to make sure all kids in a rural or inner-city classroom have the school supplies they need. Several of the science bloggers have recently been highlighting it as a way to support better science education in our schools, but there are also proposals for art, music, hands-on math, and other things which are being left behind under the Bush administrations guidelines. You can search by location or subject or really anything. _
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11:14:24 AM, Tuesday 12 September 2006

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'" _
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02:33:37 PM, Monday 11 September 2006

Someone recently commented to me that my religious beliefs are more similar to those of Martin Gardner than anybody else. He is no longer involved with conventional religion at all, but maintains that, despite the complete irrationality of it, the world with theism makes him happier than the world without. I was familiar with him from the Annotated Alice, from books of his math puzzles I had growing up, and from my dad's subscription to Skeptical Inquirer. Here's an excellent interview with him from that magazine. But I had no real knowledge of his religious thoughts. So, I'm off to check out The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener _
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11:29:28 AM, Monday 11 September 2006

Kitten is healthy and is staying. Still no name. _
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08:44:55 AM, Friday 8 September 2006

Guy visits the South. Is shocked that it is not awful. Is condescending and learns nothing. _
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10:20:47 AM, Thursday 7 September 2006

That hopefully marks the rebeginning of the ecological blogging in earnest. The field work is done, I have a ton of reading to do, the lab is currently shut down due to toxic mold, so here I am. _
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10:15:42 AM, Thursday 7 September 2006

Many, many moons ago, Matthew asked:
Was just listening to the Nature podcast, and they were talking about how food webs typically consistent of two chains, a fast and a slow, united by high-level predators. I wasn't clear if this was a new discovery or something that ecologists have known for ages, so I thought I'd ask an ecologist.

The short answer to this is that there is either tree-deer-mountain lion (fast) or there is tree-mouse-snake-fox-mountain lion (slow). This part has been known for a long time, and was what led to ecologists talking about 'food webs' rather than 'food chains'.

The long answer is that there are a huge variety of chains within a given food web, and quite a few of them have nothing to do with the highest level of predators at all. For instance, organisms of all sizes are killed by disease, parasites, or colonial animals, none of which have been conventionally considered top predators.

The big revolution in ecosystem ecology of the 1980's was the microbial loop, the idea that an entire 'food chain' takes place within the microbial world of an ecosystem, with no macrorganisms involved at all. So an alga photosynthesizes and then is eaten by a bacterium and that's it. Or a bacterium photosynthesizes and then is eaten by an alga and that's it. (They're tricky and not easily categorized, those microbes). These days, when I hear people talk about fast loops in the food web, they're usually talking about the microbial loop, where most of the production and consumption in an ecosystem occurs, but so quickly that it's most easily measured by the production and consumption of oxygen rather than by counting the cells produced and consumed. _
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10:12:46 AM, Thursday 7 September 2006

They just named the new storm off our coast Florence, and I was thinking that it seems like there have been a lot of storms named Florence, including a major one that hit the Gulf Coast awhile ago. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that it was already the most used storm name ever, when considering both Atlantic and Pacific storms. Ahhhh, the useless knowledge. _
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11:34:21 AM, Tuesday 5 September 2006

I am pretty bummed about the death of Steve Irwin. I think he convinced a lot of people who were previously pretty uninformed that we should conserve scary animals (rather than killing them) both because they are, in his word, "beautiful" and because they're important ecologically. I don't doubt that some of his activities were less than sustainable, but I commend his abilities as an educator. _
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09:06:35 AM, Monday 4 September 2006

Yesterday, our neighbors across the street knocked on our door and asked us if we could help them. They had there a little problem they could not solve, since they already have two big ginger tabbies, a dog, and a five year old. This is her:

She's currently being kept in the Kitten Storage Facility (bathroom) pending her test for FIV followed by her test for Tuxedo Rejection, but we may well have another cat. _
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02:28:08 PM, Sunday 3 September 2006

Tuxedo refused to go outside when I left this morning. I'll take that as a sign that cats don't like low atmospheric pressure, rather than an omen of impending doom. _
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10:10:27 AM, Thursday 31 August 2006

The number of female clerks for the US Supreme Court has dropped to single digits for the first time since 1994. The article points out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was turned down by the esteemed Justice Frankfurter in 1960, despite having been recommended by the Dean of Harvard Law School.

Jill, a law student herself, nicely handles the issue. _
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07:50:52 AM, Wednesday 30 August 2006

So that's that. Mark has convinced me of the error of my ways, and I will be dropping out of grad school at my earliest possible convenience. _
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07:59:33 AM, Monday 28 August 2006

If you're reading this and you're thinking that I owe you an email, you are correct. This weekend, hopefully, will involve a little less of the 12-14 hours at work thing, so I will try to write then. _
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09:20:14 PM, Thursday 24 August 2006

A nice Pandagon entry explaining how the President's new favorite word--"Islamofascist"--is really dumb, because they're really not fascists since they're really a loose collection of cells, not a centralized, corporatized government (with the obvious exception of the House of Saud, who are our buddies).

Amanda goes on to say that Bush's problem is that the right term--Islamic fundamentalist--doesn't work for him because his supporters see nothing particularly wrong with being a fundamentalist. But absolutist, black and white world views cause the vast majority of problems in the world. The inability to see nuance, to understand that one set of careful proscriptions for everybody in every situation hardly ever works, is in fact what makes people want to kill each other. _
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06:48:42 AM, Thursday 24 August 2006

Yeah, so, snakes...on a plane. That's all I really need to say about that. _
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07:03:54 PM, Saturday 19 August 2006

My friend Monica Roberts died on Tuesday, of lupus. It was a small town, and I don't really remember when I met Monica the first time. My earliest clear memory of her was at Amanda Washam's 12th birthday party, when Monica won the dance contest we staged in Amanda's driveway. She danced to "Walk Like an Egyptian". In high school, we were part of the same social group--the oh-so-smart, oh-so-sarcastic (mostly band) nerds. Monica was one of the best trumpet players around. She was also a dedicated member of the soccer team. But the love of her life was her lab puppy, Bullet. Her love of animals led her to know she wanted to be a vet, at a time when most of us just wanted to get out of high school.

I lost track of Monica after she left for Virginia Tech. I heard about it through the grapevine when she went to University of Minnesota to get her PhD in Molecular Veterinary Biosciences. I learned from her obituary that she had just finished a post-doc at The Jackson Lab (one of the most prestigious genetics institutes in the world). I'm grieving for the smart, funny kid I used to know. Her family is grieving for the woman she became. The scientific community is grieving the loss of a rising star. And her dogs are grieving for their mom. _
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01:18:03 PM, Thursday 17 August 2006

Interesting New York Times article about college ranking systems, and their pitfalls and how they could be improved to be made actually useful.

(you all know bugmenot, right?) _
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11:53:19 AM, Thursday 17 August 2006

So, I have a secret that I am now sharing with the world. I do cross-stitch, on evenings when I am too tired to do anything functional, and usually with either NPR on the radio or the West Wing on the DVD player. I find the orderliness relaxing and it's nice to have a product at the end, unlike playing computer games (or science these days).

Now, most people who do cross-stitch must have horrible taste because most patterns available for purchase are, frankly, hideous. I have mostly gotten by with nature designs, which are still cheesy but at least don't involve puppies or cherubs. A friend of Remi's showed me Subversive Cross-stitch, which is clever, but not really something I'm going to do, mostly because it's too easy. I recently finished a multi-year gigantic scene of wolves in snow, which I'm not really sure what to do with, and was feeling like doing something new. So I got on the internet and found Cross-stitch Art, which actually sells some less conventional stuff. So I ordered this lotus blossom thing which is cool and interesting looking and looks like it's complicated enough to keep me entertained. _
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11:46:43 PM, Wednesday 16 August 2006

Awesome liberal Presbyterian blog _
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09:40:28 AM, Saturday 12 August 2006

The Onion, rocking my world. In other right of bodily autonomy stories, check out Implanon. _
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06:21:36 PM, Friday 11 August 2006

The fact that Chertoff and all American news anchors keep insisting that this terror plot announced today was "sophisticated" says a lot about the state of science education in this country. Mixing chemicals together to make them explode is not exactly sophisticated science (although it is rocket science). I'm sitting 10 feet from a cabinet containing literally hundreds of currently perfectly inert chemicals many of which would explode when mixed together. And that's just our storage cabinet, of course. Our hazardous cabinet contains things that explode when looked at funny, as well as things that will eat your skin, stop your heart, and kill your fetus. As we were discussing in the lab this morning, the really surprising thing is that people have been using complicated bombs to blow things up for so long when there are so many perfectly easy to transport and mix together chemicals that are quite readily available. _
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11:47:04 AM, Thursday 10 August 2006

The Descent is an awesome ride. I knew spelunking was dangerous, but I hadn't considered all of those dangers. Also, I greatly admire that the cast was completely female, they were strong and interesting, and no mention was made of this fact at all.

The Descent is the best thriller of the year; it is Scottish and about spelunkers. The best thriller of last year was Nightwatch; it is Russian and about scary urban vampires and those who fight them. The best thriller of the year before that was The Ring; it is based on a Japanese story about a very not nice videotape.

Why do American filmmakers think thrillers have to be about girls being stalked in cities or cannibals in Texas? _
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08:49:59 AM, Saturday 5 August 2006

Song Bird is a United Church of Christ minister, music-loving optimist. Pure Luck is a secular humanist, science-loving pessimist. They are married and quite awesome (and they live in Portland, ME of all places). _
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07:49:40 AM, Saturday 5 August 2006

When I was a Boy
I won't forget when Peter Pan
came to my house, took my hand
I said I was a boy, I'm glad he didn't check.
I learned to fly, I learned to fight,
I lived a whole life in one night
We saved each other's lives out on the pirate's deck.
And I remember that night
when I'm leaving a late night with some friends
And I hear somebody tell me it's not safe,
someone should help me
I need to find a nice man to walk me home.
When I was a boy, I scared the pants off of my mom,
Climbed what I could climbup on
And I don't know how I survived,
I guess I knew the tricks that all the boys knew
And you could walk me home, but I was a boy, too.

I was a kid that you would like,
just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah I never cared who saw.
My neighbor came outside to say,
"Get your shirt," I said "No way
It's the last time, I'm not breaking any law."
And now I'm in a clothing store,
and the signs say Less is More
More that's tight means more to see,
more for them, not more for me
That can't help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat
When I was a boy, see that picture? That was me
Grass stained shirt and dusty knees.
And I know things have gotta change,
They got pills to sell,
they've got implants to put in,
they've got implants to remove
But I am not forgetting
That I was a boy too.

And like the woods where I would creep,
it's a secret I can keep
Except when I'm tired,
except when I'm being caught off guard.
I've had a lonesome awful day,
the conversation finds it's way
To catching fireflies out in the backyard
And I tell the man I'm with about the other life I lived
And I say now you're top gun,
I have lost and you have won
And he says "Oh no, oh, no, can't you see
When I was a girl, my mom and I, we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked
And I could always cry,
now even when I'm alone I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness,
But I was a girl too.
And you were just like me,
and I was just like you."

Dar Williams _
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09:47:21 AM, Friday 4 August 2006

Those poor people. _
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08:26:02 AM, Wednesday 2 August 2006

Yes, you are _
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07:36:29 PM, Tuesday 1 August 2006

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