Liz's Bloglet - Tuesday 31 March 2009

This is awesome. Also, I'm very glad that, thanks to Remi's family, I get the jokes. _
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10:34:53 AM, Tuesday 31 March 2009

CSX is doing track maintenance this month, making the train to Croquet significantly difficult. _
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10:00:24 AM, Monday 30 March 2009

If your job is to support scientific research by maintaining a computer network, then no, the security of the network and your convenience in running it is not more important than the research.

In other words, forcing reboots all over the building at 8 on a Friday morning (after sending out a notice at 9:30 on a Thursday night) is not acceptable, because you will interrupt important processes and people will lose data. This is particularly true when the patch you're installing has been available since October. _
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04:11:12 PM, Friday 27 March 2009

Anybody have any experience with Aqua Data Studio? I just discovered that we have a site license for it, so I figured it's worth a try since I'm finding running Access in Parallels to pretty much suck. _
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12:14:50 PM, Friday 27 March 2009

_
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12:04:20 PM, Friday 27 March 2009

Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It's gonna be the future soon
I've never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it's already here _
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10:28:28 AM, Thursday 26 March 2009

I try not to link to Schuyler all the time, because you really need the backstory to understand just how awesome some of the entries are. I do think this one stands alone, though and encapsulates both Schuyler's story and her dad's amazing writing.

Today, just look at Schuyler's face as she receives her new Big Box of Words, now in pink. _
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08:02:39 AM, Thursday 26 March 2009

John Hope Franklin was a real American hero. He founded the study of the history of African-Americans as an academic discipline in its own right. I don't think one can overstate the importance that simple fact. That he did it while working in segregated libraries that wouldn't let him go to the bathroom, let alone valued the work he was doing, is even more remarkable. He marched for civil rights. He advised Thurgood Marshall in Brown v Board. He lead President Clinton's Initiative on Race.

He has also been a pillar in Durham, a calm, strong voice in the face of racism and injustice. That Duke hired him, promoted him, and honored him has altered the university forever. We have all lost something, and one can only hope that new leaders will step forward. _
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07:50:58 AM, Thursday 26 March 2009

The NPR announcers are discovering that "Obama economy" is a tricky thing to say. _
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07:32:48 AM, Thursday 26 March 2009

I still regret not seeing Indigo Girls in, say, 1990. By the time I had a driver's license and money to buy tickets, it was just too late. _
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03:48:31 PM, Wednesday 25 March 2009

Thank you Mario, but our princess has rescued herself _
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02:32:33 PM, Wednesday 25 March 2009

Addendum to previous post: One of my favorites science bloggers profiles an amazing ecologist (her mom) for Women in Science month. _
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07:57:29 AM, Wednesday 25 March 2009

It's Ada Lovelace day, but I don't know a ton about women in computer science. One I do know about is local hero Marjorie Lee Browne, the first African-American woman to get a PhD in Math, who brought the first computer to North Carolina Central University, and for most of her tenure at NCCU was the only member of the Math Department with a PhD. In other women in science news, Jane Lubchenco has been confirmed to head NOAA and new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has taken the first steps to end the crime known as mountain top removal mining/valley fill. _
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07:31:11 AM, Wednesday 25 March 2009

The absence of pain is a remarkable thing. _
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08:50:06 PM, Monday 23 March 2009

Has anybody else with a MacBook gotten the splintering at the magnetic attachment points, right beneath where your wrists rest? Apparently it's a very common problem and covered under Applecare. I just have to get it to the store and the Geniuses will snap on a new top cover. Maybe that's why they've gone to the all-metal look for the new ones. _
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06:40:51 PM, Monday 23 March 2009

Actually, medicine is the best medicine _
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08:07:53 AM, Saturday 21 March 2009

One of the subjects I taught yesterday is to me one of the coolest things in biology. Most people know that humans are one of the many (many) members of the phylum Chordata. All chordates have at some point in their development:
-pharyngeal gill slits
-a tail
-a dorsal-ventral nerve cord
-a notochord (a dorsal-ventral stiff tissue derived from the mesoderm)

In other words, at some point all chordates basically look like tadpoles (yes, this includes us).

In humans and most chordates, the subgroup called vertebrates, the notochord becomes the bony structure called the spinal column. But an actual spine is not required to be a chordate.

Also included in Chordata is a group which has larvae that have all the chordate traits, but a much simplified adult form. They are the Urochordates, including the sea squirts, the tunicates

The next closest relatives of the chordates are the echinoderms, which include sea stars, brittle stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, sea lilies, and sea cucumbers. Collectively, we are the Deuterostomes and what we have in common is the earliest shape of our development, the embryo. Protostomes, everybody else, have determinate cleavage of cells from their earliest development(as the cells divide they begin to take on the roles they will have for life), and the first opening to form in the embryo becomes the mouth. Deuterostomes have radial cleavage that is indeterminate (it will be some time before any cell takes on its permanent role), an the first opening to form in the embryo becomes the anus, with the mouth forming later.

This seemingly mundane difference in development turns out to make a huge difference in the potential complexity of the organism's formation, and is a clear sign of our close relationship to all the other Deuterostomes. It also means that researchers studying human embryology do a lot of work with sea urchin embryos, rather than human, because they are cheaper and essentially identical to our embryos.

So, here's how to think about chordate evolution. A little tadpole-like earliest chordate became more fish-like, which in turn became more amphibian-like and eventually figured out lungs, which allowed them to wander out onto land and the rest is history. But all of us, for a little while as embryos, still have gills and a tail. _
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07:06:22 AM, Saturday 21 March 2009

see more Lolcats and funny pictures _
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09:14:10 AM, Friday 20 March 2009

Liss busted out another lesson in Feminism 101, which based on the current crop of movies available for my alleged pleasure appears necessary once again.

"Geez, can't you take a joke?" That's all it takes�the implication that the woman who objects to public expressions of misogyny, who doesn't find funny the means of her own subjugation, or doesn't find amusing being triggered by careless "jokes" about a brutal event she has experienced, is humorless. Uncool. Oversensitive. Weak. (As though standing up to bigotry is the easy way out, and laughing along is somehow strong.) _
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01:12:12 PM, Thursday 19 March 2009

Hey, the Huffington Post has two whole good stories today. Ben Stiller remembers Ron Silver

10 years ago two writers from Milwaukee named Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon wrote a TV pilot called Heat Vision and Jack. It was a Six Million Dollar Man/Knight Rider inspired series about an astronaut played by Jack Black who flew too close to the sun on a mission, so when it was daylight he was the smartest man in the world, and when the sun set he was normal again. Owen Wilson was the voice of his talking motorcycle. And the villain of the piece was Ron Silver as himself -- Ron Silver the actor, bad guy from Time Cop, but that was just his cover -- in actuality he was the head of NASA, which in this reality was an evil organization trying to take over the world.

Yes, I would have watched that. _
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09:14:44 AM, Thursday 19 March 2009

The Pentagon said it received 2,923 reports of sexual assault across the military in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 2008. That's about a 9 percent increase over the totals reported the year before, but only a fraction of the crimes presumably being committed. _
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09:12:08 AM, Thursday 19 March 2009

Stop-loss is over. I have several friends who get to keep their loved ones, instead of the government owning them. _
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09:29:41 PM, Wednesday 18 March 2009

Rodale press is obviously in financial trouble because I keep getting reminders that I could always resubscribe to Backpacker or Runner's World. Sorry guys. Not my idea of awesome vicarious fun. _
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11:27:43 AM, Wednesday 18 March 2009

I understand that, a lot of the time, boasting of credentials doesn't really help a discussion. But sometimes, you know I do this for a living. I'm not bragging. I'm not being unreasonable. It's just this obscure area of knowledge that I happen to have devoted my life to that has some implications for other people's daily lives, so I try to help them out. _
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09:07:59 PM, Monday 16 March 2009

I had driven past the Wright School many times before I heard about what an important place it is. How a society deals with children like Brianna says a lot about who we are and what we value. _
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08:39:16 PM, Monday 16 March 2009

Good research out of the group we share our lab with: corn-based ethanol = bad idea Until a better form of biofuel exists, it makes more sense to put land into conservation easement and sequester CO₂ in plant and soil carbon. _
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09:20:47 AM, Monday 16 March 2009

Durham was built mostly post-Civil War as a railroad town. And a lot of our railroad bridges seem to have been built to 1890's code, leading to the inevitable "decapitations" of trucks. Someone with an office by one of these notorious bridges has set up a camera...
_
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08:51:02 AM, Sunday 15 March 2009

Since when are academics bad? I mean, I know the US right has hated academics since around the time they found out about communism, but when did US "liberals" decide to go an a huge anti-Ivory Tower crusade? On Metafilter these days, linking to an academic study to support a point about anything from sociology to science is enough to get you laughed out of the room as a clear moron by a bunch of pop culture nerds and programmers. I was told today that the changes in gender roles in US society over the past 20 years are due to Madonna, Britney Spears, and Avril Lavigne, not women's studies researchers. I just don't get it. _
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09:42:59 PM, Thursday 12 March 2009

Maybe I'm the last person on earth to see this, but Wanda Sykes = awesome _
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02:22:08 PM, Thursday 12 March 2009

William Saletan says If you define pro-life as preventing abortions, Planned Parenthood is the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world. I don't think any additional commentary is required. _
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08:16:03 AM, Thursday 12 March 2009

Today I had dinner with an amazing woman who has traveled all over the world and played in major symphony orchestras and knows interesting people and tells great stories. And she invited me over to her house to play with her dogs and eat noodles and talk about my research and her kids. I like the world. _
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10:16:55 PM, Tuesday 10 March 2009

It is remarkable that some paper shufflers manage to stay employed given their incompetence. _
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11:53:05 AM, Tuesday 10 March 2009

I love this

My dad missed very few of my meets over my years of running, showing up in the middle of the afternoon at random high schools all over southwest NC. He ran in high school (and still runs, completing his first marathon after I stopped running) and so it was an interest we shared. He still keeps me up to date with the progress of my old team, although I don't know the runners anymore and even my coaches are gone. He probably is glad I wasn't a cheerleader because that would have been a harder interest to share. I can't picture him as the dad in the video, but then I can't picture me as the little girl, either.

My mom came to many meets, too, but an engineer's schedule is more flexible than a psychologist's, so she was more likely to be there on the weekends. And they both went to 7 years of Friday night football games to watch first my brother and then me in the marching band, as well as endless weekday night band concerts, musicals, and choir things. And unmentioned here (as it often is in our society) is the huge amount of time my mom devoted to driving us to lessons and various other things, at times both dropping me off at school and picking me after practice over the years. The family dinners and vacations and just time spent talking. And the time my mom spent at home with us before and while she was in grad school.

Both of my mentees are being raised by very amazing single moms who work two jobs. I know they talk to their girls every night about what they do (and they talk to me, too, about what's going on with their girls). They look for opportunities like our program and after school programs and summer camps and Big Sisters as ways for them to get more adult time. And both of my mentees go to magnet schools and are getting a great education. But I feel bad for both the girls and the moms that they do miss a lot of opportunities to do things together.

Just another way I'm lucky, another thing in my knapsack. _
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03:53:18 PM, Monday 9 March 2009

Why Bogus Therapies Often Seem to Work

An interesting side note is that Dr. Beyerstein, a distinguished biologist and skeptic who recently passed away, was the father of the excellent political blogger Majikthise _
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08:41:04 AM, Monday 9 March 2009

One of my church choir friends is a volunteer chef at the Iditarod this year. Check out his blog. _
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03:34:45 PM, Friday 6 March 2009

They'll insist that health, like salvation, is entirely in our own hands. If you just have the character and self-discipline to stick to an abstemious regime of careful diet, clean living, and frequent sweat offerings to the Great Treadmill God, you'll never get sick. (Like all good theologies, there's even an unspoken promise of immortality: f you do it really really right, they imply, you might even live forever.) The virtuous Elect can be discerned by their svelte figures and low cholesterol numbers. From here, it's a short leap to the conviction that those who suffer from chronic conditions are victims of their own weaknesses, and simply getting what they deserve.

I've been trying to explain this to several people who think that proper living staves off chronic illness, which of course implies that I got sick because I did something wrong. Sara Robinson explains this much better than I.

(aside from calling it Calvinism, when it is clearly Pelaginism--in Calvinism it is in fact heresy to believe one can earn salvation). _
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07:25:03 AM, Friday 6 March 2009

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