Category Archives: Uncategorized

Spam

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… And I don’t mean the good kind.

A feature of WordPress blogging software is that you can turn off commenting on old posts, older than a specified number of days. I don’t like doing that because some of the most interesting comments trickle in on some of those old posts. Like this one.

But, for some reason, old posts are spam magnets, and I’m not talking about the canned meat. I opened up commenting on old posts a while back, and suddenly the spam is rushing like Atlantic Seawater in a New York Subway. So, I’ve re-closed comments on those old posts.

In the mean time, I deleted a LOT of spam. The spam filter was not catching it. If you are a real person and you think a comment of yours got deleted by accident, let me know.

Thank you very much, that is all.

Rabies (and Autism)

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I have discussed rabies before. In Attack of the Hound of Malembi. Or, “Whose are these people, anyway?” I discussed a personal encounter with a rabid dog, which killed my cat and bit six friend. In Ode to Rocky I discuss an encounter with a cute little raccoon which probably did not have rabies, but since this was during the Great Rabid Raccoon Scare a few years back he got busted anyway.

And now, we have Skeptically Speaking #190 RABID … last Sunday’s show which is now a podcast available for you to download.

This week, we’re talking about a viral menace that’s one of the scariest – and deadliest – known to science. We’ll talk to WIRED editor Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy about their book Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. And on the podcast, we’ll speak to post-doctoral researcher Elisabeth Whyte, about a crowd-funded project to use computer games to help adolescents with autism improve social skills and face processing abilities.

Get your rabies shot first, then CLICK HERE.

Dark Matter, Energy Drinks, and Gender

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These three things are intimately connected.

Well, OK, they’re not really connected at all, but all will be the subject of discussion on the next Skeptically Speaking. I believe Desiree will be speaking on Sunday, December 2nd with James Pinfold about Dark Matter … apparently there is new information bringing an explanation for it into question … and the other items will be added into the podcast to be released on Friday, December 7th. Details here.

Here is something you can do to help…

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(This is for US citizens)

President Obama speaks to the American people from a busy factory floor in Pennsylvania about the urgent need to pass the middle class tax cuts, which will give families and businesses preparing for the holidays the certainty they need going into the New Year. Democrats and Republicans must come together to pass one thing that everyone agrees on—extending income tax cuts for 98 percent of American families and 97 percent of small businesses, and there is no reason to wait. The President urges Congress to take action to help grow our economy and strengthen the middle class.

Click here and fill it out.

Then… call or write BOTH of your members of Congress.

Is Bullying A Feature Or A Bug?

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This looks interesting: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.

This is the description of the book:
The No Asshole Rule was awarded a Quill Award as the Best Business Book of 2007.

When Robert Sutton’s “No Asshole Rule” appeared in the Harvard Business Review, readers of this staid publication were amazed at the outpouring of support for this landmark essay. The idea was based on the notion, as adapted in hugely successful companies like Google and SAS, that employees with malicious intents or negative attitudes destroyed any sort of productive and pleasant working environment, and would hinder the entire operation’s success.

Now using case studies from these and many more corporations that have had unquestioned success using variations of “The No Asshole Rule,” Sutton’s book aims to show managers that by hiring mean-spirited employees – regardless of talent – saps energy from everyone who must deal with said new hires.

FEATURING A NEW CHAPTER ON THE RULE AND ITS SURPRISING IMPACT! In this new version of The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton provides an uproarious account of the world-wide reaction to his best-selling book. As he writes: “I didn’t plan it. I never wanted it. I didn’t believe it at first. And it still make me squirm.” Sutton’s talking about having been branded as “the asshole guy.” But beyond the initial shock value of the provocative title, Sutton’s epilogue goes on to detail the kind of impact this important book has had on corporate organizations and employees everywhere. His book has provided a major wake-up call to those individuals in the business world and beyond who somehow have lost sight that a little civility goes a long, long way when it comes to dealing with our fellow human beings – and leading an effective organization. This is one epilogue that is definitely worth reading.

There is a blog post discussing this here:

The 7 Ways Organizations Justify Bullying in The Workplace

…The potential for individuals within organizations to behave unethically is limitless. Unfortunately, this potential is too frequently realized. If these types of incidents are dealt with in the heat of the moment, not only can they be corrected immediately but you also send a signal throughout the organization that this will not be tolerated. It is like a pebble tossed into the water that sends out larger ripples.

Bullying in school is the training ground for bullying in the organization….

Shall we discuss the Internet?

Hat Tip: Amanda Temple

First close up of DNA ever

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When Bill O’Reilly said that you “can’t explain tides” I laughed. Why did I laugh? Because if he wasn’t such a dumb-ass he could have EASILY named a dozen thing that science claims to “know” that a reasonably good rhetorician could convince the average Tea Bagger that science really can’t “know” because it can’t really “see” them. The tides have been understood not only by science by by a lot of regular working class potential Republicans (though many are not) who eek out their living on the shores of the briny sea. Bill O’Reilly must have looked like a complete idiot to them. Meanwhile, almost everything we know about the details of what happens inside a cell is either invisible or so close to invisible that it would qualify as “If we can’t even see it, how can we now that?” material.

Of course, we DO KNOW that stuff. It just isn’t easy to know. I’ve discussed that at some length here.

But now, one of the interesting inferences that science has made about something very tiny inside (usually) cells has been confirmed by direct observation, back in the early 1950s in a paper by these guys named Watson and Crick, has been confirmed by sight. A research team in Italy has produced a snapshot, a photograph, of the DNA Double Helix. Sort of.

It looks like this:

From the paper's Abstract: Direct imaging becomes important when the knowledge at few/single molecule level is requested and where the diffraction does not allow to get structural and functional information. Here we report on the direct imaging of double stranded (ds) ?-DNA in the A conformation, obtained by combining a novel sample preparation method based on super hydrophobic DNA molecules self-aggregation process with transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The experimental breakthrough is the production of robust and highly ordered paired DNA nanofibers that allowed its direct TEM imaging and the double helix structure revealing.

Pretty cool, huh? What you are actually looking at is a set of DNA strands wrapped in a very orderly fashion around a single strand that forms a core for the others. You’d have to squint really hard to see the actual double helix, but it is in there somewhere.

In order to get this picture, a strand of DNA was stretched between two pillars of nanoscopic cilicone. The surface that included the nano-pillars was designed to be hydrophobic, which caused the DNA to be left stranded (ha ha) at the super microscopic level so instead of getting all bunched up a single strand could be located. The photograph is sort of an electron microscopic image, but with technology made just for this setup. This technique is a whole new way of visualizing tiny stuff. Keep an eye on the nano silica pillar technique.

There is an article here in the New Scientist as well.

…at present, the method only works with “cords” of DNA made up of six molecules wrapped around an seventh acting as a core. That’s because the electron energies are high enough to break up a single DNA molecule.

Using more sensitive detectors that can respond to lower-energy electrons should soon allow the team to see individual double helices, and even unwound single strands of DNA. “With improved sample preparation and better imaging resolution, we could directly observe DNA at the level of single bases,” says di Fabrizio.

Watson, J. D., & Crick, F. H. C. A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature 171, 737–738 (1953)

Gentile, F., Moretti, M., Limongi, T., Falqui, A., Bertoni, G., Scarpellini, A., Santoriello, S., Maragliano, L., Proietti Zaccaria, R., & di Fabrizio, E. (2012). Direct Imaging of DNA Fibers: The Visage of Double Helix Nano Letters DOI: 10.1021/nl3039162

National Geo's Birding Essentials

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Are you interested in birding but don’t really know much about it? Did you just put a feeder outside and noticed that birds are interesting, or did you finally get around to stopping at that wildlife refuge you drive by every week on the way to the casino and realize that walking down to the swamp to look at birds and stuff is both better exercise and cheaper than playing slot machines for nine hours straight? Or have you been birding in a casual way for a while, using your Uncle Ned’s old binoculars and a tattered and torn Peterson you found on the sale table at the library, and want to find out which aspects of birding you are missing out on? Filling in the blank spots in your knowledge of birding is easy given how willing birders and writers about birding are to tell everybody else about birding, and it is probably even easier to do with a book like “National Geographic Birding Essentials.”

(Full disclosure, I write for National Geographic’s Science Blogs, sure, but really, I have nothing to do with this book. I didn’t even get it as review copy, someone gave it to me for Christmas last year.)

As you know, in the beginning of almost every bird guide is a chapter (or two) on how to do the whole birding thing, some more extensive and some less extensive. The most extensive and useful for the novice that I know of is the front matter in The Young Birder’s Guide, which I highly recommend for middle school or so aged potential birders. Well, Birding Essentials is like that first chapter but in the form of a whole book. Here’s what you need to do to see if you should get a copy of this book and spend a few hours with it. Look at the following list of topics and see if you feel like you know enough about most of them, or not:

<li>Binoculars, how to chose one and how to use them.</li>

<li>Field guide basics, how to use them, etc.</li>

<li>Understanding status and distribution of a bird species</li>

<li>Details and terminology of migration, nesting, and other patterns of movement and migration

Parts of the bird. Here’s a short list of parts. If you don’t know them, you don’t really know the parts: 

<li>
  • lores
  • eye line
  • supercilium
  • lesser and greater coverts
  • tertials
<li>Colors and patterns.  Bird color terms are atypical.</li>

<li>Methods of identification using field marks</li>

<li>Variation in bird features (sexual dimorphism included)</li>

There’s more, including strategies for approaching the field adventure that is birding, and dealing with rare variants, and so on.

Excellent birdy bedside reading, but mainly for the novice birder. If you work with bird watching in a science classroom, this is probably a good volume to have handy; tell your librarian to get it.