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The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld A passing mention in last week's post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn't find any in electronic form, probably...
A Question for the Biologists: Origin of The Origin? I've had limited success with this query on Twitter, probably because not that many people were reading late last night when I posted this, but I can give a little more context here, so it's worth repeating: As part of...
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: A Review Is In I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first...
Jake and the Overly-Analytical Parents SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at...
Science Consulting for the Movies David Kriby's new book on science advising for movies and television is a great analysis of this unique form of science outreach.
Weekend Diversion: Fill-in-the-blanks "It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas." -Paul Cezanne All over the world, hundreds of millions of families are getting together this weekend for a variety of reasons. And a large number...
Musical Poll: Lyrical Crimes I'm killing time waiting for something I can't talk about yet, so here's a silly poll to pass the time, brought to you by a couple of songs served up on the radio this morning while I was running errands:...
The Story of the One Little Pig, the Nice Wolf, and Materials Science I want a story. The story about one little pig, and the wolf. I'll need you to help me with it, OK? Yeah. OK, once upon a time, there was one little pig, and he... What did he do? He...
Readers remember Ayn Rand and cringe A great article from the awl asks writers and book critics which books they liked when they were younger, but...
Union College in the "Frozen Four" While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed "mine" that's playing in the national...
Impostors, Underdogs, and the Status of Science Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something...
Two Women-in-Science Notes Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science...
Birthday Party Speech With my slightly odd professional perspective I'm also acutely aware of how lucky I am to have plopped down not just where I am, but when.
Assyrian Books and Quote Chasing While reading bits of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Space Chronicles yesterday, I ran across this quote, attributed to "an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC": Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily...
Global Hunger Games Hunger Games - World Food Programme. Hunger Games portrays a grim future in which the "bottom 99%" must ration their food to reduce the chance that their children will be sent as "tributes" to compete in a game to...
On Basketball While in the past, I've written a bunch about basketball here, I've been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn't because the past season...
Ten Years Before the Blog: Historical Recap June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it...
Tell My Dog What She Got Wrong: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Errata In comments to yesterday's post, Andrew G asked: Speaking of writing, is there an errata list somewhere for "How to teach relativity to your dog"? No, but there probably should be. I believe there's an error in one of Maxwell's...
Always Write the Introduction Last Here are some excerpts from the introductory sections of the very first drafts of some book chapters: [BLAH, BLAH, BLAHBITTY BLAH] and [Introductory blather goes here] and Blah, blah, stuff, blather. There's a good reason for this, based on the...
The Evolution of Random Comfort Food One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to...
It Figures: The Historical Aesthetics of Scientific Publishing Steve Hsu has a post comparing his hand-drawn diagrams to computer-generated ones that a journal asked for instead: He's got a pretty decent case that the hand-drawn versions are better. Though a bit more work with the graphics software could...
Win the Opportunity to Walk With Moon Astronaut Buzz Aldrin in This Year's Cherry Blossom Festival Parade A visit to Washington, DC in the spring is always exciting, but this season the 'wow" factor in the nation's capital goes up a notch with the 100th Celebration of the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade on Saturday, April 14.
Fishing and Sacrifice at Must Farm Century after century, these people were sacrificing expensive objects in the same stretch of river where they fished every day.
Query for Non-Physicists: Initial Reactions I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I'm a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of...
The Story of the Three Giant Hippopotamuses Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses... No, Daddy, it was three little pigs. This is a completely different story, honey. Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses, who lived together in a river in Africa....
“I think I'd go with 'School productions are generally bowdlerized' as the Ockham's razor, here. They leave out the messy stuff in Shakespeare, too.” Brooke on 'Rent' at Duke
Orac 04.13.2012
PZ Myers 06.17.2009
Orac 04.30.2012
Tim Lambert 09.12.2011
ERV 11.26.2011
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006