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I reject your reality and I substitute my own I don't know if this phrase ... ... originally from Adam Savage or if he's quoting someone. I think it might be his. Today, I was in an internet argument with someone (can you believe how many people on the internet are WRONG???) and I...
Maybe My Next Book Should Be About Atheist Gatherings As you have probably guessed from the blog drought around here, it's the end of the semester. That means tons of grading, office hours, meetings with students, deadlines to meet, and all around not much time for blogging. Final exams...
Church of Sweden Church Sold As Housing In England and other countries, churches have long been deconsecrated and used as shops and for housing. In Sweden, this has previously only happened to nonconformist chapels - quite frequently, actually. But now, the first Church of Sweden church...
Bad Reporting About Women in STEM This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview...
The Writing Process 9:30am Thursday, Starbucks Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits. 11:15am Thursday, Starbucks Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into...
1970s Concretist Sculpture It's taller than I am, a sturdy climbable aluminium structure as was en vogue in the 70s.
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice...
Skepticism is a cultural phenomenon Once you understand the processual nature of Skepticism, you will be a better skeptic. Until then, you're just a dood with a T-shirt.
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004 The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap...
Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist? Over in Twitter-land, there's a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don't know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all. I have too much other stuff to do to generate...
Gender Issues Start Sooner Than You Think Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald: As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets -...
See? The Ammonia in Pink Slime is a Good Thing! It is not clear that Pink Slime has ever made anyone sick, but Tuna Scrapings certainly have. The difference? Chemical treatment of the former but not the latter, apparently....
Human Evolution: The meaning of it all We had a great discussion with John Hawks on the radio today. The podcast of that conversation is available via any one of the routes indicated here. We discussed australopiths, Homo, Paleolithic sex, ancient DNA and fossil casting calls. And more. Check it out. Thanks,...
"Your Inner Neandertal" Keynote talk by multimedia artist Lynn Fellman for Minneapolis DNA Days Do you know why some people are 1 to 4% Neandertal? Lynn Fellman explains how your Uncle Ned and maybe you have an "Inner Neander" during her art and science talk on April 28th....
What questions do you want to ask John Hawks on Sunday? John Hawks is one of the nation's leading palaeoanthropologists, and has lately been working with ancient DNA, recent and earlier Human Evolution, and an interesting project that is a sort of casting call for extinct humans and their relatives. Most of you know John from...
Ales Stenar: Q&A; These large stone ships form a common category of monuments, but few are currently as nice-looking as this one.
More Physics of Sprinting Yesterday's post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn't match real data in the...
The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which...
My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review...
Fornvännen's Autumn Issue On-Line Looking at this table of contents, I am yet again reminded of how much fun it is to edit such a wide-ranging and polyglot journal!
Everyone's Talking About the BECB! As part of my one-man media blitz for my new book Among the Creationists: Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Frontline, let me call your attention to a few posts. P. Z. Myers has posted a nice review.: What do you do...
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2002-2003 As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22,...
Hardcover BECBs Now Available! The official publication date for the BECB (that's the big evolution/creationism book for those not up on the local slang) was April 10. Alas, as the tenth drew near I was dismayed to find that the book was only...
EBooks and Agencies The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting...
Why So Many Books About Quanta? I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books...
“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