Plea for concision
Mike the Mad Biologist: "When speakers run over." It tells me that you didn't even take the time to run through your presentation even once just to see how long it would take. If you don't care about...
View ArticleSuborbital experiments worth the cost
Yesterday, some commercial space news made the NY Times ("Space Tourism: One Giant Leap for Researchers" and Wired ("Scientists Buy Rocket Rides to Suborbital Space"). Science institutes are buying...
View ArticleLanguage bootstrapping the brain
Marina Bedny and colleagues [1] show that, to a remarkable degree, the visual cortex of blind subjects takes on language-specific processing tasks. I think the paper makes a nice occasion to consider...
View ArticleQuote: John Dos Passos on academic fashions
Writer-historian John Dos Passos, in the Paris Review, interviewed in 1968, referring to the academic treatment of modern literature: The academic community is more likely to suffer from mass delusions...
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 11
Slate has an editorial by Farhad Manjoo, featuring the idiocy of people who write crank letters to NPR ("We Listen to NPR Precisely To Avoid This Sort of Stupidity"). Yes, I know some of my readers...
View ArticleThe person attached
Colleen Morgan is preparing for a session on blogging and archaeology at the SAA meetings later this month and has started a carnival to highlight posts from other blogs on "Blogging Archaeology". I'll...
View ArticleStuxnet story
Fascinating detective story in Vanity Fair about how computer security researchers ferreted out the workings of the Stuxnet worm. I especially enjoyed the psychological sketch of one of the main...
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Mapping non-me John Hawks
The White Pages can do a map showing how many listings there are for any name in the states of the U.S. Here's the map for "John Hawks": I find this so interesting -- there are dozens of people sharing...
View ArticleAlienation
On the issue of alien cyanobacteria, I recommend David Dobbs: "Aliens riding meteorites: Arsenic redux or something new?" UPDATE (2011-03-06): Also Rosie Redfield, "Is this claim of bacteria in a...
View ArticleMadison Science Pub profiled
Ron Seely of the Wisconsin State Journal has a nice story in today's (Sunday) edition about the Madison Science Pub ("Science Pub organizer taps scientists for informal gatherings mixed with beers")....
View ArticleEarly New World archaeology news
The initial habitation of the Americas has gotten a lot of press attention in the last couple of weeks. National Geographic gave us a report on skeletal remains from an underwater cave in Yucatan,...
View ArticleDNA relatives
Steve Mount works through the math of "relative finder" predictions from 23andMe (and by extension, other personal genome tests): "Genetic genealogy and the single segment". He does a nice short...
View ArticleMaking scientific minds
Lena Groeger begins a stint blogging at Rationally Speaking with this entry, "So, what's science good for?". She briefly discusses the usual rationales for "broader impact" of scientific work, as well...
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Photo
From the Flickr Commons: The Smithsonian exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair
View ArticleFDA-DTC genetics meeting
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been holding a meeting about Direct-to-Consumer genetic testing. Daniel MacArthur has been following the proceedings remotely and his summary of the first day...
View ArticleNumber as cognitive technology
Archaeologists often define technology in terms of material products. People make stuff, and that stuff is technology. But there's another way to think about the stuff we make: in terms of the...
View ArticleThe mystery of left lateralization
This morning, a timely post by cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott addresses the localization of language functions on the left side of the brain: The elephant in the room is why linguistic...
View ArticleRepatriation in Torres Strait
The Guardian: Natural History Museum returns bones of 138 Torres Strait Islanders Tears of joy as human remains are repatriated to natives of islands located between Australia and Papua New Guinea...
View ArticleThe real "junk" DNA
Let me be honest: when I started doing paleoanthropology, I really did not expect I'd be talking about Neandertal penises. And yet, here I am. Cory McLean and colleagues [1] combine a straightforward...
View ArticleI'm a genetic libertarian
Much news coming out of the FDA public meeting on direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetics. Dan Vorhaus was at the proceedings and reports on them ("Looking Ahead After the FDA’s DTC Meeting"). I believe that...
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