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Assessing risk and the anti-vax position
TPP grew up when measles and polio were real threats. Kids died of measles too. Every one of my grade school classrooms had at  least one student who had some form of paralysis from polio, so when the...
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The breadth of Carl Djerassi's scientific work
One measure of the diversity of Carl Djerassi's work can be gained from a simple diversity analysis of the top 50 of his most cited papers - he wrote more than 1200. The articles range from pure...
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February 2015 Desktop Calendar
Happy belated February! This past month was a whirlwind of science and adventures for me. I spent the past month in Chile attending the International Association of Bryologists conference and then I...
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Promoting literacy, but not in our neighborhood
TPP's walk to work takes one of three paths, all quite pleasant, two of which are green boulevard malls. It's good to switch things around, but generally, the eastern most street is taken to campus and...
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Mid-winter garden status report
So far the winter of 2014-2015 has been fairly mild. Some unseasonal cold during the late fall to winter transition. Some snow, but nothing unusual. A night or two of deep cold, around 0 F, but not...
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Black holes and revelations: the seeds of the galaxies
about #blackhole #astronomy #arXiv #abstract The centre of the Milky Way - via NasaIn this paper we present a new scenario where massive Primordial Black Holes (PBH) are produced from the collapse of...
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Lincolnland's science deniers in Congress
Actually Lincolnland only has 5 hard-core science deniers, and all things considered that ain't bad, but sadly, disturbingly, one of them represents TPP's district. And somehow having elected...
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Recently on Field of Science
On the Art of Mineral Identification » HGCarl Djerassi (1923-2015): Chemist, writer, polymath, cultural icon » CWAnti-vaxxers are to blame for a new epidemic of measles in the U.S. » GMP
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Erotic garden in northern Thailand
Sorry TPP missed this erotic garden on his last visit to Thailand, but it's newly opened. Not sure this is quite TPP's cup of tea, but it does have a tea house. To be sure, this is not the first place...
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Modular complexity and the problem of reverse engineering the brain
Bell's number calculates the number of connections betweenvarious components of a system and scales exponentiallywith those components (Image: Science Magazine).I have been reading an excellent...
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Lincolnland needs a state vegetable? Well, don't nominate a fruit!
When it comes to crops here in Lincolnland, there are two, maize and soybeans. In terms of value nothing else comes close. Some 4th graders decided that the state needed an official vegetable, and one...
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A canard about Robert Oppenheimer in Louise Gilder's "The Age of Entanglement"
It's always disappointing when an otherwise commendable effort at writing perpetuates hearsay about an important character in the story, especially when that hearsay is casually tossed out and left...
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Why the world needs more Leo Szilards
This is a repost of an old post in honor of Leo Szilard who celebrates his 117th birthday today.The body of men and women who built the atomic bomb was vast, diverse, talented and multitudinous. Every...
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Charles Darwin - the Monster Slayer
Today geologist Charles Darwin is not remembered as great monster hunter, despite some Victorian paleontologists and geologists were interested in the topic, but after discussing how geologists tried...
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Derek Lowe to world: "Beware of von Neumann's elephants"
"With four parameters you can fit an elephant to a curve,with five you can make him wiggle his trunk" - John von NeumannThat was one of many cogent messages delivered by In the Pipeline's Derek Lowe at...
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Happy Birthday Charles
Today February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday, and my dear little Sister's birthday too (A card is in the mail, Sis.); she's just a tad more than 1/4th as old, which sounds much worse than it is as...
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!
It's been sooooo long since I blogged, I'm actually ashamed to come back and post anything now! There is probably some proper term for that like "bloggers' guilt." Aha, yes, a quick google suggests...
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Another weird garden
If things come in threes, then TPP hardly knows what kind of garden to expect next! Earlier this week it was an erotic garden in Thailand, now (via this article at Slate) a strange, weird sculpture...
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Black holes and revelations: their large interiors
about #blackhole #cosmology #arXiv #abstract #CarloRovelli The 3d volume inside a spherical black hole can be defined by extending an intrinsic flat-spacetime characterization of the volume inside a...
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Love Can Move Mountains
January 11, 1996 a single seismograph of the Geological Survey of Canada buried in a quiet wooded area on central Vancouver Island started to record an unusual strong seismic signal– slowly, but...
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