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Say that again? Why chemical names tangle on the tongue
Michael Pollan's Food Rules famously advises not eating anything with an ingredient a 3rd grader can't pronounce. The rule is more about eating closer to the production point, about consuming things...
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John Nash's nighttime chalkboard scribblings
From physicist Peter Woit's blog comes a link to a PDF document containing a transcript of the bizarre scribblings that John Nash used to leave at night on the blackboards of the math department at...
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Soggy Saturday
The midwest of North America is having a rain event. Our area is not getting flooded like down in Texas and Oklahoma, but it's plenty wet. Our fountain pond and lily pond are full to overflowing and...
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Massive genetic sharing effort shows power but also shows how little we know
Your genes are not your fate. Nonetheless, genes can tell us a lot about our risk for disease, and sometimes they can tell us how to lead healthier lives.The landscape of the human genome is vast and...
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Monday morning science
It's June; where did May go? Glad some early seed collection was done before our 2.25 inch rains came this past Friday and Saturday. Front ushered in some unseasonably cool weather, cool enough to...
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June 2015 Desktop Calendar
Another group of mosses from my bryological adventures in Chile this past winter! 1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will...
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Socialism is the ism dismalest of all
If you don't recognize the title phrase, it's because it's from a Chad Mitchell Trio song from the 60s called "The John Birch Society". This morning TPP received a very important telephone call from...
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Essentials of growing grass
The essentials for growing lawn grass are no different that for growing any other green plant: water, soil, mineral nutrients, and light. Basic botany, right? So when people are missing one (or more)...
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Those pesky faculty - Wisconsin takes action
Several decades ago a dark comedy on the BBC was called "A very peculiar practice" and it was about academic life at Lowland University. The university had hired a new president from the USA to lead...
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Back online
It's been a very busy time at GamesWithWords. I'm pleased to announce that we'll be moving to Boston College in January. The impending move, combined with a large number of papers to write, has kept me...
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VerbCorner Video
In case you wanted to know more about our VerbCorner project.Many thanks to the two undergraduates who helped make this video.
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LHC restars at 13 TeV
http://t.co/jLPjvDAT6V greeting to @CERN from @ulaulaman and all network Today at CERN, LHC restarts after a stopping period, at the energy of 13 TeV. It's a great day because we expect signals of new...
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FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for...
Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking by Veronique Greenwood at Nautilus: Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an...
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Unrealistic Scientific Optimism
Not enough published studies replicate. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the most difficult to address is statistical power. Why is low power a problem?Suppose you want to test the...
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Math education: calculus in South Korea and the Rubik's cube
#abstract from #arXiv via @ulaulaman A couple of mathematical abstracts from arXiv: N. Karjanto (2015). Calculus teaching and learning in South Korea Jurnal Matematika Integratif 9(2): 179-193, 2013...
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The Velvet Spiders: High Society
Communal web of Stegodyphus, copyright V. B. Whitehead.In John Wyndham's novel Web (published in 1979, some ten years after Wyndham's own death), a group of settlers attempting to establish a utopian...
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Sympiesis
Female Sympiesis, copyright Lyle J. Buss.We often imagine that parasites select their hosts largely on the basis of type: one parasite prefers caterpillars, for instance, while another prefers flies....
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The Cancellothyridids: A Modern Success Story
Northern lamp shels Terebratulina septentrionalis, from Oceana.As has been noted on this site more than once before, brachiopods are a group of animals probably more familiar to the student of...
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Over enthusiastic reproduction
2015 has been a very good spring for the silver maples, which though rather ungainly and unattractive trees are quite common in our urban areas. Saying it was a good year only means the trees set an...
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Big, old-fashioned rhododendron
Our earliest azalea (R. mucronulatum) bloomed just about 2 months ago, and the latest flowering rhododendron in our gardens is just now flowering. It's a bit old bush some 8-9 feet tall, 10-12 feet...
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