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June showers bring mushrooms
What with all the rain it was only a matter of time before some flash flooding occurred. Wait, OK, maybe, but it was really only a matter of time before some summer fungi appeared especially after...
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The fifth shot of a tau neutrino
http://t.co/urnbKwoiSY by @ulaulaman about #neutrino #tau #Opera #particlephysics From the press release: The OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) international experiment at...
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Dynamic monopolies and the laws of thermodynamics: An interesting correspondence
In his new book on startups Peter Thiel makes a provocative argument about the necessity of monopolies. He points out that in an environment of perfect competition, everyone is so busy competing just...
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We are all Hamiltonians. We are all Newtonians.
Michael Lind is an economic historian who has recently written an excellent history of the United States. Lind divides the thread of American history as flowing in two parallel but competing...
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(T)Rump Roast - Recipe for disaster
So the Donald is running for POTUS. Imagine TPP's excitement. The Donald's message seems simple enough: I'm rich, I'm successful, so vote for me, and you'll have a rich, successful POTUS. So in what...
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Algal designs for money!
Happy Birthday to M. C. Escher. Everybody TPP knew in college had an Escher print, or two, hanging in their rooms; they were so clever, so well designed, so much fun, but who knew he tried designing...
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Want to bind small molecules? Get a backbone
Here’s a paper from the Shoichet lab at UCSF that illustrates one of the major problems that drug designers encounter – predicting conformational changes (“entropy” to a physicist). What the study does...
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What is the half-life of a tweet?
My tweets apparently have a half-life of about two hours, but I have no idea if that's unique to me. My spouse is new to Twitter and as I was showing him how he could see some data about his tweets, I...
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The chirality at the beginning of the universe
A new clue about the #quarkgluonplasma from @RHIC_STAR at @BrookhavenLabWithin the particles that constitute atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons, there are the quarks, the elementary particles with...
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I Said Primrose-Willows, Darling
The plant shown in the photo above (copyright Forest and Kim Starr) is Ludwigia octovalvis, commonly known (along with other species in the same genus) as primrose-willow. This is a very common plant...
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FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...
The White Elephant of Rucheni by John McKay at Mammoth Tales: On a Renaissance map of the world, there is a small white elephant standing near the Arctic coast of Russia. How it got there is a mystery....
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Happily, a relentlessly gay garden
The Phactors' garden attracts a lot of attention and several people in the "hood" are regular visitors to see what's happenin'. Neighbors regularly tell us how much they enjoy the views, so no notes,...
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Moss sweet toes
TPP just noted that summer rains always bring fungi, and the last couple of days have reminded the botanist of something else that comes with summer rains too. Moss-sweet-toes. Of course, at halfway...
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Friday fabulous flower - yucca in contrast
This is just your basic yucca although with variegated leaves, but it is a bit more dramatic because here it is standing in front of a weeping copper European beech and the dark purple of the leaves...
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Highlights of recent botanical research
For those of you who are not research botanists, i.e., most of you, here's a link to some editor-selected articles from the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany. One of the things that...
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Balloon flowers, really
This is just one of those mind boggling things. Who knew anyone could construct things this complex out of balloons, just balloons? Of course most of the constructions illustrated at that link are...
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Chemists are wildly polysemous
STO-3G//STO-3G calculated Raman spectrum of arsoleA few months ago this BBC news report - about the evacuation of a building because of a volatile compound got chemists on Twitter talking about...
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Mid-week odds & ends
Rose, Pete - Always liked the guy as a scrappy player for the Reds. Hard to believe he'd throw a game just to make a few bucks betting, but when you break the rules and then lie about it, you've given...
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FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!
Biology Finally Explains Why Honey Badger Don’t Care by Megan Cartwright at Slate: It’s official: Honey badger don’t care. This “crazy nasty-ass” critter—the subject of a National Geographic...
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Retirement update
Quite a few people have been asking TPP how his retirement is going. In answer: It's going well. You see everyone's big worries are money and boredom, having nothing to do and having nothing to do it...
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