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Geometry Proves Sheep Are Selfish Jerks
Sometimes what looks like friendly behavior is really an attempt to get one's neighbor eaten by a wolf before oneself. Sheep, for instance, seem cozy enough in their flocks. What's a better way to...
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Crossing valleys in fitness landscapes
With his "holey adaptive landscapes", Sergey Gavrilets (e.g. 1997) solved the problem of crossing valleys of low fitness in the fitness landscape* by positing that for high-dimensional landscapes...
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NSERC Proposal
Yikes, even though our proposal to NSERC (I think that stands for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) wouldn't be due until November 1, I just discovered that we need to get a...
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Dun, da, dun, done!
Processes always have quite a number of more or less continuous steps leading from here to there, from a start to a finish, but for purposes of our mental health certain stages of processes are...
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Another bunch of retractions
It appears that a series of papers, written by a German business professor, are being retracted. This particular scandal doesn't seem to involve data fabrication, though. Instead, he is accused of...
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More on the NSERC proposal
Title: I want something catchy but not frivolous. 'Do bacteria have sex?' has to be immediately followed by one particular definition of sex, as any process evolved (and maintained) by selection for...
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Unbending the bends
Sometime before dawn this morning, we took our oldest son to the airport. He's bound for the Caribbean for a pre-orientation trip for college (learning to sail with a team of other freshmen). They will...
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What should bourbon taste like?
An advertisement caught my attention for cherry, spices, and honey tea flavored bourbon. Having struggled to control my gag reflex, here's my take on this. In some sense the Phactor understands...
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Letting God do the punishment for you
There are lots of stereotypes about the attitudes of religious people to punishment. There is the one that says religious people are mild and meek, and turn the other cheek rather than seek revenge....
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It Takes an 8-Year-Old to Outsmart a Crow
When Aesop penned his fable about a thirsty hero who drops pebbles into a pitcher to raise the water to a sippable height, he was imagining a crow—not an elementary-schooler. And scientists have given...
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Drought triage
Almost 2 weeks ago our gardens got 1.5" of rain, and nothing since all the while baking in what is for this area extreme heat. And remember that rain came after nearly 3 weeks of no significant rain....
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What is 5 sigma?
Before the announce of the discover of a new boson in LHC by the two experiments ATLAS and CMS, I try to explain the concepts of sigma, $\sigma$. Today I would propose you a video from Fermilab about...
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The Higgs boson and the future of science
My latest post on the Scientific American blog network ties together several threads about reductionism, emergence and the nature of scientific problems which I have explored on this blog. Philip...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Globe Thistle, a drought survivor
While lots of plants are looking rather sad, the globe thistle (Echinops and uncertain of the cultivar or its origin), while a bit shorter than usual, is flowering pretty normally. These are tough...
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World Vegetable Center
Sometimes it seems that the BIG crops get all the attention and you begin to wonder who's paying the least bit of attention to all those other crops humans eat. Good nutrition depends upon the...
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A silent healer
I have an article published in The Economist's Babbage blog. Carbon monoxide gets a bad rap. The gas, produced by incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons, causes hundreds of deaths every year by...
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The day of mathematical poetry
posted by @ulaulaman about #mathematics #poetry #BridgesConference Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science (discovered via Mr Honner) is an annual conference where mathematicians,...
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Farmers' Market Etiquette
Farmers' markets are great things. My Father used to like to take his young son to fading remnants of a big city market every now and then, and then such markets, where in days gone by grocers and...
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#Microtwjc A Salmonella of Doubt ?
The microbiology twitter journal club beckons, and it is now time to wade through the latest paper, on Salmonella, and how to spot different subtypes of this bacteria. This allows us to get a look at...
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Praying for pain relief
Prayer seems to work as a form of pain relief - but is this a physiological response, or is it purely psychological? To investigate this, Else-Marie Elmholdt Jegindø and colleagues from the Danish Pain...
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