My little plantie has plantlets!
My plant is a Mother of Thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana), which I got as a freebie from the American Society of Plant Biologists meeting last August. It reproduces asexually by making baby plantlets on the edges of its leaves. Eventually, the baby plantlets will fall off and form new plants that are genetically identical to the original Mother of Thousands.
Wow, WordPress, I’m honored.
Yesterday, Paying for an Online Newspaper got Freshly Pressed, and it turns out a lot of people have an opinion about paying for the New York Times. I’m happy to see so many people in the camp of “their news is so good, I want to support them.” This bodes well for the future of journalism.
Thank you everybody for checking Steam Trains and Ghosts out! You can expect more rantings and ravings of a mad scientist-in-training in the future.
You might know that I’ve been taking a class on science writing for popular audiences this semester. There are two required readings for the course, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, ed. Mary Roach, and A Field Guide for Science Writers, ed. Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig, and I’ve been enjoying them so much that they’ve become oatmeal reading. Wait, didn’t you know that? I do all my reading for fun over oatmeal in the morning.
.
Source: Amazon
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 The book is pretty much what it sounds like: a collection of the best stuff published in popular science magazines in 2011. The articles range in subject from how you collect semen samples from chimpanzees* to shock reporting on the Gulf oil spill to a meditation on the limits of what physics might be able to discover. The book feels like reading many issues of Discover magazine and The New Yorker, because that’s where many of these articles come from. Except that this book is a highlights reel.
.
Source: Goodreads
A Field Guide for Science Writers This is pretty exciting stuff, because it gets into the nuts and bolts of how one goes about writing about science. The book is divided into sections, one of which is about actually writing well, one about the peculiarities of certain fields such as medicine, and one about working in all the various print markets. Print markets. The biggest problem with this book is that it was published in 2006, and the written word has been through an upheaval since then. I’d recommend this book for the section on craft alone, but the ten pages on writing for the Web left me wanting more.
I’m leaving this class with more conviction than ever that science writing is very cool stuff. What could be better than science and writing put together?
.
.
.
* A section of PVC pipe lined with K-Y Jelly, in case you were wondering.
I finally caved and bought a New York Times digital subscription.
Remember the furor when the Times went to a subscription model for its website about a year ago? No newspaper had ever successfully restricted their online content like this, because people wanted it free. Living on a grad student stipend, I didn’t want to pay for it either, so I limped along on my 20 free articles a month. Now the Times has announced that they’re reducing the monthly free articles from 20 to 10, and you know what? I want that news. The New York Times has some of the best news on the Internet, and I’m willing to pay for their world-class editorial board and analysis.
Which brings me to a couple of hypotheses. First, that the Internet is getting more mature and people are figuring out how to make a business out of it. Second, that people are willing to pay for the really good content online.
It’ll be interesting to see how decreasing the free articles to 10 plays out for the Times.
It feels like this sometimes
I remember the first day of high school vividly. I was going to a school far away from my home district, so my family had arranged a carpool with three other girls from the area. Their names were Sarah, Amber, and Stacey. Early in the morning that September, I got dropped off at Sarah’s mom’s house, and the three of us hung around in the shade of the live oaks, bubbling with excitement.
Sarah’s mom drove us the 30 minutes to school, then we piled out of the car and went our separate ways to our lockers.
At homeroom, the teacher had us get into groups of 6 and introduce ourselves around in a circle. I noticed that a Latina girl was being awfully quiet – she hadn’t said her name. I asked her what it was.
She gave me a very strange look. “Sarah.”
I don’t usually make blunders as bad as that one, but for a long time I’ve suspected that I’m pretty stupid at recognizing people. I couldn’t tell Merry apart from Pippin to save my life. And I hate, hate romantic comedies. Most of the characters are wearing street clothes and they all tend to be the same ethnicity. What am I supposed to work with?
There’s a name for this problem. Prosopagnosia, or face blindness. It sound like a terrifying terminal condition, but it’s actually more common than you might think. For a class on science writing I’m taking this semester, we read an article by Oliver Sachs, who cites statistics that as much as 2.5% of the population have severe prosopagnosia – they have trouble recognizing even their friends and loved ones. For the rest of us, the ability to recognize faces is distributed on a bell curve, like IQ is. Which puts me somewhere in the range of Forrest Gump.
If you’re curious, the Prosopagnosia Research Center at Harvard University has an online test you can use to gauge your own ability to recognize famous faces. It’s real quick and dirty, but the results are interesting.*
*I thought Princess Diana was Tina Fey. Just sayin’.
So I had this friend in college who wanted to be a bookbinder. She’d taken a class on the History of Print (you can do that at Carleton), and immediately she was hooked. She started doing all the bookbinding she could. I remember Heather bringing her creations back to Science Fiction House to show all of us.
You can’t make a living as a bookbinder, you might say. Not in this age of TV and videogames and Kindle.
Well, it’s been a couple of years since we both graduated, and this is what’s happened:
Heather’s at the North Bennet Street School following her dream. She’s learning how to conserve books and make them into works of art. And she just made a hand-bound copy of the Silmarillion with a title printed in Tengwar.
See more here: http://bookwyrmbound.com/
10. The schedule is flexible. The graduate school cares more about whether you do a good job than what time of the day you do it. That is, unless you’re doing a time-course experiment – then you’re at the experiment’s mercy.
9. It’s a meritocracy. To do a good job, you need to do good science.
8. My boss is a scientist.
7. You’re surrounded by nerds. I can rhapsodize about how cool carbonic anhydrase is to my fellow grads, and they’ll know what the heck I’m talking about.* They probably feel the same way about carbonic anhydrase.
6. You can spend all day surrounded by your Eppendorf tubes if you want to.
The machine I work with doesn't look like this
5. You get to work on a Machine. Or at least I do. The Machine I work with weighs at least 50 pounds and is controlled by a computer that runs DOS.
4. Ph.D. Comics.
3. You get to learn new things every day – you’re supposed to learn new things every day. The other day I went to a seminar given by a guy who is comparing the geographic patterns of phylogenetic diversity in senita cactus and senita moths. The best part was that I was required to go to this seminar. Learning about the latest research on senita cactus is part of my job.
2. Your research might help people someday. Check out Norman Borlaug, one of the University of Minnesota’s most famous graduates. His research on dwarf varieties of wheat started off the Green Revolution.
1. If you work hard, and you do what you’re supposed to do, eventually you get to be called “Dr. Such-and-such.”
.
.
.
* Carbonic anhydrase is cool because it’s ridiculously fast. It’s an enzyme that turns carbon dioxide into bicarbonate and back again in your body, and it can do this about a million times per second.
Yes, that's me, acting like a goofball.
I learned something neat the other day.
Think back to your high school biology class. When you were studying genetics, your teacher probably told you that being able to roll your tongue is a dominant trait and not being able to roll it is recessive. That’s not actually true.
There are pairs of identical twins out there where one twin can roll their tongue and the other can’t.
That by itself doesn’t mean that tongue-rolling isn’t genetic. There are traits out there that are controlled partly by genes and partly by factors we don’t fully understand. Schizophrenia, for example, is partly genetic. Yet there are pairs of identical twins out there where one twin gets the disease and the other doesn’t. Something about the environment triggers the disease in only one of the twins.
You’d expect, though, that if genetics has something to do with tongue rolling, then identical twins should be more likely to both be able (or unable) to roll their tongue than any other two people. Scientists from the University of Adelaide in South Australia actually tested this way back in 1975.* They surveyed 47 pairs of twins, some of whom were identical, about their ability to roll their tongue. The result: the identical twins weren’t any more likely to both be able to roll their tongue than the fraternal twins. The study didn’t find that genetics had anything to do with tongue rolling.
.
.
* If you want to read the study, look here: Martin, N.G. No evidence for a genetic basis of tongue rolling or hand clasping. J Hered (1975) 66(3): 179-180.
Spring has arrived here in the Twin Cities.
.
.
.
