Random Thoughts

When I was a grad student, I installed SETI@home on a bunch of lab computers, which served as a screen saver and crunched data from scans of the sky in search of aliens whenever the computer was idle…

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying"Woody Allen

Aww. I cannot bring myself to enter the contest to win a month living in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The website beckons: "Be the experiment. Eat. Sleep. Science."  But I am…

When I was studying, a long, long time ago I encountered the problem that I was busy with subjects that most of my friends did not understand. Still I considered those subjects so interesting that I…

Recently Elizabeth Cunningham Perkins brought us a Weedy Rumination on the Creeping Bellflower, Campanula rapunculoides. I will now tell you about a wildflower growing in my own garden, which is full…

Just a note here because I figured it is not clear - I am on vacation these days and, while I continue to post at a regular frequency, I am much more erratic than usual with answering comments in the…

BeautifulPeople.com, the dating site where ugly people need not apply, has launched a virtual sperm (and egg) bank for people who want to have beautiful babies.   Really.  They call it the…

Dear gentle readers and the lovely and talented Scientific Blogging/Science 2.0 community, You may have noticed that I have not been around much lately, and I felt I should let everyone know what has…

Crying is a waste of perfectly good water. So why we do it? I have no idea, so I would like to hear your ideas. To get the ball rolling, here are eight hypotheses, each surely inadequate and probably…

Scienceblogs.com stalwart Bora Zivkovic has bid farewell to that site, the latest in a series of defections they hyper-dramatize as a 'diaspora' due to recent events, but he says it isn't about…