The Hall of Fire

Boulder has, for decades, surrounded itself with open space. We like it that way. There are various drawbacks - property values are through the roof and no one's building outwards because that's the open space, but the groundswell to invade that open space with housing just isn't there. That open sp...

Especially since she tends to get the last word.

Cool. This further justifies including "lack of respect for the Constitution" on the "reasons to hate the Bush admin" list. The question is, why you would have such a list? And instead of the president pushing the boundaries of the constitution, which is a temporary situation, w...

Well, right now it's not the government that's causing people to consider lifestyle changes. It's the rising price of gas. Whether it's fair or not, people are blaming the politicians for rising gas prices and they will take that blame to the polls. So it's really not in the current government's int...

I hate bus schedules. I hate traffic jams. Neither of these apply to bicycles. Well, the bus schedules sort of do. They stop on the right, which is where I'm riding. Usually this is fine...unless the bus makes a sudden decision to stop and I'm going too fast to respond. I grew up in a subdivision. H...

It's also possible to just be that good...

Thanks for posting that, Eru & Teremia . The fact is, the American lifestyle is not the only first world lifestyle in the world. To be honest, I sometimes wonder if it is even a reasonably nice lifestyle. So hurried! So stressed! So ... drone-like. Get up, be stuck in traffic going to work / ki...

Have I ever mentioned how happy I am he changed the names of certain characters? I mean really...Marmaduke? Isn't that some enormous dog in the funny pages?

No, the physical fact is that CO2 causes warming. It can't not cause warming. It's the nature of the molecule and how it works in the atmosphere. There just isn't any controversy on that point. Sorry. Just to elaborate, CO2 absorbs IR near the peak Earth emits at. Other gases, like methane, absorb ...

Oh don't worry. I will. Though I may have to raise my price. A girl's gotta eat, you know.

Wilma, the requirements vary a bit from school to school and mentor to mentor. To get a PhD you must fulfill some very lightweight course requirements AND make an original contribution to your field. Emphasis on the latter. No one ever asks a PhD for their graduating GPA. They do, however, ask for y...

Not published in peer reviewed journals = high likelihood it's b.s. Heck, sometimes even the science that makes it past peer review is still b.s., the authors were simply blessed with either lenient or clueless reviewers (the latter should never happen, but I have seen some papers that really make m...

I first read LOTR in colleg and honestly Gandalf never grated on me. In his relationship to the hobbits I saw many echoes of certain teacher-student relationships I've had. Those echoes have only grown stronger in the years since. Gandalf struck me as a teacher or, more appropriately, a coach or men...

Yes, scientists are perfect, science is never wrong, and people are evil for driving their cars to work. Yep. The drivers that go blind as soon as there's a windshield between them and the rest of the world are especially evil. I'd be missing a couple scars and still in possession of a beloved bicy...

The rise in temperature IS measurable. It IS happening. The effects of it are actually measurable too - the shortening of winter by a few days has been recorded. The utterly off-the-scale rainfall that Bombay, India received a few years ago is a likely effect. The antarctic ice cap crack has happen...

Erm, actually, they do. The good ones are doing science. Or maybe that's just a prejudice I've picked up in school. ;) A PhD doesn't make you some sort of encyclopedic god. Just sayin'... That said, there are scientists with axes to grind and they grind them. But these things tend to get equalized b...

I used to have this sign tacked to my wall: When you can do nothing, what can you do? It's a Zen koan I came across the first time my sister got sick. You do realize that it's not that hard to reduce your carbon footprint? Just not driving in to work one day a week makes an enormous difference if en...

The model I've seen floated around lately is an ice age following the warming period. This is based on past events and on some fairly basic principles - when you perturb the equilibrium of a system, it realigns into a new equilibrium or returns to the old one. But that process of re-equilibrating is...

I wasn't aware dissidents "shut up". They certainly don't in my field... Now, what's really entertaining is gearing up to destroy your own hypothesis. My lab's preparing to do that. I'd participate in the coming storm, except I got all burnt out and ready to graduate being at the eye of th...

Prim, my boss went away back in January to do just that. Not only are grants reviewed by fellow scientists, but preferential treatment is NOT given to the famous guys. There's a famous story in the RNA community of a Nobel laureate who moved to the US after winning his prize. He was shocked to disco...