The reference manager software Endnote is the single crappiest piece of software I have ever used. The sooner it dies a nasty, horrible, painful death, the better.
Who’s the Scientist? – Seventh Graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab:
My picture of a scientist is completely different than what it used to be! The scientist I saw doesn’t wear a lab coat. . . . The scientists used good vocabulary and spoke like they knew what they [...]
Everyone’s favorite systematics journal Systematic Biology have produced a collection of T-Shirts that you can buy online (like the awesome one above). This is a fundraising project, and 100% of the profits will go to helping graduate students in the field of systematic biology (like me!).
There are others there that [...]
Now, I’m really skeptical of the six-degrees of freedom stuff, and mildly skeptical of small world network things in general (lots of shiny, little usefulness). However, I may be swayed by some new research coming out of Microsoft (?!) who tracked a metric crap-tonne of instant messages traveling through the MSN network:
[...]
Just a quick apology – the posting frequency here will decrease (and already has) until I finish my Ph.D. I’m in the last stages now (touch wood) and am hoping to be done by May.
The Encyclopedia of Life has gone online. Unfortunately, she’s currently dead in the water:
We are currently experiencing an extremely high volume of traffic on our web site. As a result,
you may have difficulty accessing our site. Our apologies for the inconvenience. Please try again soon.
Fortunately, Carl Zimmer has [...]
‘cos it’s Valentines day – Evolution, by Langdon Smith:
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths [...]
Said the little Eohippus,
“I am going to be a horse!
And on my middle finger-nails
To run my earthly course!
I’m going to have a flowing tail!
I’m going to have a mane!
I’m going to stand fourteen hands high
On the psychozoic plain!”
The [...]
I recall something that I believe I heard Carl Sagan say either in an episode of Cosmos or in one of his earlier books, that one could store enough information to hold an entire encyclopedia by putting a notch in a stick, if only one could measure where the notch lies to some absurd [...]
There’s a fascinating article in today’s New York Times by Amy Harmon on the new “personalized genome” companies where she talks about the ethics and impact on her life of getting her genome explored:
For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about [...]
