See-through fish! You can see its eyes and nose inside of its head!

Cloud update: WHEN IS THE SPEEDBOOK COMING????

I have not ranted about the cloud in a while.  That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it a lot. In fact, I've been checking the Google Chrome project blog at least once a week looking for updates about the arrival of Google branded netbooks with Chrome OS installed.  They promised Fall 2010!!!  October is here, and still no word.

I have a feeling they felt like they needed to step up their game after the arrival of the iPad, and are scrambling to be as awesome as Apple, but the iPad does not meet my needs.  I want a small netbook, something that fits in a purse rather than a backpack, but I need a keyboard and stand up screen on the go.  I do a lot of word processing, which is just about the only thing that iPad sucks at.  Oh, that and running multiple programs at a time.  Oh, and running FLASH.  COME ON.

Rumors are that Google quietly copyrighted the name "Speedbook" recently, which implies that they are working on their own hardware for the Chrome OS platform.  The phone they made for Android was kind of a bust, but I think this might be an emptier corner of the market.  I am already salivating.  Who knows if I'll be able to afford a Speedbook (although Google has promised cheapness), but it's always nice to have something to aspire to.  Mostly I'm tired of lugging around backpacks.  Backpacks are difficult to make look good, as discussed eloquently by Glitter-and-Spandex at PhDazzle, a blog about PhD fashion and living.  How awesome would it be to have a super-speedy cloud-based computer in your purse?  Not only is it small and convenient, but you don't have to worry about damage (except the expense), because everything is in the cloud!  No setup, no cluttered desktop, no additional anti-virus software necessary, or expensive Microsoft suites.

Of course, speaking of expensive MS software suites, I still haven't found a replacement for OneNote.  Google notes just doesn't do it for me, nor does Evernote.  I like the tab layout of OneNote, and all the customization options.  OneNote is the one thing holding me back from jumping head first into the Cloud revolution (oh yes, I said revolution).

I did find a nice PowerPoint replacement however.  I also found several online LaTeX editors!  My favorites were ScribTeX and MonkeyTex.  The problem with these is that I like to use several files to keep large projects organized, with one main tex file that calls each chapter individually, and neither of these cloud programs were able to do that for me.  Maybe I was doing something wrong?

I experimented with Cloud desktops, but it doesn't really fit into the way I do things.  They are all trying to too hard to look like a traditional Windows or OS GUI, and I don't think that's necessary.  My computer desktop is completely empty, in fact, except for the Recycling Bin, a result of my hatred of clutter and the awesomeness of the Windows 7 search function.  And as I've mentioned before, although I use Google docs more often because of the convenient integration with Gmail, Adobe Buzzword is a great online Word replacement.  If I didn't have Word on my computer, I would use Buzzword over getting Open Office, as I like the GUI better.

Google, I'm getting impatient here.  Tell me more about this Speedbook thing, first of all.  And then, improve Google Notes so that I can have a cloud OneNote without buying Office 2010!  Which completely undermines the point of cloud computing by requiring the purchase of a huge offline software suite.  Oh, and it would be awesome if you could make it compatible with old OneNote files, just like Google docs is compatible with MS Word files.  Thanks!

A new name for this blog?

It turns out that ZBlog is not a unique name, nor do I think it expresses what this blog is about.  Of course, I haven't even really decided what this blog is about...science mostly, with a sprinkle of education, society, epistemology, and my own opinions.  A while ago, I decided I needed to think of a better name for the blog, but I'm just plain stumped.

This blog, by Chris Garrett, has suggestions for coming up with a good blog name.  He has actually posted on it several times.  One thing to avoid, he says, is using "blog" in the title.  Well, my current title not only has the word "blog," it only adds one extra letter!  His tips are as follows:

A good name is

1. Readable
2. Pronounceable
3. Spellable
4. Memorable
5. Concise
6. Unique

This all sounds good to me, but a bit vague and obvious. What I really need is a burst of creativity.  Any suggestions? I need help here.

She Blinded Me with Science

I used to love this song, but the video makes me rethink its message. In the end "Mr. Dolby rejects Science and things Scientific." Note the use of capitals, implying that Science itself is some kind whole and separate entity. And not just any entity, but a villain! Mr. Dolby, the science of sexuality is truly incredible. Do not throw the doctor into the river just because you struggle to understand! He doesn't deserve it! I think that if you two sang together about science a little more, you might find it a little less blinding and a little more, ummm, sexy.

On another note, the women in this video all fit the "sexy scientist" stereotype, while the men are all somewhat "mad." Surprised?

A closet workspace for the doctoral student?

I have been thinking a lot about workspaces recently, with the imminent arrival of my boyfriend and his computer in my studio.  For while, I was considering investing in a cloffice.  In other words, I was thinking about putting my desk inside my closet.  Just in case you were wondering, cloffice is not a word I made up.  There are entire sections of design blogs dedicated to the cloffice.  The New Yorker even wrote about one.  Here is a great one, from Apartment Therapy.

Check out this cloffice, from two fellow graduate students with a blog about making their lives a little more glam while pursuing a PhD.  The girls at PhDAZZLE make cloffices sound hip, but I think I'll stick with what I've got for now.

Click here to check out PhDAZZLE.

8 Sites that Would Have Made High School Science Way Cooler

Not listed in order of awesomeness.

1. Astronomy: In-browser interactive planetarium app.   There are a lot of these popping up right now, and they are really cool.  The planetarium program I had in high school was limited, expensive and came on five or six floppies. 

2. Planetary Science: Duh, Google Mars.  Pretty much the best map of another planet I've come across.  I have the iPod app too.  

3. Science and Society: A recreation of the Apollo 11 released for the 40th anniversary last year by the JFK library.  In addition to the top-notch simulations of every stage, they have incredible pictures, audio, and even video.  One of my favorites was someone (I think maybe Aldrin?) playing with a blob of water on the capsule.  Listening to the audio from this incredible mission never fails to bring tears to my eyes, it's kind of pathetic.  

4. Physics: A game from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  You help this cute little creature named Twitch collect little parts for a robot using simple machines (incline plane, fulcrum etc).  A super simple way to introduce physical concepts.  I love it!

5. Cellular Biology: Chock full of animations about cell biology.   A little clicking around will eventually get you to some very cool but simple animations of what goes in our bodies on a microscopic level.

6. Zoology: An online, interactive version of Swiss Naturalist Conrad Gesner's famous work, known as the starting point of modern zoology.  My favorite entry is the Unicorn.  Let's just say zoology has moved forward a bit in the past few centuries. 

7. Genetics: An instant eye color calculator.  It turns out the likelihood of my parents having a blue eyed kid was 1.8 percent!  That makes me feel special.  Play around with genotypes and phenotypes to see what color eyes your kids will have.  

8. Chemistry: An interactive periodic table. .  Depending on your choice of source in drop down menu at the top left, clicking on an square in the table will bring up all kinds of information, photos and videos about that element.  One of my favorite features is the temperature scale, which you can move up and down to change the states of all the elements. 

A Return to Patternicity, and its Mortal Enemy: Stochasticity

In a recent blog post (Emergence, Patternicity and the Wave) I touched briefly on the human tendency to seek out patterns. Like when we imagine feudal ant societies as the basis for ant colony behavior. The ants can be explained by simple rules governing individual ants--which isn't pure randomness--but sometimes we even insist on seeing order and organization where there really is nothing. And it doesn't help that randomness tends to be so organized-looking, following natural statistical laws that produce triple lottery winners, record breaking craps rolls, and identical twins separated at birth who marry women with the same name. But if you do the math, all of these phenomena are well within the boundaries of chance. In fact, with all the random people in the world doing all the random stuff they do every day, the chance of this kind of stuff just happening randomly is downright probable.

Randomness was the subject of a recent episode from WNYC's Radiolab (if you haven't heard a Radiolab episode yet, get on it, it's awesome). Jad and Robert chose to go with the more obscure and fancy sounding word for randomness: stochasticity. Stochasticity is, according to my dictionary, "the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan."  It is what believers in luck and conspiracy and destiny laugh off.  It is governed only by statistics, and has made several Las Vegas entrepreneurs disgustingly wealthy.  You can kiss those dice as many times as you want, but stochasticity is not convinced.

The Radiolab episode had several fascinating stories, but the one that caught my ear (and inspired this post) was about a woman with Parkinson's disease named Ann who was addicted to gambling. And I don't mean that she lost a paycheck or two at online poker, I mean she was crippled by the need to gamble, morning, afternoon, and night. A high school English teacher on a state employee's salary, Ann lost more than $200,000 in a year. That's $200,000 dollars in quarters. Ann was genuinely, hopelessly, physically addicted to playing slots.

Ann describes her mindset as a continual, compulsive search for the secret to winning: she got three lemons in a row before winning last time, so maybe lemons had something to do with it.  "The trick of a one-armed bandit," Read Montague, a professor of neuroscience at Baylor University, told The Boston Globe, "is that it provides us with the illusion of a pattern. We get enough rewards so that we keep on playing. Our cells think they'll figure out the pattern soon. But of course they won't." So Ann's gambling problem boiled down to her compulsion to see patterns where there were none--her natural patternicity. Patternicity is a word I borrowed from Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptic's Society. Allow me to quote from the blog post where I introduced patternicity, to save you clicking time:

Patternicity, argues Shermer, is a reaction that humans evolved in order to protect ourselves. The example he gives is that of a rustle in the grass, which may or may not be a deadly predator. Although it is far more likely that the rustle is just a trick of the wind, assuming the existence of the predator is a safer bet if you don't want to end up as somebody else's dinner.

And this natural, built-in tendency to see patterns around us is of course controlled by a natural, built-in chemical: the neurotransmitter dopamine. High levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia and other serious psychological disorders.  Dopamine also just happens to be associated with body movement control, and low levels of it are the primary cause of Parkinson's symptoms. Aha! The pieces are starting to fit together, aren't they…

Ann was on a drug to control her Parkinson's symptoms, and this drug worked by imitating dopamine. No wonder Ann's patternicity was on a rampage! And she wasn't alone; The Boston Globe article cited recent medical studies that found that anywhere from 3 to 13 percent of patients on medication like Ann's develop severe gambling addictions or related compulsions.

This kind of overambitious patternicity is markedly different from the delusions of government conspiracy popularly associated with other dopamine related psychological disorders, but it seems quite possible that they both boil down to chemical imbalances that screw with our pattern recognition software.  Our body is incredibly complicated, and as far as I can tell there is no part of our own anatomy more baffling and full of surprises than the brain.  Tinker with its chemistry just a smidgen, and all kinds of crazy shit happens.  And you thought you were in control...

More than a McNugget: Chicken Communication

Chickens can talk.  Kind of.  And they're delicious.  What's not to love?

I am a very strange eater. I tell people I'm a vegetarian so as not to bore them, but I'm actually just terribly picky about what animals I will ingest. I believe in transparency of consumption, and in equality of guilt throughout the chain of production (I'll save that for another blog entry). That being said, I like to eat animals. And I don't get to do it very often. So it was a special occasion when Chris bought us a locally farmed, free-range, organic chicken this week and endeavored to roast it in my grandmother's old roasting pan, using the crappiest apartment oven of all time.

The experience got me thinking about chickens. We Americans eat a lot of chicken, and we rarely think twice about it. Most people who decide to cut out only a portion of their meat consumption choose to eliminate pork and beef, often for religious or health reasons. But I think we also feel a stronger connection to the cow and the pig than we do to the lowly broiler chicken.  The former two are mammals, which means we have stronger family ties. Also they are furry, which reminds us of puppies. I could imagine hugging a piglet, a clean one, whereas I can't imagine hugging a chick. Pigs and cows are also a lot larger than chickens, which for some unknown reason seems to mean a lot to us (think of the big fuss over whales). And then of course there is the big I-word: intelligence. Cows and pigs are most certainly more intelligent than chickens.


Carnivores and vegetarians alike love to throw around claims about animal sentience and intelligence as if it is hard core scientific fact. But if I've learned anything studying assessment theory for the past six months, it's that intelligence is not something we can measure accurately even in humans, so what makes us think we can objectify it in animals? Still, there are certain basic mental feats that we consider indications of some amorphous type of animal smarts. One of those is representational communication. In other words, a certain noise or combination of noises that correspond to a certain meaning. The representational nature of human communication is what makes blogging possible; when I type the word chicken, I don't have to show you what I'm talking about, because the combination of the syllables chic- and -ken mean something specific to you already.

As kids, we are taught over and over and over by a myriad of animated movies and TV shows that almost all animals can communicate just as well as we can, and make intelligent decisions based on those communications.  If we are to take these childhood representations as fact, most of this communication is actually inter-species, a kind of encoded English.

Also they tend to wear warm weather accessories but no pants. Oh how those movie producers lie!

There are a lot of animal behaviorists interested in representational communication. Most of this research is on apes, our well known evolutionary cousins. But the creature responsible for the McNugget (or at least a portion of it) turns out to be an interesting research subject as well. Dr. Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia has found that certain rooster calls trigger nearby hens to look for specific information, i.e. food or predators. These calls have "language-like qualities," and indicate a level of social sophistication that has only been shown for a few mammals. This video shows a hen responding to a call indicating the presence of food.  She walks toward the loudspeaker and begins to peck at the ground, looking for the food.

Personally, I'm impressed.  It may not be Chicken Run, but these birds, which we stuff into windowless houses so pungent with ammonia that they develop sores all over their bodies, and breed to grow so quickly that they cannot support their own weight, aren't empty-headed idiots placed on this Earth as yet another commodity. They are the product of millions of years of evolution, including several thousand (at least) of domestication, which has given them a unique language-like ability to communicate, and I think that they deserve some respect.

So I got out the cloth napkins, and lit some candles.  Cheers to the talking chicken!

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Pick a little, talk a little, cheep!

Nerdy Chic: Designing with Science

Confession: Despite my claims at rationality, I spend at least half of my time online perusing design and organization blogs.  My favorites include Apartment Therapy, Chez Larsson, Design Sponge, Manhattan Nest and Ikea Hacker, among others.  I love seeing how other people have organized their homes and lives in creative ways, and I dream that someday I will have the time and space for such endeavors.

In my attempts to create a somewhat unique space on a graduate student budget, my apartment has taken on something of an accidental nerdy-chic style.  I mean, I'm pretty nerdy (but also chic, right guys? right?) so it makes sense.  I have a framed piece of wrapping paper printed with pages from a human anatomy textbook, several botanical watercolors by my grandmother, a small collection of pine-cones, and a vintage celestial globe given to me in high school.  I also have glass bottles in many shapes and sizes scattered around the apartment, in which I cultivate philodendron cuttings and germinated seeds from my leftover produce, and handmade throw pillows (I had a lot of time last summer) with appliquéd sea creatures on them (an octopus and a sting ray).   Adding to the sense of nerd-dom are bookshelves full of astronomy texts, tattered fiction and education journals, and of course me, the resident nerd.

It turns out I'm not alone.  Science style is all over the place, and has even been spotlighted several times on Apartment Therapy.  Check out some of these science-inspired pieces on my secret lust-list.

Textbook inspired pillows by Heather Lins Home.  The best part is the addition of the figure numbers.

Has anybody else noticed that taxidermy and botanicals are beyond hip right now?

Hey these guys totally stole my idea.  I love how BIG they went with it though!

This globe looks a lot like mine.  I think the lines of it are very mid-century; I could see it on Don Draper's desk.

Too cool.  Hey doctor friends, could you get your hands on an x-ray for me?

A lovely turn-of-the-century (the one before last) photograph of Lick Observatory, one of my favorite places.  Would look awesome on my wall.

I think I need some of these flasks to complement my bottles.  They make perfect flower vases!  Plus, you can conveniently measure out the cut plant food.

 And of course the dream of the mid-century wooden ant-farm complete with queen.

Google reveals our stereotypes, plus, sexy scientists in their skivvies!

Science textbooks have been trying hard to include photographs of multi-gendered, multi-cultural scientists. But has our image of the "scientist" really been affected by these attempts at equity? Today I Google-imaged "scientist" just to see what I would get.

There are a couple of things I noticed immediately about these results.

1. Our collective image of the "scientist" wears a lab coat.  Only one of the 33 pictures on the first page of results is not wearing one.
2. The color scheme of our collective "scientist" is apparently blue, green and white.
3. Of 33 pictures on the first page of results, 7 of them include women. 2 of those pictures with women come from a the same web comic, and are actually jokes, leaving five serious depictions of women in science.
4. In the 33 pictures of scientists in the first page of results, there are 21 pairs of glasses.
5. In 22 of the pictures on the first page of results a scientist is working with or displaying some kind of mysterious liquid in a test tube or beaker.  In fourteen of these 22, the liquid is bubbling or smoking ominously.
6. 3 of the 33 pictures on the first page of results depict a scientist who looks like they might possibly not be white.  It's hard to tell.  Two of those three questionably ethnic scientists are also women.
7. At least nine of the scientists appear to be "mad."
8. In the first two pages of results, there are only four real photographs of women "doing science."  One of those four is a model in a lab coat and little else, shown below.

Did anybody else notice something interesting about our emergent image of the scientist?  Please, comment!

How to Control Things With Your Mind FOR REAL

I'm not sure how this escaped my notice, but technology that uses BRAINWAVES to control machines is now SO ACCESSIBLE that they've built it into kids' toys. That's right, they're making toys where you can put on a headset and control the movement of objects with YOUR MIND. Is anybody else peeing their pants right now?

In the Spirit of the MLB All-Star Break: Curve-ball Physics

I thought I would take a break from the kind of science that you have to think really hard about, and reflect on the simple physics behind the curve-ball.  We're talking about a pitch that is SO counterintuitive that for years, baseball experts couldn't even agree on its existence.  Well it turns out the pitch exists in a major way.  A good curve-ball can arc a solid foot and a half away from its original path, and be close to impossible to hit.  Vin Scully called Clayton Kershaw's curve, which he's about to lob in the photo below, "public enemy number one"; this pitch is no joke.

In 1852, a German-Jewish physicists named Heinrich Magnus (below) was the first to describe the way objects spinning in a fluid create a kind of whirlpool around themselves, which has the effect of pushing them slightly off course.  This phenomenon, known as the "Magnus Effect," is what makes curve balls curve.

Emergence, Patternicity and "The Wave": Are we all crazy?

After reading Emergence by Steven Johnson, I was left wondering why we have so much trouble abandoning the watchmaker metaphor--which Johnson refers to as "the myth of the ant queen"--and accepting the idea that nature can regulate itself.  Patterns occur in nature because individuals make decisions based on what's right next to them, and these decisions average out into big trends.  Take ants (of course) for example: one forager ant meets five other ants that smell like foragers, and she decides to switch to nest maintenance.  This tiny decision, when scaled up, creates an enduring ratio of foragers to nest maintenance workers in the colony that can last for decades.  Yet we still can't drop the image of the dictatorial queen!

My own graduate work is on how people conceptualize things that are really, really big.  So of course my first guess for what obstacle might be keeping our brains from accepting emergence was the scale necessary for the phenomenon to be possible. For example, let's say that one forager ant met five forager ants by accident, and she switched to nest maintenance unnecessarily. On a local level, that ant is going against the pattern. But when decisions about what job to do are made by hundreds or even thousands of ants, a stable ratio emerges. In the same way, there are always a dozen or so drunk baseball fans who throw up their arms too early or too late as "The Wave" moves around Dodger Stadium.   But on a scale of thousands of Dodgers fans deciding individually when to throw their hands up, a stable wave pattern emerges that moves fluidly through the stands.  We struggle to extrapolate this phenomenon to nature because, outside of sporting events, we don't usually hang around with tens of thousands of other humans.

Emergence: It's not just about ants, but sperm, and cities, and flowers, and computer programming and...

I don't often ponder theology, especially not publicly.  But my obsession with social insects has led me to start reading about a phenomenon that I find, well, somewhat divine.  And yet at the same time this phenomenon is utterly mundane--the epitome of designerlessness.  It's called "emergence."

Emergence is the invisible hand described by Adam Smith, at work not only in free markets, but in the organization of almost everything in the natural world.  (I highly recommend  the book Emergence by Steven Johnson.  He lays out several fascinating examples of emergence in nature, and talks about how the phenomenon will apply to our technology in the future.  The book was written before social networking and Wikipedia, so it could use a second edition, but it is fascinating nonetheless.)

Emergence guides the development of a fetus, dictates when the cherry blossoms appear, and creates thoughts from electrical impulses.  And, of course, emergence is at the heart of why ants are so darn cool.  Enduring systems of positive and negative feedback on a very local scale will inevitably create structure on very large scales, and that's it.  The system itself is the designer, with each component doing his (or more likely her) part.  The power of creation is not outside of nature, but within it.

How I poisoned four people (and other musings on the epistemology of science)

I borrowed my grandmother's wildflower book for the Skyline to the Sea hike yesterday, and we managed to identify some pretty cool plants.  We found Red Clintonia, Globe Lilies (see photo on right), Giant Wake Robin, and Hairy Star Tulips, among dozens of others.   I think I may have been more excited about the names than the flowers.  My favorite name was Rattlesnake Plantain, which the book explained was "named for it's discoverer, John Goodyear."  What?  Was his real name John Rattlesnake Plantain Goodyear?  And what do desert reptiles and jungle fruits have to do with the redwood forest?  I have yet to figure this one out.

It was fun to put names to flowers, but the futility of it was always in the back of my mind.  Humans love to assign vocabulary words to things, to taxonimize, categorize, classify. But does a Fetid Adder's Tongue by any other name not smell as fetid?