TEDGlobal

By: | July 26, 2011

I’ve been back for a week, now, from TEDGlobal: an ideas conference that is fast becoming my annual clarity retreat. Moved from its original host city of Oxford, the event was held in Edinburgh, Scotland and my arrival – to paraphrase John Denver – felt like coming home to a place I’d never been before.

Thinking to avoid drinking conference coffee, that foul internationally uniform brew, I picked up Starbucks on my way to the complex, only to find that TED had flown in elite baristas from around the world to make our coffees. It is just that ridiculous.

TED Talks online have become familiar household discussion items, but if you ever get the chance to go to in person, I highly recommend it, including the fast-proliferating TEDx events that are independently organized by local groups. Because the real value of these ideas festivals, which I happily see are becoming a form of tourism, is in the mixing of people who generate the ideas.

The magic doesn’t happen when Malcolm Gladwell gets up on stage and hypnotizes everyone with his speech rhythms, clothes hanging limply off his fragile frame. It doesn’t even happen when we learn that flying cars, just like the ones we were promised so long ago, are finally ready for market.

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Guest Post: Jumping Spiders in Love

By: | July 25, 2011

When it comes to complex courtship displays, birds of paradise are right up there. They do this whole hanging-upside-down-from-a-branch thing. And granted, the mantis shrimp has an impressive suite of wooing manoeuvres, used to communicate amorous intentions to the potential mate in question (otherwise the wooer might come across as an aggressor to the wooee). But complexity for size, the jumping spider (family Salticidae) has got to take the cake.

“The first time I would have seen a habernatus dance would have been in 1974,” says Wayne Maddison, zoologist and Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He recalls that as he watched, transfixed, the male spider’s dance just kept going and going. “It was this thought of: Oh my god is this complexity ever going to end?” Continue reading →

The War on Potatoes

By: | July 22, 2011

I am totally in love with potatoes. I’m getting married in two weeks, so I guess I love my fiancé more, but potatoes are a close second.

Bolivians love potatoes too. They buy them by the sackful. Bolivia has the distinction of being home to both the best potato and the worst. The best is called a papa rellena, which means “stuffed potato.” To make a papa rellena, you start with two globs of mashed potato. Take the globs and shape them into cups. Fill one half with beef and onions or a hard-boiled egg or some cheese – whatever you have on hand. Then fit the other cup on top so that you have a tennis ball-sized object. Then you fry the whole thing in oil.

Woman selling chuño

To make the worst potato — chuño — travel to the frigid and barren altiplano. Take a normal potato and lay it on the ground in the sun. Leave it there for several days until its soul has evaporated. You will have a shriveled porous thing that resembles a bleached shrunken head. Now rehydrate and serve. On second thought, just chuck it in the wastebasket. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Bees – Part I

By: | July 21, 2011

A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food.  An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out.

To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or not — maybe he’s just going through a phase — here’s a nice video by Andrew Quitmeyer and Tucker Balch, showing how the bees talk to each other via dance.  And here’s a charming NPR show by Robert Krulwich on bee decision-making processes which make the human processes look outright lame.

http://abstrusegoose.com/186

How to build a better conference

By: | July 20, 2011
photo of Hackathon Berlin courtesy of Ralf Roletschek and Wikimedia

A few weeks ago, I asked, could we make conferences less sucky?

In that post, I pointed out the contrast between two meetings I’d recently attended and tried to extract some lessons for how to make conferences better. After some more thought and a lot of feedback from LWON readers, I have put together some rules of thumb on how to make a good conference.

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The Four Types of Scientists

By: | July 19, 2011

Last September, I posted to my (now defunct) personal blog a cheeky theory: scientists can be categorized into four types, which roughly agree with some of the Myers-Briggs personality test buckets. I’ve re-posted it here, with a few updates and tweaks based on reader comments.

I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test in the seventh grade, on the one afternoon of the year my teacher had set aside for us to go ahead and choose a future fulfilling career already. We all sat down at a computer, answered a few hundred multiple-choice questions, and finally discovered which of the 16 types best fit our preferences.

I’m an ISTJ. In the system’s jargon, that’s ‘Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging.’ In plain English, the type is often referred to as the inspectors, the truth-tellers, the ‘Just the facts, Ma’am‘s.
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Guest Post: A geologist and a creationist walk into a store

By: | July 18, 2011

It’s a sunny evening in Fairbourne, a coastal village in rural Wales. Inside a small food shop, I’m listening to the owner and his wife discussing the true nature of the holy spirit.

I reach for a packet of breakfast cereal. “The woman just didn’t understand,” says the shopkeeper.

I place a tin of tomatoes into my basket. “I told her the holy spirit is not a thing,” he says.

I wander along the narrow space between the shelves into the back of the shop. It’s quiet here and there are no windows. On the left, a line of dusty red wine bottles sits opposite bags of bread.  On the right, racks of stationery and cheap plastic toys. In the corner there’s a disused Post Office counter. In a village, it’s common for a shop and postal service to run from the same premises. That used to be the case here.

My basket is full, so I return and place it on the till. “I explained to her that it is Him,” the shopkeeper says to his wife. Continue reading →

Paying No Attention to Bimodality

By: | July 15, 2011

Galaxies are the universe’s basic units.  (True, they’re made of stars, but all the stars are in galaxies.) So if you understood why galaxies look the way they do and how they’ve changed with time, you’d probably understand the history of the whole damn universe.  Oh boy.  And astronomers believed they sort of did but for years the belief was just that, mostly supposition and hope.

Astronomers did know that, the way people are (with notable exceptions) either male or female, galaxies seemed to be (with notable exceptions) either spiral or elliptical.  They also knew that galaxies are the color of their stars.  So spirals are blue because they’re full of stars being born out of gas in a hot shower of ultraviolet light.  And ellipticals are red because they burnt up their gas and are full of dying or dead stars whose light had cooled to red or infrared.   Astronomers inferred, reasonably, that spiral galaxies were young and elliptical galaxies were old, old, old.  Spiral galaxies also seemed to live in the universe’s rural fields and ellipticals, in cities of other galaxies.  Nobody could put it all together and explain why young, starforming galaxies would live in the field and old dead ones in cities.  But astronomers had only small samples of tens or a few hundreds of galaxies, so they didn’t have leave to generalize. Continue reading →