I Can't Believe My Life Happens to Me
terrasig | July 21, 2010So, readers know that I went out West this past weekend to visit colleagues at the University of Colorado, spend some thinking time at the southern Colorado ranchland endowed to us by the late PharmDad, and - most prominently - visit PharmMom and PharmStiefvater on the occasion of her 70th birthday. I'm extremely grateful to my wife, PharmGirl, MD, and the illustrious PharmKid for holding down the fort and handling the emotional and practical issues of the little genius starting 3rd grade on Monday.
When Mom told me she'd been following the aftermath of Pepsigate/sbfail, she asked, "So, what…
terrasig | June 2, 2010Just the other day, I wrote about how DrugMonkey and I have experienced unprecedented and sustained blog traffic for posts we wrote in February on K2 Spice, one of a couple of marijuana-like "incense" products still sold legally in the United States.
Every morning, I dial up my SiteMeter blog statistics and take a look at what posts readers first land upon when coming to visit the humble world headquarters of Terra Sigillata.
Last week, 2,700 to 2,800 of the 4,000 most recent hits were landing on our February K2 Spice post. (You will also note below the sad state of my readership in that…
terrasig | April 11, 2010Last Monday marked 17 years since Eric Young led off the first Colorado Rockies baseball game with a home run that triggered a collective, mile-high orgasm for the 80,227 spectators gathered in the old Denver football stadium.
The advent of the expansion Rockies also launched a Pharmboy laboratory birthday celebration week tradition marked by two days off: one for a lab ski day in the high country followed later in the week with a Rockies game and the finest handcrafted ale offered by Denver's Wynkoop Brewery. I was reminded of this by my Twitter buddy, Mike Smith (@M1k303) who taunted me a…
terrasig | December 27, 2009Sitting back today looking at news and webcams in my former home of Colorado had me also reflecting on the events that conspired to put me in North Carolina. This unexpected turn in my life also opened me up to a local community of remarkably creative people with national and international reputations in their respective fields.
One of these people whom I am fortunate to call a local hero is journalist Barry Yeoman. Barry was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as, "(One of) the best unsung investigative journalists working in print in the United States.... Yeoman specializes in…
terrasig | December 14, 2009Last week in Stockholm (and Oslo), the 2009 Nobel Prize winners were gloriously hosted while giving their lectures and receiving their medals and diplomas. In Chemistry this year, the Nobel was shared by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz, and Ada E Yonath for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, a remarkable nucleoprotein complex that catalyzes the rapid, coordinated formation of peptide bonds as instructed by messenger RNA. My post on the day of the announcement in October was designed to counter the inevitable (and now realized) criticisms that the prize was…
terrasig | August 18, 2009
A couple of four years ago, a few dudes I just met around town had this idea to bring together a few bloggers who write about science. One was Anton Zuiker and the other was Bora Zivkovic, also known as Coturnix or He-Whose-Mind-Teh-Intertubes-Pass-Before-Going-Out-To-The-World. Anton also has a title, bestowed upon him by News & Observer columnist Dan Barkin back in 2007:
He's a quiet visionary. He's a low-key doer. He's a let's-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It's the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a significant role in determining how far Web 2.0 goes…
terrasig | June 5, 2009
Just a quick note to dial up Ira Flatow's Science Friday show on NPR today at 3 pm EDT. Supporting information and the archived show can be found here.
Guy-who-I-would-kill-to-be, Tom Levenson, will be on with Ira to speak about his new book, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.
Here is also a link to other appearances Professor Levenson will be having related to the book.
For those of you who don't know Thomas Levenson, he is currently a Professor, Interim Program Head, and Director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the…
terrasig | March 27, 2009Just a quick note of congratulations to friends of Terra Sig (FOTS, if you will) on earning 2008 Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ).
Online
FIRST: M.B. Pell, Jim Morris and Jillian Olsen, Center for Public Integrity, "Perils of the New Pesticides"
SECOND (tie): Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times, The "Well" blog
SECOND (tie): Scott Hensley, Jacob Goldstein and Sarah Rubenstein, The Wall Street Journal Online, The Wall Street Journal Health Blog
THIRD: Randy Dotinga, Voice of San Diego, "Suicide Magnet" [Part I, Part II]
You…
terrasig | March 22, 2009I had the happy pleasure of visiting on Friday with Sheril Kirshenbaum and Bora Zivkovic for a panel discussion in a course at Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
Directed by Dr Misha Angrist, PubPol 196S "Science in the Media" is described in the course catalog as follows:
Those who write about science, health and related policy matters for a general audience face a formidable challenge: to make complex, nuanced ideas understandable to the nonscientist in a limited amount of space and in ways that are engaging and entertaining, even if the topic is far outside the…
terrasig | August 3, 2006Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house.
I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…
terrasig | July 11, 2006Sorry, gang, but this is just more journal than blog - and yet another emphatic and blathering reason of why I love this town.
Had a lovely hike yesterday with PharmGirl and PharmPreSchooler to the Grottos just outside of Aspen proper, an amazing series of igneous rocks and ice caves at the base of Independence Pass. PharmMom now forbids posting pictures of her beautiful granddaughter on these here internets, so here's an inanimate shot that still doesn't do justice to the view:
Then, had a lovely lunch with a dear friend in Explorer Bookstore and Bistro, an idyllic setting in an old…