Love for Terra Sig readers
terrasig | October 25, 2008A reader sent the following to my blog e-mail address but under my meatspace name.
So much for pseudonymity.
Here's the version with my 'nym:
And am I the only one who wonders if Mrs Walsh is PhysioProf's mother?
terrasig | September 22, 2008Here's an update on E. coli-gate in Tularosa, NM:
Okay, so it's more than fluid - it's about a pint of sludge left in front of each house where the garbage truck stopped. But this is ridiculous:
[Tularosa resident Ken] Riedlinger took samples from the sludge puddle to the Diagnostic and Technology Center in Alamogordo and they found a huge amount of E. coli, he said.
"The upper tray reported it's infinite, the numbers were too great to count," Riedlinger said. "This is massive, massive E. coli. This is deadly stuff."
E. coli is a bacterium found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals…
terrasig | September 11, 2008. . .and I thank you for your support.
I'm not a huge blog traffic addict and, in fact, I mostly keep a SiteMeter counter below because I get to see the geographical distribution of our readers. They have a great map feature where you can look at the locations of the last 100 or 500 hits and I love to see folks from Perth, Australia, Jawa Timur, Indonesia, or Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada.
At 1229 GMT on 10 Sept 2008, we received our 200,000th visitor - a reader from Truro, Nova Scotia - to whom I owe some Alexander Keith IPA (e-mail me to redeem your gift!).
After looking back at my original…
terrasig | August 11, 2008After a long sit on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, I'm home from the ScienceBlogs blogger and reader meet-up. Many thanks to all of you readers who came out on Saturday to meet the bloggers at Social Pub, sponsored jointly by Seed Media Group and NYC Skeptics.
The threatened anti-vaccination crowd did not materialize and I had a delightful time chatting with Dr Val Jones of the Voice of Reason blog, Peter Frishauf, founder of Medscape, one of the Medgadget proprietors, a reader named Dawn whose blog I cannot remember right now, and Steve, a pharma/biotech attorney.
Dr Val was totally…
terrasig | August 6, 2008It appears that a number of bloggers who write under the ScienceBlogs.com masthead will be converging on New York City this coming weekend. For those of you who know my background, I simply call this "The City."
I mentioned earlier that it was unlikely that I would be there due to family and job commitments (and the fact that my sister and her family were elsewhere that weekend when we could've otherwise had a lovely family gathering).
But with the generous blessings of PharmGirl and PharmKid, I will indeed venture to New Amsterdam for about 32 hours that will include the highly-touted 'meet…
terrasig | July 14, 2008A convergence of personal and professional issues have left me little or no time for blogging the last week or so. But many thanks to you for checking in here and even e-mailing to say hi. I actually have a couple of good science topics in the hopper but haven't been able to execute them fully. But as Arnold once said, I'll be back.
Let me also express my gratitude to my research and wine mentor, and stealth co-blogger, Erleichda, for his great Friday Fermentable column about wines of the Northern Italy Lake Country.
In the meantime, check out the DrugMonkey-recommended post from…
terrasig | February 29, 2008A lively discussion has ensued this week across the intertubes about the ScienceBlogs.com network to which we belong and what should or shouldn't be provided as content in a blog that calls itself a science blog.
As usual, the most sober, inclusive, and non-inflammatory treatise on the topic comes from ethicist, philosopher, and physical chemist (because one Ph.D. is never enough), Prof Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science: she calls it navel-gazing. I submit that her navel is among the wisest around:
Why do so many bloggers at ScienceBlogs write about stuff besides science?
We…
terrasig | February 3, 2008
Yesterday was the 1st anniversary of Blogroll Amnesty Day, originally proposed by a reasonably prominent blogger who used the occasion to relieve himself of guilt when purging his blogroll and building back up only a list of those he reads regularly.
I learned via my new homies, PhysioProf and DrugMonkey that Jon Swift and Skippy have proposed this day instead as an opportunity for low-traffic bloggers to blogroll even lower-traffic bloggers to help everyone rise up in notoriety.
Despite being here at ScienceBlogs for 20 months, I have managed to keep my readership to a small but select…
terrasig | November 28, 2007...and we thank you.
If you look down yonder left, you'll see that my SiteMeter counter passed 100,000 visits earlier today.
To be precise, a visitor from the University of Edinburgh's Moray House Institute of Education dialed into ScienceBlogs' 'Last 24 Hours' channel at 2037 GMT and clicked on my post about yesterday's death of Dr Robert Cade, the renal physiologist who formulated Gatorade. (So that readers don't get nervous, SiteMeter doesn't track in any greater detail than that.).
So, a great many thanks to my Scottish reader for being #100,000. If I knew who you were and could be…
terrasig | November 22, 2007For readers not in the US, today is Thanksgiving Day. Our friends to the north celebrated their harvest festival last month.
I'll be giving thanks today to my local Honeybaked Ham® franchise for making our little stay-at-home celebration that much easier.
As I also enjoy my British-crafted Samuel Smith Imperial Stout, I'll also be giving thanks that my little blog hobby is something that is valued by you folks around the world.
There are a great many challenges on this planet and there is much suffering among our people. We should all find something to be thankful for today.
Wherever you…
terrasig | November 9, 2007We were asked recently by our ScienceBlogs hosts:
Is there a 'typical ScienceBlogs reader'? Who are these people? Why do they read Sb? What do they get out of it?
From my comments, e-mails, and traffic patterns, most of you have advanced degrees and are reading from universities, drug companies, US federal agencies (including the military), and some newspapers and scientific publishers. While mostly American, a good many of you are from Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Your age ranges from the early 20s to the early 60s. Many of you are practicing scientists, physicians, or other…
terrasig | November 7, 2007Okay, here's one final update on our drive to raise DonorsChoose.org funds for K-12 teachers to conduct projects in their classrooms.
An e-mail came in today from Charles Best, the Bronx schoolteacher who established DonorsChoose:
Thanks in great part to the attention ScienceBlogs generated, we made Internet history! During the month of October, readers of more than a hundred blogs gave $420,000 to classroom projects on DonorsChoose.org, benefiting 75,000 students. To put that in perspective, it took four months for the hugely successful Facebook causes application--with millions of users--…
terrasig | October 30, 2007I chose not to plague you with incessant reminders to contribute to our drive to raise funds for projects at DonorsChoose.org - where public school teachers propose class projects and you decide which ones to fund. Just one post at kickoff and another halfway through. We just completed the drive for our local NPR station so I know that badgering can grow on you no matter how worthy the cause.
But you readers have been incredibly responsive and generous in donating to the Terra Sig "Save the Science" projects. With a total of $2,806.47 donated thus far, we are 70% of the way towards our goal…
terrasig | October 13, 2007Well, I've really got to hand it to Terra Sig readers, some of the most thoughtful and generous folks I've come across. Our "Save the Science" blogger challenge at DonorsChoose now stands at $1,881, 47% of the way toward our $4,000 goal.
For those reading for the first time, DonorsChoose.org is a fundraising organization for K-12 public schools, those mostly in underfunded districts. Teachers propose projects, then donors like you and I get to pick which project we want to fund, wholly or partially.
The Terra Sig "Save the Science" project list is here, with instructions on how to give.…
terrasig | September 14, 2007[Welcome Daily Kos readers and many thanks to DarkSyde for the link - btw, if you're wondering what Terra Sigillata is, click here.]
The other day I fired off a quick post on the absurdity of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing to cut reimbursements for two radioimmunotherapy drugs for lymphoma to less than their cost. The two immunotherapy drugs in question are Bexxar (I-131 tositumomab) and Zevalin (Y-90 ibritumomab) - both drugs target the CD20 protein on the surface of normal and malignant B-lymphocytes, killing the cells by the radioactive emissions of…
terrasig | February 15, 2007The Department of Anatomy at SIU Medical School was kind enough to link to each of us cited by Nature last July among the top 50 blogs written by scientists.
Here's to hoping that more widespread acceptance of blogs stimulates other scientists to start their own.
terrasig | September 24, 2006I completely missed it: a rather momentous occasion in the life of this blog.
The ScienceBlogs.com version of Terra Sigillata just passed the traffic volume of the old site on Wednesday, 20 Sept at 9:14 pm EDT with a visitor from Arlington, MA, USA.
Visitor 13,986 must be a regular reader because they came directly here, not even through the ScienceBlogs frontpage from which I derive almost 20% of my traffic.
So, while it took just over nine months to reach almost 14,000 visitors at the old blog (although I haven't had a new post there since June), we got to 14,000 here in the new digs in…
terrasig | August 31, 2006I'm deeply appreciative of all who've come out to support my student and former lab intern, Jen, who is riding in her brother's memory in the Philadelphia LIVESTRONG Challenge 100-mile bike ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation on 10 Sept 2006.
http://www.livestrongchallenge.org/06pa/jenforjon
Jon, a Carnegie-Mellon graduate student, crew coach, and all-around monster athlete, died in late June of a bacterial infection secondary to his treatment for osteosarcoma. He was 23.
As promised, here's an update that shows her tremendous progress since our last post, when she was still around $2,…
terrasig | August 15, 2006So, we're finally turning around some of the darkness that has surrounded this blog since late June.
I'm deeply appreciative of all who've come out to support my student and former lab intern, Jen, who is riding in her brother's memory in the Philadelphia LIVESTRONG 100-mile bike ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation on 10 Sept 2006.
http://www.livestrongchallenge.org/06pa/jenforjon
With your help, Jen is now over $2,000 ($2,230, precisely) toward her $10,000 goal with about 25 days to go until the ride. Moreover, their team, Jon's Crew, stands midday EDT (1700 hrs GMT) at $9,395 toward…
terrasig | July 4, 2006As noted in my last post on the end of our ScienceBlogs.com DonorsChoose campaign to raise funds for public schoolteacher projects around the country, we have all been amazed at the outpuoring of generosity from readers who share our passion for educating the next generation of scientists. At the very least, you have all played a part in improving the scientific literacy of kids who go on to do other things, but can still apply critical thinking skills to everything from making sense of politician/sciencespeak to protect themselves from unscrupulous marketers of dietary supplements.
But as…