Misc.
tsmith | May 31, 2014Perhaps because it's college graduation and reunion time, L.V. Anderson at Slate has written a column entitled "People Still Say They 'Went to College in Boston,' Meaning Harvard? Please Stop Doing This." She claims that by giving such an evasive answer, one "buy[s] into the overblown mythos of Harvard and the presumption of Ivy League superiority." Or worse, it "functions as an elitist dog whistle," and that those who may "react inelegantly" upon hearing one went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton and others are "insecure people who perhaps have not yet learned that Ivy League schools confer degrees…
tsmith | June 17, 2013Years like this are rough on blogging. As previously noted, I teach an every-other-year spring course on infection and chronic disease. Well, every summer I also teach an intensive course (basically a semester crammed into a week) on the topic of applied infectious disease epidemiology: taking what's known about ID epi and learning how to actually "do" it. For this course, which this year was exclusively taken by either DVM students or practicing veterinarians training for their MPH degree, their final assignment is a writing assignment. It's pretty wide open: they can write about any area of…
sastyk | February 24, 2013It has been a long couple of weeks. It took a full week for the stomach virus to drag through the entire household two weeks ago...when I thought we were done, well...not. Last Friday we were finally clear, and able to leave the house again...just as Eli began his week long school break (Eli, who has autism, does not like breaks in his routine, so this is not a good thing.)
On Saturday, after my first night's sleep entirely uninterrupted by anyone saying "Mooooooom...I don't FEEEEEEL Good," we took an emergency placement of two children, a six year old boy and 10 year old girl. They were…
sastyk | February 16, 2012Hi Folks - I've gotten (rightly) a number of emailed complaints about the number of comments that are disappearing, and more questions about whether I am censoring comments, or moderating them.
Other than a few occasions for egregious attacks on other posters or sucking up my time until I had no other choice, I don't censor comments. The reason your comments are disappearing and being marked as held for approval is because of Science Blogs - there are a number of technical problems with my blog that SB has basically not been able to fix (and some of them affect other blogs) - the idea is…
sastyk | April 13, 2011Please stand by. Ok, don't stand by, go plant something ;-). Sorry folks, I've tried to post two articles that have disappeared into the ether. The hard drive on my desk top died and the laptop is giving me fits too. I've even got baby goat pictures to show you, but I can't get them up at the moment.
Cuteness coming as soon as the technical limitations are lifted!
Sharon
sastyk | March 28, 2011Posting will be intermittent and light this week. It is time for spring cleaning around here - pretty much a full time job. Not only is there Pesach coming to motivate me, and my next home visit in the foster/adoptive parent prep cycle, but also there's the fact that our weirdly cold spring is supposed to warm up, at least a bit. Once the weather hits the 50s with any regularity, and the garden season starts, it is all "House? What house? Who even goes into the house anymore?" Add to that the fact that we've hit the critical "8 weeks before last frost" date in the life of a grower, and…
sastyk | April 12, 2010It was a lovely weekend with lots of friends, Eli's belated birthday party, spring, peace, quiet, music, good stuff. My house is even clean. I mean, well, for me. I'm too happy to worry about anything.
So I got nothing today. I do, however, have a contract with science blogs that requires three posts a week.
Well nothing but a contract and a mind on summer, which is, I'm told, icumen in...
And one of the top songs of the last 1000 years! What have you got?
sastyk | March 1, 2010On Saturday evening as my family went out to synagogue for purim, I was astonished - driving through Schenectady there were only a few inches of snow on the ground. Now we often get more snow than lower elevations, but this time the difference was astounding - we have nearly four feet of snow on the ground.
I like snow, but I admit, I've never dealt with this much, accumulated so quickly - it snowed non-stop from Tuesday morning until Saturday night. Sometimes we had gentle flakes, other white-out, but snow it did, and looking out this sunny morning, my four and a half foot goat fences are…
sastyk | February 26, 2010Three feet and counting so far. The prediction for the "upper elevations" (that would be us) is that we could get another 1-2 feet before tomorrow night. So while I am lost in meditation of the stunning beauty that surrounds me and trying to locate my woodpile, our car and the dog, all of whom are largely encompassed and hidden by snow, I leave you with some alternate reading.
First of all, in the "deeply sorrowful things" category, Leila, who posted at ye olde blogge as "Bedouina" and "Leila" died this fall. I hadn't realized it - and I feel terrible that I did not realize. The last…
sastyk | December 31, 2009What is your blogiste doing instead of writing posts and working on her new book these days? She is frantically trying to make her home a suitable place for the workshop she's running in it in a few days. That means moving furniture that might get moved and discovering things horrible beyond description. It means sorting out things that ought to have been gotten rid of years ago. It means discovering that the bottom layer of my laundry pile has entered the "composting" stage.
Of all the domestic virtues, the one I lack most deeply is tidiness. This is exacerbated by four kids under 10,…
tsmith | April 26, 2009While I'm at it, I might as well add that I now have a twitter account, for those of you who'd like to follow along there: http://twitter.com/aetiology
Or, if RSS feeds are more your thing, Aetiology's is http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/aetiology
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...
tsmith | December 31, 2008I've been really terrible at spreading around some link love this year, largely because my time to read other blogs has been significantly diminished due to my other responsibilities. However yesterday I was able to do a tiny bit of catching up.
I've not blogged much on HIV denial recently (no time, alas, to keep the comments cleaned up). However, regular readers may recall how much the HIV folks hated to be compared to creationists. ERV points out a post by an evolution denier championing HIV denial as well. Birds of a feather...
In a related vein, James muses what should be done…
tsmith | September 13, 2008Via Bora comes some of the week's most important journalism: video of a Chicago Tribune reporter trying to put lipstick on a pig. He gets it much too easy with the first one; the squealing and running around when he tries to go for the second one is more familiar to me (after the jump).
tsmith | July 16, 2008Back out swabbing today (noses this time, not asses). Heading out with 3 grad students who've never done field work before, so should be a fun day. Meanwhile, just got another manuscript submitted last night; that makes four currently under review with still a few other in draft. In the meantime, don't feel [or feed--TS] the troll(s)--I'll be back to clean up when I can.
tsmith | June 30, 2008I rarely talk politics here, but I received this email from a cousin the other day:
According to the Book of Revelations the anti-christ is: The anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuassive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal.... the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destory everything. Is it OBAMA??
The email itself, unfortunately, isn't out of the ordinary; many of my family members believe we're in the End Times. What made this one…
tsmith | June 19, 2008In her guest post at Highly Allochthonous, hydrogeologist Anne Jefferson explains how one can have two "500 year floods" in short measure. Great reading...
tsmith | April 24, 2008You may recall the case of geneticist Robert Farrell, who had been initially charged with bioterroism for sharing generally-harmless strains of bacteria with a colleague, SUNY-Buffalo art professor Steven Kurtz. Farrell plead guilty to a reduced charge last fall and received a fine and probation. Now the verdict is in for Kurtz; more after the jump.
A federal judge on Monday (April 21) dismissed the case against Steven Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, saying that the government indictment against him "is insufficient on its face," The Buffalo News…
tsmith | April 22, 2008I realize art is, of course, subjective. I know what I like; sometimes I can explain why, and sometimes I'm not sure what it is about a piece that draws me to it. Certainly good art evokes emotion and can stir controversy and push limits. And like the notorious virgin Mary/elephant dung uproar, an undergrad at Yale has recently caused quite a stir with her own senior art project:
Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking…
tsmith | March 20, 2008It's been a busy 3 days here in Atlanta. My talk Tuesday was well-received, I have lots of new ideas for future projects, and I'll have posts on the conference itself starting, hopefully, this afternoon (last night was family time, so no posting). In the meantime, I'm writing up the manuscript for the study I presented and I thought I'd ask for some input with one small portion.
The study itself is a sampling of swine for bacterial carriage. On the first farm we headed out to (and by "we" I, of course, mean my trusty graduate student), we only had on hand as many swabs as we were going…