Self-Indulgent Wankery
kbeck | May 28, 2009So. The chimps will be brachiating off to a new territory, the address of which kemibe provides below. We have considered this move for a while, but our decision crystallized lately due to the confluence of a number of events.
My absence may or may not have been noted in recent months here on the Refuge - a blog on which I once posted with more frequency. Part of that is due to work-related writing, part of it attributable to dabbling in creative writing (I use that term loosely), but largely, it's because posting on Science Blogs is no longer fun.
As the bona fide scientist of the chimp…
jfiore | December 29, 2008And now for something almost completely different on The Refuge: How well can you count? No, not like in grade school. I wrote and recorded a tune the other day. It's called Timmy Umbwebwe Lights A Candle (yes, I have a thing for odd titles). The initial beat was composed on the drum kit. Not that I planned it this way, but it turns out that the main theme is comprised of three measures of 9/8 followed by a measure of 13/8. This counting is somewhat "plastic" though, and if you prefer you can think of it as alternating measures of 5/8 and 4/8 with an extra measure of 4/8 thrown in at the end…
jfiore | December 19, 2008Here's a wonderful rendition of 2 Kings 2:23
Who says the Bible can't be a source of hilarity?
(hat tip to vdrums.com)
jfiore | November 27, 2008Much has been written on the Refuge regarding what might be termed fine motor co-ordination experiments. That, and something to do with playing the drums in a manner that most drummers don't, you know, like backwards. Some might ask "What is the point of practicing a double paradiddle on a bunch of left-side mounted toms for a right handed drummer?" I guess one could be philosophical and say "Because it's there" but ultimately, doing something musical is what matters, at least to this little bonobo. Exercising your brain to perform unusual patterns at will simply gives the musician a larger…
bushwells | January 4, 2008Forgive me. I'm going to channel Sally Field here by way of Shelob. I received an e-mail earlier this week notifying me that The Tolkienian War on Science (TWoS) placed second in the non-fiction category of the Middle-earth Fan Fiction Awards 2007 (MEFA). Here's my bitchin' plaque, courtesy of Rhapsody, a Tolkien aficionado who is also one of the regular readers and a commenter here at the Refuge (many thanks, R).
The backdrop of Minas Morgul is taken from Peter Jackson's The Return of the King. I figured the choice of this image is appropriate for the TWoS since science and technology…
jfiore | November 15, 2007There is a fun programming assignment I give to my freshman Python class. I call it curses. An example of it (written in Java, with source) can be found here. Basically, the program generates a series of denunciations, each followed by a somewhat odd curse. For example: "You noisy pile of squashed dog snot- May your TV set gyrate madly!" or "You mindless sponge of rotting spam- May your buttocks emit a loud buzzing noise!" (try it, you might find it entertaining). The purpose of the assignment is to show the students how to use random numbers to access tuples (random array indexing for you…
bushwells | September 28, 2007Gene Expression's Razib used a catchy little title for the article in which he referenced DNA Unraveled by Colin Nickerson for the Boston Globe. How overarching the role of RNA will be for the regulation of gene expression throughout the genome is still up for grabs, but one can't deny that there's fascinating and uncharted territory to be explored.
Predictably, the folks at the Discovery Institute leapt all over Nickerson's article as further implication that complexity = Intelligent Design, and the old "scientists don't know everything therefore the theory of evolution is not true" canard…
bushwells | September 19, 2007Once again, my brothers and sisters, it is that grazhny Talk Like a Pirate Day. What hound-and-horny chepooka is this, I ask you? That PZ chelloveck and other SciBling lewdies Corpus Callosum, Grrl Scientist, and Dr. Free-Ride guff away when they slooshy Pirate. I say "Yarbles!" to that. There should be a "Govoreet Like a Droog Day." I think that would be real horrorshow.
Nadsat Dictionary
bushwells | August 24, 2007So you've got your Harry Potter fandom, your Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom, your Pirates of the Caribbean fandom and your Star Trek fandom.* Isn't it about time for an Evolutionist/Rationalist fandom? Well, isn't it? Check out my answers to the meme** that's sweeping the fan-i-verse!
Note added in proof: The responses to this meme may readily be extended to any scientist-fandom, e.g., see comment #1. Have at it!
01. The first character I first fell in love with.
Charles Darwin. Sweeeeeet!
02. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now.
Thomas Huxley - Darwin's bulldog…
bushwells | July 6, 2007Speaking, or rather screeching, as a menopausally-crazed, cognitively-impaired winged harpy, I feel it is my duty to swoop in and squawk about the recent hormone replacement therapy free-for-all that's goin' down at Science Blogs.
Links are hardly necessary given that this is front page news but those of you who have wandered into this mess of bonobo scat and banana peels called the Chimp Refuge can scurry off to Neurotopia v.2 where another insidious primate provides extensive and authoritative reviews in three parts. I'd just like to point out a couple of things. I may have missed these…
bushwells | July 2, 2007To the approximately half-dozen or so of my regular readers:
The Refuge has been very active recently thanks to the capers of the young males of the troop. As a consequence, those few entries I offer are likley to be buried quickly. Should you have a burning desire to read my blathering specifically, I have added a "Doc Bushwell" category so that my meager number of entries can be sorted from the piles of overripe banana peels.
And now back to your regularly scheduled brachiation...
bushwells | June 8, 2007An e-droog recently waxed poetic about a single malt Scotch that she gave to a friend on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday. If I recall correctly, this was an especially rugged Islay beast, and stronger than the infamous Laphroaig. The subject of single malts triggered an avalanche of nostalgic reverie, not uncommon for us geriatrics, so I will inflict you with my aged yammering...and photos... here.
A British friend, then a post-doc in the lab next door and now a chemoinformatics guru, introduced single malts to me back in my grad school days. My previous experiences with Scotch had…
jfiore | May 2, 2007PBS/Nova ran a show on Sir Isaac Newton the other night entitled Newton's Dark Secrets. Interesting though it was, for years I have claimed that Sir Isaac's true "dark secret" was that he learned how to travel through time. Yep. Right up to the 1970's. He wanted to be a rock legend...
"Newton, Lake and Palmer" just doesn't cut it though.
bushwells | April 16, 2007I freely admit it. I routinely destroy my neoencephalon by watching all manner of crap on television. I am not one of those overweening snobs who daintily curl an upper lip as I sneer, "I never watch television." I love popular culture, and frankly, find a dose of mindless television to be relaxing, and occasionally thought-provoking.
Warning: This is recycled bonobo scat from the long defunct Refuge, ca. Nov. 5, 2005.
Such occurred recently when I watched the imaginatively titled, "Vampire Bats" featuring the unconquerable Lucy Lawless. Although I was not a devotee, I enjoyed watching…
bushwells | March 16, 2007
When I was a little kid, I frequently snuck into my older brother's room and read his collection of science fiction books and pulp magazines (see previous post on SF&F books). My mother, who was (and is) a big fan of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (a lovely book and recommended) thought I might benefit from reading some fantasy so she bought The Hobbit for me when I was 12 (6th grade; 1966, yes, I am that old) which I happily read. My brother, who was a college student at the time, then brought home The Lord of the Rings in 1968, and I devoured it. I re-read The…
bushwells | March 13, 2007Long time no see.
I took something of a hiatus from the hootacular environs of the Refuge due to the Most Wonderful Time of the Year at DOPI:* performance reviews for 2006 and objectives setting for 2007. I know. I shouldn't whine and bitch about this, seeing how much work you academics put into the grant writing process in the unending effort to suck at the NIH/NCI/NSF/IYAH** teat, and I can appreciate how difficult that is. After seeing my grad advisor lose a significant grant (since regained) during the heyday of Ronnie Reagan years when 0.0000037% of all NIH grants were funded, I…
bushwells | December 18, 2006Re: Ask a Science Blogger - Harsh Criticism, Did It Help or Hinder? Warning. My response contains offensive material. Oh, you're not surprised? Well, OK, this is the Chimp Refuge. You already know that there are piles of bonobo scat everywhere. So let's get to steppin' and squishin'...
During my first "real" job out of my post-doc, one of my colleagues told me this joke, repeated here with my embellishments:
Two explorers stumble into a wild unknown land, and are captured in the bush by the fearsome indigenous inhabitants. They are brought before the tribal chief, who conveniently…
bushwells | December 14, 2006Wait! Don't answer that just yet. Please allow me to give myself a little Q&A pertaining to issue of "proportionately fewer hot women read sci-fi and fantasy."
Q1. So tell me, Me, do you read sci-fi & fantasy?
A1. Well, not so much lately.
Q2: How about your past flirtations with the genre?
A2: I burned through my older brother's Analogs and other pulpy sci-fi mags when I was a kid. I went on to read Poul Anderson, Harlon Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven (my husband for whatever reason likes to call me Teela Brown), Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Julian May, Marion Zimmer…
bushwells | November 30, 2006There. That banal neologism has been rattling around in my cranium for a few days like errant bb shot, and I needed to get it out there. Sometimes, a loathsome word must be purged from the brain before it causes too much damage.
"Meme," which makes me cringe when I read it let alone write it, is the most overused word in the blogosphere (also a shudderworthy term). Just say it: "Meme." It can only be spoken with a nerdsome whine.
Everyone and her/his cat and dog are tacking -ome on to words:
"Genome. Metabolome. Kinome. Lipidome. Transcriptome."
"Harlan Pepper, would you stop…
bushwells | November 2, 2006Continued from Look, I'm just a biochemist, part 1*...
Recently, I had lunch with a colleague who is concerned about how he is perceived in discovery research. The guy is a sr. scientist in DOPI's leads discovery department which assays something in the order of a gazillion compounds in screening "campaigns." He and his group are able to miniaturize assays to volumes the size of fly's tears and make the robots dance like St. Vitus on rye bread. He fits massive numbers of data points to mathematical models, and has a keen eye for what constitutes a lovely and seductive concentration…