It is highly improbable that an obscure researcher will outdo Big Science or that a low budget candidate will win her way into the White House. But in the realm of sports, many are rejoicing as big-spending baseball teams struggle out of the gate. After today's interleague play(May 20th), the most efficient teams---the ones who are spending the least on salaries per win are mostly young and without a World Series title in at least two decades:
In life, all good things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by.
As a few of you may already know from the Science meets Society “interview” with me (from SMS’s published German version that is), Sascha Vongehr has finally left the postdoctoral limbo and entered the assistant professor position limbo at one of the best universities that the new international leader in science and technology has to offer, being also basically the leader here in my field of nanotechnology: Nanjing University (precisely
To the couple of positions I
posted yesterday from the Chess Tournament I played this weekend, let me add one I played on round II, when I was white against Fausto Scali, the blind player. The position arose from the Advance variation of the French defense (1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.e5), which however we reached with a transposed move-order (1.e4 c5 2.c3 d5 3.e5). In the position below, black has just played an inaccuracy in an already slightly worse queenless middlegame:
Chess is a game, a sport, and a very radical way to test one's concentration and discipline in pure thought. Besides liking it as a game (a precondition to enjoy the other benefits), I also enjoy immensely the demands that a chess game puts on your brain's functioning; and this is brought to the extreme during a chess tournament, where you are also subject to pressure from competition factors extraneous to the 64 squares where the battles develop.
April 30. The last day of Autism Awareness Month. The last hurrah, although let's be honest, the wider world didn't really notice all that much and probably didn't learn all that much, either.
The truth is that autism awareness happens at the individual level every time we, as parents, take our autistic children out and have them interact with the world. For autistic people, it happens every time they are out in public and self-disclose, but also when they don't, when the people they interact with don't know they have autism, or as they get to be known by others, when that label fades into the background, and they are just seen as uniquely themselves, perfect as they are.
Gregory Miller, a former JRC employee, has set up a
petition on Change.org, and given permission to repost his petition letter:
It's been a while. And now I'm back only to say goodbye. Well, not really. It's just that I've decided to go on to a more personal blog at (drumroll, please):
The Beast, the Bard, and the Bot.Why? What's wrong with Science 2.0, I hear you ask? Nothing at all. Like I said, I wanted something more personal. It was time to move on. Nevertheless, thank you Science 2.0 (and the people behind it), I enjoyed my time here. My first blogging experiences here were interesting and rewarding in more than one way.
Don't get too excited but 200 activists are going to jump off Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
These aren't the usual pesky environmentalists, these are hang-gliding global activists, which really sounds like just an excuse to go hang-gliding but get permits to do it in cool places but it's still going to raise money for a worthy cause.
"These behaviors can be irritating for family members." --on stimming in autistic children
My children stim. I stim--come on, for Pete's sake--every one of us--autistic or not-- STIMS. We all engage in self-regulatory behaviors to calm ourselves. Some of us have small, discrete behaviors that are not necessarily obvious. I swing one of my feet beneath my desk at work. I rub my thumb over my index finger repeatedly. My fingers slide back and forth over the steering wheel while I drive. They're small stims. But they are there, and they are used to regulate myself.
