My paper on Squid Babies (which started out as a dissertation chapter) just got accepted!

Well, technically it's Accepted with Revisions, which, for the non-academics in the room, means my co-authors and I have to change a few things before it gets published. But still! It's going to get published! This calls for celebration!

So, in honor of Squid Babies, have a gorgeous video by pacificcoast101 on the embryonic development of the California market squid:

Consider the following scenario. An initial measurement indicates that two indistinguishable particles – particles of the same type, carrying no kind of identity tag – are headed northward and southward, respectively. The next (relevant) thing that is indicated by a measurement is that two particles of exactly the same type are headed eastward and westward, respectively. We also assume that the scattering is elastic – no particles are created or annihilated in the meantime – and that the pair of outgoing particles is in some sense the same as the pair of incoming particles: no other particle has entered or left the scene in the meantime.

Students are often driven by baser concerns and robotics students even more so - hungry all of the time?  Invent a robot that can cook.   Need to take over the Republic?   Build some robots that, oddly, use colored swords.   

The Experimental Robotics course at Stanford gives students a chance to show off their automated ideas to classmates in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.     The course is a chance for students to take the math and programming skills they learned in the Intro to Robotics course and use them to direct a pre-fabricated robotic arm to perform a task in the real world.

Progressive kooks in San Francisco want to ban Happy Meals but they can't have a beef with vegan burgers, right?    Just down the road from 'Frisco, at Stanford, biochem professor (and founding co-director of PLoS - yayy, open access!) Pat Brown is trying to make vegan burgers that will appeal to humans and maybe keep McDonald's in business in the bay area.

Brown wants to make a vegan cheeseburger to replace what you get at fast-food franchises like McDonald's, his goal being to decrease the global impact of animal farming.   

History Mystery #3 - Land, Law and Science

"Words are to the Anthropologist what rolled pebbles are to the Geologist — battered relics of past ages often containing within them indelible records capable of intelligent interpretation..."
John Herschel

Global warming is a complex matter, with many effects interacting. This, of course, makes modeling it accurately a great challenge. Now, a new feedback mechanism has been identified. The quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. But how does this affect our world?

Recently, a research team has been looking into how higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere affect the soil and its ability to take up methane and nitrous oxide, or release these potent greenhouse gases. By gathering data from 49 experiments across the globe, the team went looking for general patterns. They found two strongly emerging patterns:

Pesky animal rights activists may complain if you eat veal but they can't complain if you eat larvae, right?    Those are bugs and people sitting in trees have to eat something while they keep the forest commission from clearing brush or removing dead trees to prevent wildfires.

The California State Fair is coming up in a few weeks.   It is earlier the last few years, because the old August dates were darn hot and with that sumbitch global warming it was only going to get hotter so they moved it back to July and, today, it is a balmy 70 degrees.   For residents of the once-hot Sacramento area, climate change has been a real boon, though drought in the South shows that they are not so lucky.

I’ve got to be honest.  Graduate student life comes with awesome perks: flexible schedules, fun-loving coworkers, and amazing travel opportunities.  But the green-eyed monster occasionally peers over my shoulder.

Check out this photo, taken a few weeks ago in La Jolla, Southern California. What do you think is most striking about it?



Some people might be surprised by the sheer number of squid in the photo--but rest assured, that's quite normal. This is the California market squid, a gregarious creature that often travels in large shoals. (Or should I say schools? They certainly seem to be swimming in a coordinated manner.)