Earlier this Fall, I was part of the University’s “DUKTalks” event — rather like TED talks but (i) featuring speakers from UO, and (ii) without the vast audience. It was a fun and interesting program, with fifteen minute talks on medieval runes, Facebook, and more. My talk, “The Physics of Life,” was about (unsurprisingly) biophysics. … Continue reading DUKTalks + Fish Guts
One of the recent meetings of our Systems Biology center was devoted to social media and related things, about half of which dealt with Twitter. I’ve generally been confused by twitter — I can’t see why anyone would want to drown in a flood of short, superficial messages, or why anyone would expect an audience … Continue reading Twitter, cat pictures, and other wonders of the internet age
There’s no shortage these days of articles on the shortage of STEM*-major students. Not quite as common, but arguably more important, are articles critically assessing whether such a shortage exists. The Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago featured a nice essay in the latter category, The STEM Crisis: Reality or Myth? *Science, Technology, … Continue reading Growing STEMs
I’ll continue writing on useful or interesting readings in biophysics — Part I, a few weeks ago, dealt with textbooks. There are many technical or scientific books that either aren’t actually about biophysics, or that are about a narrow aspect of biophysics, that are nonetheless particularly useful or stimulating. Here are some that come to … Continue reading Readings in Biophysics, part II (Readings not in Biophysics)
I like graphs. At their best they are useful, elegant, and thought-provoking. At their worst, they’re infuriating. Modern systems-ish biology seems to have an abundance of awful graphs, even in good papers (as noted earlier, for example), perhaps because the complex statistical procedures it often uses are hard to make sense of. There’s no excuse … Continue reading (Another) bad graph
The Eighteenth Elephant 