Appallingly, the University of California system has just prohibited its employees from using AirBnB (and other peer-to-peer services) for business-related travel [link: Inside Higher Ed]. I’ve become a big fan of AirBnB [wikipedia]. For those unaware of it, it links people with rooms or apartments or houses to briefly rent out with people looking for … Continue reading UC vs. AirBnB
As mentioned a few weeks ago, a highlight of teaching this term was bringing in an elephant femur and a dog femur, to highlight the lack of simple proportionality between them. (The elephant’s femur is about 10 times as long as the dog’s, and 20 times wider.) Coincidentally, just a few days after this, researchers … Continue reading Next year, I’ll need a bigger cart
I spent the past week at a fascinating conference on teaching at the interface of physics and biology: a mix of biophysics research talks, education talks, and combinations of the two. I presented a poster on my ‘biophysics for non-science majors’ course, which went over well. Perhaps its biggest impact was superficial, though: everyone (including … Continue reading A soft, silky, scientific poster
In general, there’s little or no correlation between the length of a eukaryotic organism’s genome and any other “obvious” characteristics, such as the creature’s overall size. Humans have a genome of about 3.4 billion base pairs; those of mice and giraffes are a bit smaller (2.7 billion base pairs), for example, and orangutans’ and guinea … Continue reading The creation of the birds
The Eighteenth Elephant 