Longer life

A friend of mine wrote in an email recently, "Life is too short." That got me thinking, what if it were longer? What is it were possible to make humans live three times longer and extend their reproductive capability three times longer as well? Would that fix a lot of social problems? If women had a 60 year window to have children instead of a 20 year window, would it make it easier for them to have a career? Or would people just be expected to "pay their dues" at work for three times as long?

It's interesting to see what a lot of science fiction has to say. Frequently, other alien races tell humans that their short life span is a gift. The fact that humans don't have very long to live makes them tenacious and full of life (according to aliens). Humph.

Journals for negative results

I have been told by more than one person that it would be useful to know what *didn't* work so that people wouldn't constantly go down the wrong path designing and building their experiments. Apparently, there is at least one real journal for negative results: Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine.

Link of the day: Stanford commencement speech by Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia gave the 2007 Stanford commencement speech about the deteriorating importance of diverse and high quality culture in American society. This topic has interested me in the past; see the following posts on 17 June 2005 and 4 February 2005.

Gioia proposes:

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.

Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

So I'm going to take this test. (Note to make it fair, the athletes and American Idol finalists must also be living Americans.)

Active American NBA players: Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwayne Wade, Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marsbury, Steve Francis, Carmelo Anthony

Active American MLB players: Alex Rodriguez, Curt Schilling, Greg Maddux, Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, Tim Linceum, Barry Zito, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Mike Piezza

American idol finalists: Fantasia

Living American poets: Allen Ginsburg, Robert Pinsky, (unfortunately T.S. Eliot is already dead)

Living American playwrights: (unfortunately August Wilson died and Tom Stoppard is not American)

Living American painters: ummm.... (I think Georgia O'Keefe and Jackson Pollack are dead already)

Living American sculptors: Maya Lin (there was this Guggenheim exhibit I went to featuring a sculptor but I can't remember his name)

Living American architects: I.M. Pei (Frank Lloyd Wright is long dead)

Living American classical musicians, conductors, composers: Michael Tilson Thomas, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, van Cliburn, Wynton Marsalis

Living American scientists: Barbara McClintock, Bruce Alberts, (can't think of any American chemists), physicists: Alan Guth, Sean Carroll, Kip Thorne, Edward "Rocky" Kolb, Frank Wilczek, Bob Jaffe, Washington Taylor IV, Ed Witten, Peter Fisher, John arris, John Joannopoulos, Matthew Fisher, Dan Fisher, Leon Balents, Phil Anderson, Steve Girvin, Doug Stone, Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, Eric Hudson, Don Eigler, Mike Crommie, Paul McEuen, Rob Schoelkopf, Dan Prober, Sean Barrett, Jack Harris, Dave DeMille, David Awschalom, Isaac Chuang, David Pritchard, Dan Kleppner

Living American social thinkers: (I guess Malcolm Gladwell is Canadian)

Total
20 active American NBA/MLB players and American Idol finalists
10 living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, conductors, composers
33 living American scientists

If you omit scientists (I'm just a little advantaged), I'm doing mediocre on my culture. I can explain this with several reasons. First, the high culture scene is much more international than the NBA/MLB or American (hullo) Idol. Also, I don't spend much time on modern (1960+) culture except for music. But Gioia is right that there is hardly any media coverage of arts in America.

Link of the day: APS Virtual Journals

The APS Virtual Journals aggregates journal articles from APS, AIP, Nature, Science, IEEE and others for various hot topics in physics. The articles are selected by a board of editors. Currently, Virtual Journals includes sections on applications of superconductivity, biological physics, nanoscience, quantum information, and ultrafast science. Pretty cool!

Link of the day: Academic Productivity, GTD in Academia

I found two great blogs over the weekend. The group blog Academic Productivity focuses on how technology can help increase efficiency in academia. There are also some posts on GTD-related topics. The solo blog Getting Things Done in Academia is written by Professor Mike Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma. I like his posts on writing effectively and ants (even though that has nothing to do with GTD).

Quantum coherence in photosynthesis

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry report in Nature (subscription required to access paper) that they have observed quantum coherence in a photosynthetic protein called FMO. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has a press release here.

Link of the day: Evolution on steroids

My dad sent me an article describing a highly anticipated game called Spore. It's being designed by the creator of "The Sims" and "SimCity". In Spore, you start with a single celled organism and play god, directly the course of evolution. Sounds cool!

Link of the day: X-Gals

Today I came across an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A group of women biologists keep a support group going online through an email discussion list. They call themselves the X-Gals. I would like to do something similar with physicists, but I haven't quite found the right people yet.

Link of the day: Interview with David Botstein

I really enjoyed this interview of biology professor David Botstein. I found Botstein's discussion of university-level science teaching particularly interesting. Apparently, Princeton has a special curriculum to get undergraduates excited about science while giving them a strong foundation in ideas. Botstein is one of the leaders in this effort.

Link of the day: Lab management

My sister sent me a very nice link about "lab management." The materials were developed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Check out the huge "practical guide to scientific management for postdocs and new faculty" and the video "Starting a Research Group in 1978" featuring Nobel laureate biochemist Thomas Cech.