Doctor Eclectic

Original Blog Blurb from 2013 (with the links updated) You might reasonably ask yourself why Episode 59 is being posted before episode 58.  I could go all postmodernist on you, arguing that requiring integers to ascend is just another expression of the tyranny of the patriarchy, but instead I will offer an analogy: During the original run of Firefly on Fox, why would the network executives pass ov...

Original VSI Blog Post from 2013 “Hidden world” books are very very popular. Everything from The Spiderwick Chronicles to The Dresden Files to Fringe to every mainstream superhero comic ever says that the world we live in is just one of many, either existing in parallel to ours or intersecting with ours in special, magical places. This idea gets support from the ongoing scientific process, which i...

Original Blog Entry from 2013 During LAST weekend's entirely seasonal "freak" snowstorm, I did a panel on Science and Journalism, which this episode follows up on.  Hopefully THIS weekend's entirely seasonal freak snowstorm will be over and done with so that we can go to Herp Day on Sunday in Efland, which I somehow always read as "Elfland" when I'm flying past that exit on I-40 (curse you, Lord D...

Before we get started this week, I have a new article out in this quarter’s ParABnormal Magazine , coincidentally called “The Animal Unconscious.” As a small boost to their marketing efforts, I include a link to The Sample , a newsletter that uses AI to recommend other newsletters based on your reading preferences. It forwards this newsletter to its own readers based on how often you all click on...

Original Blog Entry from 2013 Submitting a grant application (even a little one like the funding for this podcast) is a relief, not quite like that first breath after blowing your nose, but kind of.  I did the final update two whole hours before the deadline, on a day when I had a cold and a temporary crown put on one of my teeth. Sitting in that chair with nothing to do but bite down, while the v...

Original Blog Blurb from January 2013 As I mentioned during the episode, I’ve read more about Stephen Jay Gould than I’ve read of his writing directly, though I have a post on one of his more famous arguments here (it must be famous if I’ve heard of it).  Robert Kurzman was pretty tough on him in Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite , but he's just the latest critic.  I particularly like the line fr...

Here we are again It’s astronomically still spring, but the spring semester is over, which means it’s time for my various summer teaching gigs. Last week I went to Texas for a grant-funded workshop on green entrepreneurship . In June I have a new Introduction to Permaculture class for Science & Math, and in July a reprise of last summer’s Experiential Neuroscience , which I wrote about soon after....

Original Blog Blurb from December 2012 Today’s episode might sound as though I am ragging on the writers of fantasy for varnishing their tales with a thin veneer of scientific lingo. That is not so. My view is, We gotta start somewhere . Human children are not turkeys, or dragons. They don’t hatch knowing the scientific method, and it can’t be imprinted on them, either, as much of our educational...

Original Blog Blurb from 2012 Though I didn't say so during the episode, thanks to Tom Drury for our musical tag.  Haven't used it in a while, but its chant-like vocal goodness seemed particularly appropriate today. You see, today’s episode concerns myth , in the Joseph Campbell sense of the word, of stories that tell us where we come from, where we’re going, and how to get there. Tolkien wrote my...

Original Blog Blurb from 2012 Today's episode checks in with my nephew, who we last heard from in Episode 12.  Given his mathematical tendencies, I always assumed he'd go into engineering or something, but now he's talking the same pre-med smack his sister did.  So I take the opportunity to put on the evolutionary medicine hat and plug one of my favorite tech-ahead-of-its-time stories.  The Russia...

Original Blog Blurb from 2012 Sort of like a consulting detective, but not. I can’t completely explain where all the castaway references came from, although likely it had something to do with the adventures of Louis de Rougemont, which is still playing downtown at Triad Stage, and which my kid and I are going to see as a matinee this Sunday. There’s a theme running through the play about the tensi...

Thanks for reading Doctor Eclectic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Original Blog Blurb from 2012 In this episode I praised Looper for the emotional truth of the story, but that doesn’t mean they got the science right. What the hell IS telekinesis, anyway? What forces are supposed to be involved? Electromagnetism, as in Magneto ? Gravity, as in Graviton ? Marvel Comics...

Thanks for reading Doctor Eclectic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Original Blog Blurb from 2012 Dr. White is a careful and conservative scientist.  One fascinating aspect of this topic I couldn't draw her into speculating about was the link between bacterial and cultural evolution, in other words, whether people invented the cultural practice of circumcision (the rem...

Thanks for reading Doctor Eclectic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Original Blog Blurb from 2012 This semester Chad Rohrbacher and I are training the NCATSU biology department’s grad students how to write, using an automated online tutor called Criterion . It’s a BEACON -funded project, designed partially to help minority students get into more and better PhD programs...

Original Blurb from 2012 Nancy Fulda did a great job of explaining local minima last time, didn’t she? I thought so, anyway. But maybe it only made sense to me because I spent two and a half years of a postdoc dealing with similar problems. I was building models of a biological neural network. Not the kind of artificial neural network she worked with, where the individual neurons are simple and id...

Original Blurb from August 2012 First, the links that will scaffold your podcast listening pleasure: http://www.nancyfulda.com/movement-a-short-story-about-autism-in-the-future http://escapepod.org/2012/05/15/ep314-movement-hugo-repost/ Hit these before you listen to the show. Thanks for reading Doctor Eclectic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Lots of people and places...

I mentioned having finished Kevin Roose’s book about his time at Liberty University, The Unlikely Disciple . He spends a lot of time in that book talking about the class he had the most trouble with, called History of Life, which was mostly about refuting evolution, using scientific-sounding terms. Today I’m speaking with Eric Horstman, who worked for years in one of the places that Charles Darwin...

Original Website Blurb from 2012 I went to this conference/workshop/retreat mostly because I wanted to pick up some ideas on having students do basic nature journals, and because I wanted to camp in the Sangre de Cristos , which a previous mentor of mine always raved about, but it turned out to be much richer than that.  I met a couple dozen really smart and interesting people, all of them passion...

Original Website Blurb from 2012: a (B)Rave Review Public radio is apparently all abuzz with conversation about Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article about women having to make difficult choices in balancing work and family. I read that article, and I thought it pretty straightforwardly called for some simple but important structural changes, like allowing more family leave time. Nothing radical...

Original Website Blurb from 2012 How do we take this level of care, craft, and creativity http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/best-posts-batmans-facebook-wall and apply it to this? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature11018.html Ironically (iff you missed the posts on selfishness earlier in the week), the Nature article above, which discusses the likelihood of a complete bl...

Awww, cute. Episode Blurb from Original Website: 2012 Tonight’s episode is a good old-fashioned movie review. Here’s the clip that reminded me about the charity aspect of the movie, and convinced me that I needed to do a little promotion on my own, since none of the previews I've seen mention that Disney will give money for chimp conservation if you go see the film during opening week. http://www....

Pre-emptive Updates from 2021 This one is delayed because I wanted to just think about it for a day. What felt, at the time, like normal wait-and-see scientific caution on my part about the Trayvon Martin case (which I repeatedly mispronounced in the audio) now feels much different. George Zimmerman continued on a course of domestic violence and stoking of the fires of racial controversy over the...

This is part one of a two-part interview. Original Website Blurb from 2012 [minus all the broken links] Danielle left a comment on the blog page.  As keeps happening, when I followed up with her about that, she turned out to be interesting.  Yay, social media! As promised in this week's episode, here's a link to her blog on the Scientific American Blog Network. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...

Original Website Blurb from 2012 Tonight's episode is about our second-biggest secular religion (capitalism being #1).  I've been thinking about these issues for a while, usually from the more scientific point of view, where I would usually agree with people like Michael Crichton or Freeman Dyson that evidence is the only reason to believe anything, and that emotions get in the way as often as not...

This one is just silly. There were a lot of links in here, which I temporarily deleted instead of taking the time to update. Original Website Blurb from 2012 This week’s episode ( which rhymes with "ode," at least, although it's not really poetic in any way ) centers around a fairly common minor medical problem that plugs into evolution on at least 3 levels: 1) Design: This is really cool. Your ea...