According to this report (warning link is a PDF): 34% of workers under 35 still live with their parents. 52% of those under 35 and making less than $30,000 a year (me). Now from the way the statistic is phrased I assume that it includes teenagers with jobs, and excludes college kids without jobs. Even [...]
Posts from ‘September, 2009’
DNA Sequencing Technology
John Timmer has started a cool post on sequencing technology over at arstechnica. The writing seems like it would be quite accessible to someone without much biology or chemistry background. Sunday’s post is focused on Sanger sequencing which is the classical technique and still used by people working with one or a few genes at [...]
Making the Pie Bigger
When zero sum games are played for fun they can be very entertaining (see: poker). When they’re played for survival they’re miserable (see: who do we throw off the lifeboat, which person gets this kidney, and poker when you can’t afford to lose). All too often keeping people alive (whether with regards about health care [...]
That’s strange…
Words that have forewarned of many awesome discoveries in science, though they definitely are not doing so in this case. In the past ten months I’ve dropped from 75% likely to be male to only 50% likely to be male 51% likely to be female according to a program that claims to be able to [...]
I spoke too soon…
Just yesterday I said this about Roger Beachy getting appointed to head up the new National Institute of Food and Agriculture: He’s spent his entire life working in the public and non-profit sectors (places like Cornell, Wash U, the Scripps Institute, and most recently president of the Danforth Plant Science Center). Can you imagine the [...]
Still Very Irritated
Turns out I declared mission accomplished too soon before. I’ve now done a clean install of wordpress itself, which unfortunately includes a new theme (plus side, rotating pictures in the header). Unless the corruption worked its way into the mySQL database itself*, this should have killed it. *Is that even possible? Databases are right after [...]
What is the NIFA?
More than a year ago, in May of 2008, Congress passed the Food, Conservation and Energy act of 2008. It was weird going back to read up on the coverage of the bill and reading how President Bush objected to X or proposed Y. His presidency already seems so distant. One of the things this [...]
Herbicide Resistance
Plant breeders can find natural resistance to pathogens. Some crops can be grown in regions where they have few or no natural insects attackers. But every crop with face the problem of weeds, other plants that threaten to steal light and nutrients. And the crops that sustain us will always suffer from an unfair handicap, [...]
Red Skies in Sydney
Australia is in the middle of one of their worst drought of recorded time. Bone dry topsoil is vulnerable to be swept away by the wind, the same thing that happened in America during the dust bowl. The windborne soil is creating enormous dust storms like this one which hit Sydney yesterday. The pictures are [...]
More on Sugar Beets
Sugar beets in this country are produced by 10,000 farmers growing beets on an average of 110 acres each. These are the people who will be impacted by the ruling. NYtimes quoted the head of a sugar beet processing company saying they’ve been accepting the beets since they came on the market and it’s been [...]