Fresh Wallaby Juice

The menace of perchlorates grows again. Now 36 states (the AP says) have detected perchlorate in their drinking water. Perchlorate is at least potentially a hazard, because it can interfere with thyroid activity in adults and children, causing problems with metabolism and normal growth. Industrially, perchlorates are used as oxidizers in rocket fuel and fireworks [...]

Long time without an update. Lot going on, about which I shall post more later. Today’s work-task: An abstract for a conference six months from now. Simple, really — 300-350 words summarizing what I’m going to be talking about, in language calculated to inspire everyone at the conference to come see my poster. One hitch: [...]

For those who haven’t seen it yet, apparently they’ve found out that dinosaur bones (most notably a T. rex) may contain soft tissue: Removal of the mineral phase reveals transparent, flexible, hollow blood vessels containing small round microstructures that can be expressed from the vessels into solution. Some regions of the demineralized bone matrix are [...]

My advisor emailed me late last night about a statistics lecture one of our brand-new collaborators was giving today. He had to leave early today, so guess who got to go instead? It was actually a lot better than I’d feared — it was indeed a non-technical survey of “non-linear dimensionality reduction by manifold embedding”, [...]

Separate but not unrelated links on … Evolution – “When you have patched a tire too many times, you

In the interests of serving the public at large… well… and amusing myself… and to see if it boosts