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Science KnowledgeCategory Archives

The right to life – I have it.

The Way It Was | Mother Jones.

This article has made me angry. So angry, i am going to open very far too fresh wounds.

I don’t miscarry. Five times, the fetus died. Five times, this longed for child died before twenty weeks. Some early, two, very very late.

Once I gave birth to a little girl I grieved over, too tiny and perfect for life.

The rest of the time, I had a D&C. The fetus, long dead, had to be removed, as my body was not letting go, as my heart was not. It was killing me. I could have died of septicaemia.

With the law changes in the US, I WOULD have died. My subsequent miracles, my youngest children, never born. My equally cherished older children motherless too soon.

The pious arrogance of the anti abortionists. If they are all so pro life, why are they so willing to sacrifice mine? And my youngest two children, who would not have even had a chance to live? 

And all the women who must make the terrible, awful choice, whether the fetus is viable or not, to end a pregnancy. What cruelty is there in choosing for them. Choosing a way of vast expense and pain. Of almost certain death at the hand of backyard butchers. For these desperate women, often trapped in violence and poverty, frequently trying to protect other already born children, unable to access affordable contraception with the obscene lottery of health insurance (unless for the gift of Planned Parenthood, who do far more to prevent unwanted pregnancies than to end them), or perhaps young, vulnerable and scared, with parents who would not understand, or who would rage and throw them out, or with the consequence of death and revilement from their community, hard lined with religious intolerance, mocking the very words of their religious ethos – how dare ANYONE condemn women to this? Their children left motherless, often already fatherless, consigned to foster homes that may scar them in too many ways. The women dead or broken, from one awful episode left unable then to ever have that child they may have wished more than anything they could have had, who perhaps died, or meant the death of them? Or that they could have had if older, supported, or not abused?

People like these so called right to lifers make me sick with their sanctimonious hypocrisy. They seek only to preserve the narrow definition of life. All life is not sacred to them. ONly that which gestates. 

Those people have blood of far more on their hands than any abortionist. Those people are murderers far more vile.

Happy Birthday to the amazing Marie Curie

Many of you may have noticed that today’s Google Doodle honors famed physicist and chemist Marie Curie, in celebration of her birthday. But this year also marks the centennial of her second Nobel Prize. (It bears mentioning that Curie was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, she is also the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person ever to win in multiple sciences.)

via An insightful look at the life and work of Marie Curie.

The magic of reality…

Also – Pluto has a twin, aww, congrats and welcome Eris :)

Eris and its moon. Surface details are fiction...

Image via Wikipedia

(I am fond of Pluto, and have a tshirt that i wear a lot, that says ‘Don’t worry Pluto, I’m not a planet either’)

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The cult of the individual : knowledge is now based on opinion

Too many of us seem to think that learning from a book, or through research in a university laboratory, makes you worthy of fear or disdain, rather than respect. They think it is better to “go with your gut”, or “learn through experience” than listen to someone who probably knows far better.

via FOOI #11: Listen to the experts, they know their stuff | Article | The Punch.

Love a world where Dance Your PhD exists

Wonderful, marvellous – should i consider this for my upcoming PhD DESPITE Kermit the wonder wheelchair, or BECAUSE of Kermit?;)

For the last four years, scientists from around the world have been participating in Science’s Dance Your PhD contest. The rules of the competition are simple: convey your graduate work in the form of interpretive dance. Creativity will win you points, as will scientific merit; but only by combining the two do you stand to win a spot in the annals of Dance Your PhD history.

via Check out the winners of this year’s Dance Your PhD Competition!.

Translating scientist speak, or…

S#*@ scientists say, an education courtesy of Boing Boing.

Learn and grow, people. Learn and grow. Or, yay, science!

How sugar molecules secretly shaped human evolution

Sugar. How it has changed us. There is a speech i cherish from the seventh Doctor Who, storyline Remembrance of the Daleks, (the anniversary episode) which goes :
JOHN: Hmm? Your tea. Sugar?
DOCTOR: Ah. A decision. Would it make any difference?
JOHN: It would make your tea sweet.
DOCTOR: Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?
JOHN: Not really.
DOCTOR: But
JOHN: Yeah?
DOCTOR: What if I could control people’s tastebuds? What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those that cut the cane.
JOHN: My father, he was a cane cutter.
DOCTOR: Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter.
JOHN: If this sugar thing had never started, my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African.
DOCTOR: See? Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge, rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.
JOHN: Life’s like that. Best thing is just to get on with it.

See? Life’s like that, and as it turns out, more than we think.

Three million years ago, a gene mutation switched off a sugar-making enzyme in early hominids. Our ancestors actually became unable to breed with those who still had the enzyme, possibly causing the emergence of our evolutionary grandparent, Homo erectus.

via How sugar molecules secretly shaped human evolution.

The lure of Ada

Ada, Lady Lovelace (the poet Lord Byron's daug...

Image via Wikipedia

Ada was my second programming language. I had used Basic on CP/M to do many things, pushing my Amstrad CPC 6128 well beyond its comfort zone. I went on to PCs, and finally ended up at Flinders University (the observant reader has noticed The Serval Project is based there, yes, it is a homecoming to be there). At the time, Java was still regarded as ‘new’ (oh, so many years ago). SO we did a modified version of ADA 83 – not even the modern, Object Oriented ADA of today, but an older, and still more simplified version. Verbose as anything, I actually quite LIKED this language. Though i would have preferred Java, to be honest. But it got me curious – ADA is such an odd name. And I discovered, pre Wikipedia, what ADA was named after.

Yes, ADA is an American Defence language, but it is named after the first programmer ever – Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace , only legitimate child of Lord Byron, that cad and poet.

A great and gifted mathematician, she contributed a set of notes containing an algorithm for  Charles Babbage‘s Differential Engine – regarded as the first computer. Should it have been built, these notes would have been run as the first program.

As a woman doing work in an industry i utterly love, that inspires me, and delights me daily, how can i not admire her? Like many of us, a working mother, she managed to combine her passion and her intellect with a family – no easy task at any point, but in her time, almost unheard of! So, i take time out to honour her memory, and be inspired by her, and all the wonderful talented women out there working in our amazing industry, and to hope many more join!

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Neil deGrasse Tyson met Carl Sagan (via Boing Boing)

Carl has been a lifelong inspiration. Neil is a worthy successor, who will be doing a much anticipated Cosmos followup soon.

When Neil deGrasse Tyson met Carl Sagan – Boing Boing.

Digesting the fat of the land (via The Drum)

Frugality vs conspicuous consumerism, the hav it all now mentality that certainly is a porton, way upgraded to large portion, of obesity crises in western countries…

In Australia and just about every other country in the world the proportion of overweight and obese people increases year-on-year. Sixty-seven per cent of Aussies are overweight as are 74 per cent of Americans. The one ray of light in this is that the New Zealanders have managed to trump us with 68 per cent – it’s good to hear the fat hobbits across the Tasman Sea can beat us in something other than Rugby, but still, we’re all getting too large.

Not only are we eating more meat, our food portions generally are expanding in size. In the US 20 years ago, the average cheeseburger had 330 calories, now the average is 590; the average portion of spaghetti contained 500 calories, now it comes in at 1020; and a can of fizzy drink had an average of 82 calories, now it has ballooned out to 250. Now, none of us were starving 20 years ago, but a hell of a lot of us weighed a lot less. Added to this we are chucking food out at a rate never before seen – in Australia we throw away 5.2 billion dollars worth of food each year, including 1.1 billion of fresh fruit and vegetables. That’s around 600 dollars per household. There are charities popping up around Australia now whose sole purpose is to take the food we want to throw away and give it to hungry families.

So we’re getting fatter and fatter, eating more and more, and to top it all off we are throwing tonnes of it away. Six hundred dollars worth per household thrown into landfill – think about that. You know what is going to cost that much? The carbon tax. Actually, it’ll cost a bit less – around 500 per household. And that is putting aside the Treasury estimates that show nearly 70 per cent of Australians will be fully compensated.

via The fat of the land – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).