End of the World Midnight Wheat! An ale brewed with “midnight wheat, chocolate malt, chili and spice” from Shock Top (aka Anheuser-Busch)

First and foremost a special thanks to James K. for providing the bottle for this review!

Look – The beer mostly looks good, however, there is one glaring issue and that is sediment. You can probably see some floating in suspension in the photo. I know there are ways to pour a beer to keep the sediment in the bottle and out of the glass, but I don’t mind a bit of sediment in my beer. The instructions on the bottle itself advocate the “pour most, swirl, then pour rest” method which would introduce sediment so I feel justified to comment on it. Again, I don’t mind a bit of sediment, but this is too much, it’s especially too much when I know it’s being produced at an Anheuser-Busch facility, which has brewing down a science and thus I can only assume this much sediment is intentional rather than accidental. Other than that it’s a nice copper hue with a snowy white head that never gets past maybe ½ a finger and dissipates quickly thereafter. No real tracing on the glass to speak of.

Smell – The smell is very mild, far milder than I expect from this style. If I really breathe deep I can get a bit of banana and some spicy notes, but not much else.

Taste – I’m looking at the last few sips of this and still don’t have much to say. It tastes like a standard, if a bit lacking, wheat beer with maybe a bit of cinnamon (which might be the spice the bottle is promoting). I will readily admit that I don’t think I have the palate to notice any of the tastes specific to midnight wheat nor chocolate malt, but unless those are milder version that a typical hefeweizen I don’t feel like they’re contributing a lot. None of the flavors are off or bad, they’re just not really there in the first place.

Feel – Crisper and drier than I’d have thought. I guess the I keep trying to compare this beer to a dunkelweizen, but it just isn’t. It’s more like a spiced wheat beer, but even still I tend to expect something a bit creamier and smoother than crisp like this. Not a knock against it, but not really a positive either, it just is.

Drinkability – Unexpectedly drinkable for how dark a beer is it. Goes down very easy, and at a respectable, but not ridiculous, ABV of 6.0% you could kick back a few of these on a chilly day and feel alright about it.

look: 2 | smell: 1.5 | taste: 2.5 | feel: 3 | overall: 2.5

C- / 2.33

Serving type: 12 oz. bottle

Reviewed on: 24 April 2013 5pm MDT

Last week I attended my first science conference: The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, TX. If you followed me on Twitter, then (for better or for worse) you also knew that I was one of about 40 people microblogging the conference. There was a lot of great science to cover and it was fun trying to distill that information into 140 character limit. I got to present a poster on the shock dike that I’ve been working on for over a year now and I received good feedback on the research. I also met a lot of great people, some of whom will be potential collaborators in research and outreach projects.

At the end of the conference I began to think about my favorite aspects and topics at LPSC. There’s no rhyme or reason to this list, but a few of these items will  become blog posts once I sort through all my tweets and notes and can write something coherent.

Conferences are not restful- I wasn’t expecting a vacation time, but nor was I expecting to consume the same amount of coffee as I would during finals. Between microblogging and networking, there wasn’t much downtime. At the end of the conference, I was pretty beat.

Scientists are real people- This may seem like a silly thing to say, but the outside world thinks we’re either socially inept like those in the Big Bang Theory or we’re protected by the walls of the Ivory Tower. True, some scientists don’t have the best social skills, but most that I met are great to hang out with, play games, and enjoy a beer or two. And the fragility of the Ivory Tower has never been more apparent until Sequestration hit. The funding cuts meant that many scientist couldn’t attend LPSC and present their research, collaborate with their peers, and participate in the free flow of information. More importantly, some are concerned about job security.

Pre-solar CAI’s- I nearly choked when I heard this in a presolar grains session. A CAI is a calcium aluminium rich inclusion. These things are composed of refractory elements, or elements that stay solid at very high temperatures. They are the oldest things in the solar system and condensed out of the solar nebula before the planet making process took off. Presolar indicates something that formed before our solar system. So, finding a probable presolar CAI is like sampling the proto nebula of another solar system. Pretty neat!

The MESSENGER mission at Mercury is churning out some of the best science in NASA- I’m of the opinion that the MESSENGER mission is kind of the underdog of the NASA missions. Cassini and anything Mars related get a lot of much deserved attention, but the people working on MESSENGER deserve accolades, as well. The lack of attention isn’t their fault- they have a fantastic website, but it’s hard to compete with the rings of Saturn and a laser shooting robot searching for past clues of life.

Mercurian meteorites- Few topics are as contentious as this one.  A researcher from University of Washington claimed to *possibly* have a meteorite from the innermost planet, or at the very least, from a very similar planetesimal. Could we have a few Mercurian meteorites in our collection?  Possibly. But current spectroscopic data from Mercury don’t align with any known meteorites. Another problem: crystallization age was revealed to be ~4.3 billion years old. This is too old to come from Mercury, but could possibly come from another asteroidal source.

The HED/4 Vesta debate- Another contentious topic in the meteoritics field. The HED’s are a group of meteorites that likely came from asteroid 4 Vesta. Spectral reflectance from the asteroid matches that of this suite of meteorites. However, a few within the meteoritics world will tell you that the science is wrong and one group of these meteorites, diogenites, may have come from two parent bodies. This would eliminate 4 Vesta from being the HED parent body. This is a fairly heretical stance because the link between HED’s and 4 Vesta is fairly well established, but still provides for some solid conference entertainment.

Platinum anomaly that may reignite the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis- The idea that the Younger Dryas extinction was caused by an asteroid impact has been a dead issue for the meteoritics community for some time now. The evidence wasn’t really there to support the hypothesis until a researcher found platinum anomalies in ice cores from Greenland. Now, he didn’t claim that it came from an impact, but the presented evidence could make things interesting for those on the paleoecology side of this issue.

Outreach should be embraced. Get the science to the people!- Science funding is at a dangerous crossroads in the US. Either we show the public why our research is relevant and drum up support or we watch our grants dry up and our science with it. Our research is publicly funded and we have an obligation to share it with the taxpayer and get them involved.

Finally, never admit to not knowing who Steve Squyres is during a game of Cards Against Humanity, the Mars edition. I learned this the hard way and I will forever be grateful to those who didn’t toss me out of the game in spite of my ignorance.

1. Print out one of the two flyers below (or this link: here)
2. Post it somewhere public. Examples include: a message board in your department, at your local comic shop, on your mom’s fridge, or on your best friend’s windshield.
3. Take a photograph of the posting.
4. E-mail that photo to paleopals@sciencesortof.com
5. Wait to see if winning happens to you.

In a month or so, Charlie will use a random number generator to select 3 people to win Science… sort of T-shirts! And just in time for spring! There are also some secret prizes that will be announced on an upcoming show, but I assure you that they are indeed worth the minimal effort.

And do you want to know a secret? Most people don’t bother because they’re lazy and don’t want other people to know about the show. This means your odds of winning are high, so get in on the ground floor and get yourself some swag!

freeimages.co.uk

How to loop in R

Use the for loop if you want to do the same task a specific number of times.
It looks like this.

for (counter in vector) {commands}

I’m going to set up a loop to square every element of my dataset, foo, which contains the odd integers from 1 to 100 (keep in mind that vectorizing would be faster for my trivial example – see below).

foo <- seq(1, 100, by=2)

for (i in 1:50 ) {
foo.squared[i] <- foo[i]^2
}


If the creation of a new vector is the goal, first you have to set up a vector to store things in prior to running the loop. This is the foo.squared <- NULL part. This was a hard lesson for me to learn. R doesn’t like being told to operate on a vector that doesn’t exist yet. So, we set up an empty vector to add stuff to later (note that this isn't the most speed efficient way to do this, but it's fairly fool-proof). Next, the real for-loop begins. This code says we’ll loop 50 times(1:50). The counter we set up is ‘i’ (but you can put whatever variable name you want there). For our new vector foo.squared, the ith element will equal the number of loops that we are on (for the first loop, i=1; second loop, i=2).

If you are new to programming it is sometimes difficult to keep straight the difference in the number of loops you are on versus the value of the element of vector being operated on. For example when we've looped through the instructions 4 times, the next loop will be loop number 5 (so i=5). However the 5th element of foo will be foo[5], which is equal to 9. Therefore, foo.squared[5] should equal 81.

Silly mistakes to be made
If you are having problems with your loop, it could be one of these silly mental slips.

Did you reset your vector inside the loop? Is it possible you put a new.vector <- NULL inside the loop instead of before it? Yeah, I've done it. About 45 minutes later I finally figured out what was wrong with my loop.

Did you forget to subscript your new vector? Possibly the inside of your loop looks like this
{ foo.squared <- foo[i]^2 }.
You are missing your square brackets with a counter on the left side of the <- operator. This will result in foo.squared containing only one value – the last value calculated by the loop.

Why is this controversial?

A little background:
1) Loops are slow in R. This fact puts lots of R users on the defense from the very beginning. Users of almost any other language can just bring up looping speed when they want to get under R users' skins. The fact is, for many people, it doesn't matter. Computers are fast and even slow looping will likely accomplish what you need in a reasonable length of time unless you are working with a really huge dataset. And there are lots of workarounds for users of big data in R.

2) R itself is primarily written in C (or some variant like C++). When you set up a vector in R, you can easily do operations on the entire vector (this is the vectorization that gets discussed so frequently in R literature).

foo.squared <- foo^2 #this will square every element in the vector foo and store it in foo.squared

Underneath the R code you just executed is blazingly fast C code running loops to get you the answer. The upshot here is that C is much faster than R and if you can do get what you seek in R by applying a command to a vector it's typically a good idea to do so.

3) R is a functional language, the result of that is the flow control and programming is somewhat de-emphasized. Many R natives would prefer that you use the apply family of functions rather than writing a for-loop (often possible, but not always). Adding a layer of vitriol to this preference for the apply command is the rumor (left over from the S language from which R was derived) that apply is faster than a for-loop. This is false (at least theoretically), because inside the code for the apply command is a for-loop written in R. There are a couple of functions in the apply family which do avoid R loops and therefore probably are faster than a loop. But most apply functions are no faster than a well constructed loop (more on well constructed later). But using apply is best left for another post, we have plenty to tackle just learning how to write a half-way decent loop.

Some more advanced looping thoughts

If you are writing a for-loop inside of a larger construct, the number of times you want to loop could depend on the length of a vector which could change depending on other factors. Therefore, you can set up your counter in vector part of the loop like this

for (i in1:length(foo)) {
#stuff to do the number of times that foo is long
}

The well constructed loop

If you are running into speed problems there are a couple of things to try (see also the R inferno).

Get as much stuff as possible out of the loop. If there are any operations that could be done to the vector prior to looping get them outside of those curly brackets.

Avoid growing your object

In the example above we created an empty vector to store our new values in (foo.squared <- NULL). That vector is empty, and every time we go through the loop we grow the vector by one. It would be faster if we could set up our vector to be the right length ahead of time and then just simply fill that vector with the correct values.
foo.squared <- numeric(length=50) #generates a vector of 50 zeros; now we run the loop as before

Of course, sometimes when we write loops we don't know how many things are going to come out the other end. Usually we can guess on an upper bound though. It's going to be faster to partially fill a very long vector using a loop then get rid of the meaningless stuff at the end than to grow a vector one loop at a time. We can make a very large vector full of NAs and dump them at the end. Give these two loops a try and note the speed difference on your computer.

bar <- seq(1,200000, by=2)
bar.squared <- rep(NA, 200000)

#get rid of excess NAs
bar.squared<-bar.squared[!is.na(bar.squared)]
summary(bar.squared)


Versus

bar <- seq(1, 200000, by=2)
bar.squared <- NULL
for (i in 1:length(bar) ) {
bar.squared[i] <- bar[i]^2
}
summary(bar.squared)

Yes, I do wear bowties frequently.

Hello Paleoposse! My name is Ryan Brown and I’m one of the newest victims bloggers here at the Paleocave. I made an appearance on Episode 134 where I talked a bit about meteorites and the asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources. I blog over at Glacial Till where, confusingly enough, I do not actually talk about glaciers. Most of my blogging centers around meteorites, planetary science, and some geology. I have no plans on abandoning my own blog, so keep your eyes open for cross-posts between the two sites.

A little about myself: I’m an undergrad in my senior year at Portland State University where I’m majoring in Earth Science with a minor in Space and Planetary Science. While keeping up with my normal classes, I can also be found doing independent research at the Cascadia Meteorite Lab on campus. I’ve been there since I was a freshman learning about the wild world of meteorites and it’s finally culminating in two co-authored papers (one that’s in peer review and the other being written) and a rather unhealthy addiction to space rocks and caffeine. And somewhere in all that, I’ve managed to squeeze in time to lead the skeptic group on campus.

So, why meteorites? What makes this relatively niche science so fascinating? In short, meteorites are the left over building blocks of the solar system. They are to meteoriticists (a person that studies meteorites) what fossils are to paleontologists. They allow us to understand how planets formed and evolved out of the great chemical cloud that swirled around the young protosun 4.5 billion years ago.

We group meteorites into three main categories:

1. Stony meteorites 
2. Stony-Iron meteorites
3. Iron meteorites

These three categories can further be broken down into smaller groups based on shared characteristics in mineralogy and chemistry. But we’re gonna keep it tidy and just stick with the three main groups.

Stony Meteorites

The stony’s come in two different flavors:

• Ordinary chondrites- They’re called ordinary because they account for nearly 85% of known meteorites. In my humble opinion, a better name would be common instead of ordinary.

Ordinary chondrite NWA 869 (Image from Wikipedia)

• Carbonaceous chondrites- These meteorites are considered the most primitive in terms of chemical evolution. They’ve seen very little to no heating, and as a result, contain water in the form of hydrated minerals. Cooler yet, the chemical make-up of these meteorites closely approximates that of the sun. This means we can study them to learn about the very early days of the solar nebula before the planet making process took-off.

One of the more famous carbonaceous chondrites- Allende (Image from Wikipedia)

• Some achondrites- These are meteorites without chondrules, or these spherical silicate inclusions. I say some because not all achondrites are stony. Some fall under the stony-iron category and, if you’re feeling particularly heretical, the iron category. Those that are stony come from either the moon, Mars, or asteroids such as Vesta 4.

The newest martian meteorite, NWA 7034. We’ll cover this one in detail in the next post. (Image from NASA)

Stony-Iron Meteorites

These are meteorites that are made up of significant portions of metal and rock. In some cases, you can get a near 50/50 compostion. Some of the most striking, and priciest, meteorites come from this category.

The Esquel pallasite. The presence of olivine grains in a metal body is thought to represent mixing of the mantle with the core from a catastrophic impact. (Image from Wikipedia)

Iron Meteorites

And then there are the iron meteorites. These are thought to be from the cores of planetismals that grew large enough to develop an iron-nickel core, but suffered some sort of impact that disrupted the parent body. Famously known for the cross-hatched, Widmanstatten pattern.

The iron meteorite, Seymchan, displaying the Widmanstatten pattern. (Image from Wikipedia)

What I’ve written here isn’t comprehensive in the slightest and it’s not meant to be. This is just to give you an idea of the complexity of the stuff that falls from space. I’ve already written a lot on my own blog under the Meteorite Monday series that covers these beauties in greater depth. If you’re interested in learning more, click on the link provided and peruse my stuff. Or post your questions in the comment section below and I will do my best to answer them.

The ambitiously titled Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life presents a novel framework for how to approach some of life’s biggest questions, a partnership between science and philosophy appropriately called “sci-phi.” Pigliucci deftly demonstrates in each chapter how the one-two punch of these fields is an appropriate, measured, and practical way of viewing and interacting with the world and within our own lives.

There are many people along the non-believer spectrum who write about the majesty of science and discovery absent of any sort of supernatural presence. Some people cross over into actually suggesting that science itself can give our lives meaning and purpose. Pigliucci keeps this distinction clear by often reminding the reader that science says what “is” NOT “what ought to be,” which seems to be the root source of the aforementioned overstepping by other authors. Pigliucci makes no such claims and shows how science can tell us what is true about our reality and that philosophy can then help us decide how to incorporate reality into our quest for eudaimonia (literally “a good/true demon”), or a sense of deep happiness that can only come from a fulfilling life.

One thing that surprised me is how little of this book is about philosophy of science. I guess just hearing the two words in close proximity primed me to think about that disparate idea of philosophically analyzing science and the scientific method. This is familiar territory for anyone, myself included, who read Pigliucci’s previous book Nonsense on Stilts, which very much is a primer of philosophy of science. However, Answers for Aristotle is not a sequel to Nonsense on Stilts. The philosophy covered in Answers for Aristotle is not about critiquing what the science says about the world we live, instead the philosophy builds on the facts as understood by science to give a sense of meaning not fulfilled by the act of scientific inquiry in and of itself.

Epicurius, creator of good demons and good food. Obviously.

Besides being ambitious, the book is dense with information. It’s divided into six sections, beginning with the very question of what morality is and where it comes from. This includes everything from neuroscience to evolution within the veneer of the most prominent moral theories present in philosophy. The book then delves into how we know anything at all, who we are (more neuroscience but also the philosophy of free will), relationships with other people, politics, and god. Clearly Pigliucci does not feel the need to pull any punches. If that sounds like a lot of ground to cover in a handsome 312-page package, it’s because it is. Pigliucci fully admits when he’s forced only give a cursory explanation of a given topic, but he supplements his necessary brevity with references relevant to the topic of each chapter yielding 16 pages of other works to go check out after finishing this one.

When we had Pigliucci on the show, I mentioned that I considered Nonsense on Stilts a valuable enough resource for the critical thinker that it sits on my shelf next to Carl Sagan’s seminal Demon-Haunted World. However, I cannot say the same for Answers for Aristotle because I expect this book will be constantly find its way into the hands of friends and family, both those who agree that the unexamined life is not worth living and those who think us non-theist science-types can’t lead a rich and moral life.

Ultimately, Pigluicci presents his case for sci-phi with succinct snappy prose that manages to convey a lot with bogging down the reader with trivia. Answers for Aristotle is as potentially useful as it is interesting. Pigliucci opened this scientist up to the power of philosophical inquiry with Nonsense on Stilts, now he’s taught me how to apply that power with Answers for Aristotle.

 5 out of 5 Brachiolopes

Hear Massimo Pigliucci on Episode 112 – Philosophy… sort of.

Also check out Massimo Pigluicci’s own blog and podcast Rationally Speaking.

And of course, if you’re so inclined, buy the book on Amazon.

If you want to learn a computer language a logical question would be which one to learn?

Right now there are 3 languages I’m interested in. These are R, Python, and Javascript. All of these are useful in scientific and data analysis. I’ve written about R a couple of times and we’ve had guests on the show that are serious Python programmers. Javascript really is one of the main languages of the internet and if you are interested in communicating your projects and results via the web (and who isn’t) javascript (especially the new-ish D3 library) should be on you list of languages to consider. But really, it isn’t all that important which language you learn as long as you learn a language. I’m an advocate for open source languages, but really you should pick something that you’re likely to use. If you’ve got friends or colleagues that use a certain language, pick that one up.

There are a multitude of ways to learn languages, but interaction is required. So if you start with a book or an online course (like coursera) you have to work the exercises (problem sets, whatever). Coding is hard, you have to beat your head against a problem for a long time to get a eureka moment that will let you move on. You have to do this again and again.

One good way to get started is Code Academy. They have courses in Javascript and a relatively new course in Python. If R is the language you’re interested in there is a similar style course at Code School (Try R). Or I’ve had lots of good success with this book, A First Course in Statistical Programming with R, so I’ll plug it again here.

These courses/books will get you started but really to learn a language, you have to solve your own problems with it. This requires a lot of staring at your screen, googling, and time on stackoverflow. But in the end you gain a powerful tool and a marketable skill, and — if Steve Jobs is right — a new way of thinking, solving problems, and seeing the world. Definitely a new year’s resolution worth pursuing.

volcano

You get a big barf load of numbers in your R interpreter window. This is enough to send lots of people running back to Excel as fast as they can say ‘Bill Gates.’ Ok, admittedly that isn’t nice to look at. If you want to view your data in a more visually appealing way you can use the View command (make sure your capitalize the ‘V’).

View(volcano)

Now things look more like they do in a spreadsheet. If you’re on a Windows machine this is really works well, you’ll probably have a scrollable window pop up with slider bars and everything. On Mac OS it’s a little more janky. You’ll get an X11 window that you can use your arrow keys to navigate around.

Ok, looking good! What if you’ve loaded in your data, you’re looking it over and you see an error (misspelling maybe)? Do you have to open up your file in Excel, fix it, and re-save it as a csv, and then open it up again in R? No. No you don’t. You can use the fix command (but have care, things can get confusing this way).

volcanoII <- fix(volcano)

will allow you to open up an editable window, make changes by clicking the error with your mouse, and typing in the correction. The changes will be saved in a new data frame called volcanoII (because that's what you typed on the left side of the <- ). Here is the caveat, the data edits aren't saved in the original file, just in R. If you want to save a copy of your edited data frame, you'll have to write out a file from R (use write.table). Alright, hopefully this pushes you a little farther towards dumping your spreadsheet program for data analysis.

But as for the content of this post, I’ve asked the Paleopals to contribute their ideas for things you could get the geek in your life for this solstice season. Here are the results. Enjoy!

 Patrick writes in 2nd person and suggests:

A great gift for the Science… sort of fan is a limited edition print of Peaches the Brachiolope by Brynn Metheney.

However, if you’re a fan and you’re shopping for someone who isn’t exactly a fan (though I can’t imagine why you’d tolerate their company if they weren’t listeners) she’s got lots of other fantastic art that’s likely to please anyone.

If you’ve got friends that are “steampunks,” you could buy them one of the novels that kicked off the genera. The Difference Engine by William Gibson, The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, and Infernal Devices (Angry Robot) by K.W. Jeter (who coined the word “steampunk”) are generally regarded as the first steampunk novels, and they all came out at nearly the same time. My understanding is that the three authors were all bouncing ideas off one another during the writing process. I haven’t read The Difference Engine (so I won’t comment on it). The Anubis Gates is often trumpeted as the best of the three (and it’s finally available as a Kindle edition). It is quite good, but not exactly steampunk (at least not how I normally think of steampunk). It’s really a historical time travel novel. Infernal Devices is a fairly hilarious adventure novel, and is squarely in the steampunk family of sci-fi/fantasy.

Nate Silver is the blogger responsible for the FiveThirtyEight.com blog that’s been bang on predicting presidential races for the last two election cycles. He’s riding high and he’s got a new book out, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t. Pretty decent book that falls somewhere in between Freakonomics and Innumeracy (both in style and in scope, although it’s longer than both). He covers lots of things Science… sort of listeners might be interested in including trying to predict earthquakes and forecasting climate change.

If Nate Silver isn’t nerdy enough for the budding data scientist on your list, maybe you should get them a membership to flowingdata.com. If you know someone interested in coding up some really good data visualizations (web ready or otherwise) think about signing them up for Nathan Yau’s members only tutorials for a year. Or, if you prefer get them Yau’s recent book, Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics. Or the great-granddaddy of data viz references, Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which is a really nice looking book (even if it is just sitting on a coffee table.

Kelly wants to keep you awake so you can make the decision with her suggestions:

Now you can combine the two great loves of your life, science and caffeine! The deep sea diver tea infuser is a great gift for the aquatically-inclined caffeine lover in your life:

Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books that you loved reading as a child? Zach Weinersmith has come up with his own choosable pathway game book called Trial of the Clone, which his wife thinks is awesome! So check it out!

Ben didn’t respond but Ryan assumes he’d suggest:

The Lonely Planet Travel Guide to Canada! Go visit Ben and see all of the sights.

Did you like Canada so much you want to live there? Here’s how.

Not totally convinced? This book seems quite complementary.

And be sure to pick up a handy Canadian history guide so you can pass your immigration test.

Jacob’s a busy dude so Ryan made up some suggestions for:

Jacob probably likes to pretend flying planes, and here’s a computerized video game program that simulates just that.

But what’s the point of simulating without the proper controls? Jacob may say you need a yoke… and rudder pedals… and a switch panel… and a radio. Because seriously, do you want to play this game or just pretend to like a punk?

Charlie telepathically told Ryan that he knows you deserve:

A record player that can convert your vinyls to mp3. Is it sacrilege? Maybe. But a backup is a backup.

But if you really want to hear those vinyls you’ll need some Grado Presitge Series SR80i headphones. Also great for recording podcasts, if you know what I mean.

And Ryan thinks everyone ought to have:

I usually suggest at least one comic, and I would be remiss if I did not mention Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s an amazingly imaginative sci-fi/fantasy book that just feels big. Vaughn has an excellent record of quality longform storytelling and Saga is shaping up to be something very special.

But I also think you deserve a drink. Yet I’ve noticed when I visit friends they sometimes lack the basic hardware necessary to put together a fine cocktail. So if you’re hoping to stock your friends (or maybe even your own bar) with the necessities for good mixing, here’s the load-out I suggest:

• A Boston shaker, 1 30 oz. piece and 1 15 oz. piece. I love the metal on metal seal you just can’t get with glass.
• A pony/jigger combo. Can handle most any measurement you’ll need for proper proportions.
• A proper mixing spoon. The twists in the stem help with stirring and you can make swizzles, which are quite fancy.
• A Julep strainer. Basically a slotted spoon, quite distinct from the more common mesh strainer  The Julep strainer does let a bit more through, so for drinks you really want well strained you might need to strain twice, but I feel like this is a better multitasker, and easier to clean, than the mesh variety.
• A muddler. Lots of drinks require a good muddling, and then you’ll thank me for the above strainer.
• Old fashioned glasses. You’ll need something to serve your creation in. There are lots of glasses that could be picked, but I like the versatility of an old fashioned glass. (Although a set of Coupe glasses are also sure to impress any guests.)
• King cube ice tray. Just in case you have to serve a drink on the rocks instead of up. Remember that whole surface area to volume ratio? Same principle.

Also Patrick pointed out that our old posts concerning solstice gift giving still hold up, so be sure to check those out for additional suggestions. Here’s a list:

• 2010
  • Patrick
  • Ryan
  • Jacob
• 2011
  • Patrick
  • Ryan 

Image Credit: zeitspuren

There are a few parasite/pathogen related projects this round, which of course has me quite excited.

This project studies the ecology of Lyme disease in California, and seeks to link this ecological information to human risk of Lyme disease infection:

This project by Will Helenbrook looks at how interactions between humans and primates influences disease transmission. Will does a fantastic job of explaining the importance of his research: “How important is this? One out 4 people in the world will die from an infectious disease and 75% of newly emerging diseases are found in both people and animals. Furthermore, 40% of emerging tropical infectious diseases originate in primates. Clearly, the impact of wildlife disease on people is huge! Well, if we can understand those factors that increase disease transmission, then we can potentially reduce the impact of infectious diseases on human and wildlife health.”

I’m also pretty pumped about Elisabeth Whyte’s project. Elisabeth is an avid player of World of Warcraft, and is using her skills as a gamer to develop more effective treatments for kids with autism.

If you have some extra dough and want to spend it on SCIENCE, then bounce on over and support the #SciFund Challenge!

This post originally appeared on the Weinersmith Blog.

Hi Paleoposse… It’s podcast award season again.  Here at Science… sort of we always view these things a little ambiguously. We, as a group of podcasters, don’t have too much ambition as far as winning a category goes. But, we get a significant amount of new website traffic (and presumably new listeners) from the little bit of buzz these awards generate.  So if you have a few minutes and want to help out the show, go visit the podcast awards and nominate us (voting comes later).  This year Stitcher has decided to get into the game, we don’t quite know what to expect from them, but again, being nominated certainly can’t hurt (and we aren’t as highly ranked on stitcher as we’d like to be). So go nominate us for a Stitcher award too if you are feeling generous.

Thanks for your support!

As much as I love visiting museums on the down-low, seeing what the typical visitor (who doesn’t write blog posts about the experience) sees, there’s something to be said for behind-the-scenes tours. And holy balls what a tour it was at the Georgia Aquarium.

First of all, a big thanks goes out to Jen Richards, our unofficial tour guide. The Georgia Aquarium has some pretty great behind-the-scenes tours — want to SCUBA dive in the whale shark tank? you can! — but I doubt any of them are as intimate as Jen’s tour was for just me and Ryan. Plus, ours was free.

Jen’s story is heartening to anyone who’s looking to start a museum career: she came to the Georgia Aquarium as a volunteer, and turned it into a full time paying gig as a trainer. No, she’s not a dolphin trainer, she teaches classes on marine conservation. For us, this meant that she could not only identify every species we encountered, she often knew the individuals.

nom nom nom

Speaking of marine conservation, the Georgia Aquarium is very involved in research and restoration. Take, for example, its whale sharks. The Aquarium has four whale sharks in a massive tank, and they’ve been studying how these filter-feeding sharks actually eat their food. While the mouth is quite large, the throat is very small, and rather than use teeth to pierce or chew, they use modified gill rakers to filter plankton, krill, larvae and eggs from the water. Their filtration system is so good, they can differentiate grains of rice from their normal food (yes, the Aquarium tried it)! The Aquarium has also been conducting field research on the animals since 2005, focusing right now on the mysterious annual gathering of whale sharks in the Yucatan. Call it a whale-shark moot if you will.

Hiding out at the “Watery World of Colors” wall

One of the great things about the Aquarium is that even the non-public space contains mini exhibits with tanks, panels and labels, which gives the impression that the Aquarium has its visitors in mind all the time. Even the hallways are lined with research posters, marine life sculpture and photography, species silhouettes for size and shape comparison, and even a “camouflage wall” meant to teach kids that camo is relative to your background. Another such non-public-yet-educational space is the area above the tropical reef tank. Seeing the reef from down below, you’re looking at beautiful fish and coral and clear water. Seeing the reef from above, you suddenly understand just how much work it takes to artificially create that environment, which in my case helped me appreciate just how astounding our natural reefs ecosystems are.

Lights, water, action!

First, there’s the sheer quantity of water that needs to be perfectly chemically balanced and added to the system. Staff have to check the chemical makeup of the water in every tank multiple times a day to keep it calibrated, and compounds are constantly added and removed, which takes a lot of different containers of crazy hues. Every two minutes, the reef gets an influx of new water, and that’s just one of the many many exhibition tanks at the Georgia Aquarium; given that the Georgia Aquarium is the largest in the world, you can imagine how much water they use on a daily basis, and this water must be guaranteed from the city. All day long there are heat/light lamps shining on the surface of the reef tank, but lamps alone aren’t enough, so the Aquarium has a huge skylight just for the tropical reef for more light. This light is so important that through a city ordinance, the Aquarium actually controls all the airspace above the skylight, which means they can block skyscrapers from being built that would cast shadows over the reef.

Yep, the Georgia Aquarium controls all that.

Then there’s the coral. Most aquarium coral reefs aren’t made of living coral (mostly because it’s illegal to take coral from a living reef, so if you’re starting from scratch, you can’t use the real thing), but the Georgia Aquarium grows its own coral, and is slowly trying to replace the dead matter in its tanks with the living colonies it breeds. Not only that, but they’re taking these coral colonies out into the Florida Keys to replace staghorn and elkhorn coral in reefs that have been damaged.

aw, shark purses

When you’re above the tropical reef tank, you can get up close to the coral and mangrove nurseries, the shallow “shoals” where sharks are hatched and grown, the system through which water is filtered and proteins removed (ohhh, so that’s what that sea foam is…), and the room where all the various organisms are grown to feed the animals in the exhibits. Seeing all this work, you begin to understand why an adult ticket costs $30. It’s an eye-opening, educational experience, one which I wish was available to regular visitors.

Head over to Juli’s blog for the rest of the scoop on the Georgia Aquarium.