Proposed: A new gender-parity benchmark, you guys!

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So Science, that lovable institutional behemoth of scientific publishing, has just produced a list of “top 50 science stars of Twitter” that manages to contain, by my count—I’ve triple-checked—four women. Eight percent.

Looking at the list, it hit me:

Seriously, though, I was in a gay bar this weekend with a better gender ratio than @sciencemagazine’s Twitter list: http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/09/top-50-science-stars-twitter#full-list
—@JBYoder, 7:50 AM – 17 Sep 2014.

I hereby propose this as a new, painfully minimum standard for gender parity: If I passed more women on a trip between the dance floor and the bar at the Saloon last weekend than are present in your speaker roster, reviewer panel, or unasked-for list of notables, you’re doing it wrong. In the interest of establishing this as a rigorous benchmark, I plan to immediately embark on a systematic survey of gay bar gender ratios, starting Friday night; interested collaborators should contact me through the usual channels.

Meanwhile, see the totally meaningful list of awesome animals Tom Houslay offers in the spirit of Science, and the big special issue on diversity in science just released by that other beloved institutional behemoth of scientific publishing, Nature.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: The key to a secure global future is evolution

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Sunrise from the Fall River Road

A mountain vista in Colorado, with trees killed by pine beetles in the foreground. (Flickr: John B. Kalla)

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, I discuss a big new review article on all the ways understanding evolutionary biology will be critical for human health and development in the next hundred years:

The long list of authors, led by Scott P. Carroll and including Ford Denison, whose lab is just down the hall from my office at the University of Minnesota, explicitly connect evolutionary principles to global goals for sustainable development. These include the reduction of both “chronic lifestyle” diseases and infectious diseases, establishment of food and water security, clean energy, and maintenance of healthy ecosystems. Carroll and his coauthors divide the applications of evolution to these problems into cases where evolution is the problem, and those where evolution may offer the solution.

I’m going to be citing this paper in every grant application I write for the next decade, I suspect. Go read the whole post, and download the original article from Science Express.

Stuff online, disappearing shorelines and thoughtful fingertips edition

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2014.09.05 - Lower Manhattan I

(jby)

  • Nickel-and-dime misgovernment. How local governments, especially small ones, are way worse than the Feds—and how they’re shaking down their poorest citizens with court fees and traffic fines.
  • If we’d just spend the money. There’s a system in place to mass-produce an anti-ebola drug.
  • It’s almost as though conventional wisdom is just Baby Boomer projection. Apparently millennials read more books than their elders.
  • Or, the only thing that got me through yesterday. A brand remembers September 11.
  • Because this is totally what’s holding us back. The legal complications of mining asteroids.
  • Going down. Thanks to erosion and rising sea-levels, there’s a lot less Louisiana than you might think.
  • Pretty slick. A plasmid that gives bacteria genetic code to fix nitrogen also helps them mutate to better work with a host plant.
  • And yet they’re no help with my writer’s block. Receptors in your fingertips are thinking about what you touch even before they tell your brain about it.

Stuff online, conservation and consternation edition

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Summer sunset in the boundary waters.

Photo by Clint McMahon.

  • For now and the future. Fifty years of wilderness protection in northern Minnesota.
  • Not feeling the fucking love. A soft-pedal profile of I Fucking Love Science, and its emphatic counterpoint.
  • Visibility! A new site devoted to the personal stories of LGBTQ scientists.
  • Maybe a bit? Is ecology explaining less than it used to?
  • Maybe not different “species,” though. How one bacterial symbiont split into two without ever leaving its host.
  • C’est vrai. On immersion-learning a foreign language, and the meaning of learning.
  • Government bureaucrats over corporate bureaucrats. Make government smaller and more efficient by hiring more workers instead of out-sourcing.
  • And he ought to feel like one, by now. Hope Jahren sure has an asshole for a colleague.
  • Best unintended consequence ever. A socialist utopia is no place for pickup artists.
  • Robert Moses versus humanity. The man behind the worst public planning choices of the 20th century.
  • As in everything else. American inequality applies to diet quality, too.
  • Antonin Scalia is a horrible, horrible person. Exhibit A.

Stuff online: Missing links and vital webs edition

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Yellow bird at the lodge

Photo by Tambako The Jaguar

Stuff online, rare genetics and bees edition

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Green Apple Bee!

Photo by Danny Perez Photography.

Neither rain

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Fresh summer rain. Marathon in six weeks. Gotta do the miles. Running shoes squish and suck all the way down the empty trail to the lakes. The few other runners wave in solidarity. One reaches out for a high-five, shouts “Fuck the weather!” with a grin. But the rain patters on the trail, on the leaves of the ash trees, on Lake Calhoun, like a thousand running feet.

Stuff online, leftovers and lactation edition

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Bellaire Ohio Sunrise

Photo by Joanne C Sullivan.