Sandwalk 2007

 
John Lynch of Stranger Fruit started a trend last year when he posted the first sentence of the first blog of each month for the entire year. He's done it again this year [My year in blogging. I couldn't do it last year for obvious reasons so here's my summary for 2007.

• January: Brits Losing After American Invasion: According to recent reports red squirrels in Britain are facing extinction.


• February: Another Canuck Blogger There's a really good blog called Primordial Blog. As far as I can tell the author (Brian) lives in the Yukon—that's part of Canada (barely) so he must be Canadian.


• March: Evolution Is a Fact DaveScot over at Uncommon Descent writes in "Theory of Evolution as well tested as…"


• April: Public Scientific Debates Sean Carrol has posted an article about pubic debates over the validity of string theory [String Theory is Losing the Public Debate].


• May: My Six Months Are Up! I started Sandwalk six months ago. The goal was to give it six months to see how things worked out.


• June: Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney Video on Framing Science Chris Mooney has challenged me to respond to a video (see below the fold) of a talk that he and Matt Nisbet gave on framing. Over on his blog, Chris criticizes PZ Myers who couldn't sit through the whole hour [PZ, You Can Do Better Than This....]. Neither could I, but at least I got to the 50 minute mark which was more than twice as far as PZ.


• July: Visible Mutations and Evolution by Natural Selection A recent posting [Darwin Still Rules, but Some Biologists Dream of a Paradigm Shift] raised the issue of adaptationism. The controversy is over the main mechanism of genetic change in evolving populations.


• August: Heme Groups Monday's Molecule #37 is the heme group found in myoglobin and hemoglobin.


• September: Theories of Speciation In order to understand real evolution you have to understand speciation. This fact usually comes as a great surprise to adaptationists who tend not to think of such things.


• October: Do You Think Iran Will Get the Messsage? Here's a scary report from the New York Daily News [ Bush eyes 'surgical' strikes vs. Iran, sez mag].


• November: Can You Smell Isovaleric Acid? Isovaleric acid [3-Methylbutanoic acid] smells like sweat. It is responsible for some of the odor in a locker room, for example.


• December: Seymour Benzer (1921 - 2007) Seymour Benzer died last Friday. In the 1950's and 1960's Benzer was a prominent member of the 'phage group founded by Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria [The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1969.].

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