A few weeks ago I moderated a discussion about synthetic biology down in Washington. Excerpts from the talk (including the one above) are now posted here.
Originally published March 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Greg writes:
“I’m currently a Ph.D. student studying maths in Australia (submitting next week). The the tattoo on the top, I got about three years ago in Berkeley, CA. The other tattoo I got about a year later in Sydney, Australia. Both these tattoos are closely related to the research I’ve done for my Ph.D., which is in the area of elliptic partial differential equations. The top equation is called the Monge-Ampere equation and is the archetype of the equations I currently study. The bottom equation is called the ‘Infinity Laplacian’ and was chosen because it is correlated to variational theories which I find to be beautiful.
Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles is in Barcelona at the Evolution of Language conference, and he’s live-blogging like crazy. Fascinating stuff well worth checking out. [Link fixed-cz]
Originally published March 14, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
If you’re a scientist mysteried by the media, AAAS has set up a nice site to help. Included are a series of interviews with members of that dubious profession, including Science Friday’s Ira Flatow talking about radio, and the New York Times’s environment writer Andrew Revkin on newspaper reporting. I talk> about life as a multitasking freelancer, and how blog posts and books are and are not the same.
Originally published March 13, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Steve writes:
“I got my two tattoos the summer after I graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in Chemical and Nuclear Engineering. On the left shoulder is the recognizable radiation warning trefoil, and on the right is the U.S. Army’s hazard symbol for chemical weapons (I interpret it more as a general chemical warning symbol). Some would say that hazard symbols like these represent a desire to for isolation, but I like to think of them as my two pillars of training. That no matter what happens to me I’ll always have my knowledge of these two sciences to rest upon.”