The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has me spending all my spare time and then some till the wee hours reading about reactor design and safety systems and makes me want to go into nuclear engineering. Am I weird ( Read more... )

I have to put together a research proposal, precursor to my doctoral thesis proposal, for fellowship funding applications I'm trying to get together ASAP. For a while now, I'd been meaning to post here an overview of my new research program but hadn't gotten around to it yet. So, what better opportunity than head-on-the-chopping-block to throw ( Read more... )

Some questions in evolutionary developmental biology that I've formulated and have been puzzling over lately:

• Should defects that do not cause early, catastrophic effects (pleiotropy or otherwise) be expected to cause only milder or delayed negative effects? Is there a definite multimodal distribution? Or a long tail?
   
• What is the meaning of a ( Read more... )

I didn't ask my advisor, because I know he would've told me I'm being an idiot and if I don't cut back on what I try to do I'll never get the bare minimum done. Things like my masters' thesis. c.c;

But, what's a few days in the grand scheme of things? Every little piece of time seems so small, doesn't it? And it doesn't help that I half expect I'd ( Read more... )