CNN.com is fronting a story about Stephen Glass, the former reporter editor at The New Republic who was famously exposed in 1998 as a serial fabulist and became the subject of a Hollywood movie. I had read the article – “Hack Heaven” - that ultimately got him caught. It told of a teenaged computer whiz kid [...]
This is from a kind of silly article in the NYT about how people are generating too much DNA sequence data and we can’t really deal with the deluge. They get lots of smart people (many of whom are my friends) to talk about this problem – but I think they’re making a mountain out [...]
Google has a new feature – “Something different” – that, according to their description returns “queries that may be in the same category as your original search”. Well, yesterday I entered a colleague’s name – “goldstein” – in to google, and got the following: Hmm. So I tried another search, this time for “Friedman”: So [...]
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of [...]
As we enter the 2010′s a horrible spectre is before us – the year 2020 and the inevitable sickening overuse of 2020 vision/2020 hindsight in articles about the decade. We are seeing it already. Human nature being what it is, I can’t imagine we’re going to actually be able to convince journalists, bloggers and common [...]
As if there wasn’t enough stem cell hype already….
There’s a very good article from a respected bank analyst on the Sandlers that shows how the 60 Minutes attack was totally unwarranted.
I just received an email from Herb Sandler: Dear friends We are living in a benighted time. It is hard to believe that the attacks on Marion and me, and the company, are really happening. As you know, we were one of the very few companies which was monomaniacally focused on loan quality, doing what’s [...]
From a 1995 New Republic diarist by Roger Rosenblatt which frequently pops into my head (and which I dredged up in Lexis): As soon as I find out where Andrew Lloyd Webber lives I’m going to stalk him, watch his every move, get as close to him as his clothing. If he goes to a [...]
I'm a biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I work primarily on flies, and my research encompases evolution, development, genetics, genomics, chemical ecology and behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan. (More about me here).
I can be reached at:
mbeisen at berkeley.edu
and @mbeisen on Twitter
