Many people, including perhaps some Two-Penny readers, know very little about what scientists do. Frankly, I’m not sure I can claim to know, and I used to be one. (Well, I was a science student and lab assistant. That counts, right?) Well, now there’s a website called LabLit.com that helps illuminate the mysterious lives of scientists. In addition to essays by and profiles of numerous working scientists, they also highlight realistic portrayals of scientists in the arts (novels, film, etc.).

I haven’t had a chance to explore much of this site yet, but I’ve liked what bits I’ve read so far. I’d particularly like to point out this profile/interview of a mathematician who offered some advice to the creators of Numb3rs, which is currently my favorite show on television. (I wish I’d watched the first half of the season, but I’m sure I can find a way to remedy that.)

I suspect, and this interview seems to confirm, that the math on Numb3rs is real math. It certainly helps that I’ve heard of at least a few of the types of analyses they talk about. Now if only I could figure out what they mean. The show definitely makes me wish I’d done more math (although perhaps at a slower pace than my college math classes).

Numb3rs airs Fridays at 10 pm Eastern on CBS. I encountered LabLit.com via Science Magazine‘s NetWatch.

1. The world cup will be held in Germany.
2. Prostitution has been legal in Germany since 2002.

Over the past week, I’ve found a fair number of resources on evolution that I want to look more closely at. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to evaluate them right now. I’m posting this partly so that I’ll be able to go back and find these things again, and partly because I know that some of you will be interested. These resources are:

• The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution, which contains all of Darwin’s writings as well as several works by his predecessors, those building upon his work, and people reacting to evolution. The library is hosted by the American Museum of Natural History, which also has an exhibit on Darwin’s work and Life. I got to see the exhibit in late November, and it’s really amazing. The admission is a little expensive, but I think it’s worth it.

• A New York Times article on research about recent (within the last 10,000) human evolution:

  Wade, Nicholas. “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story.” New York Times. March 7, 2006.

• An article in Science about a computer generated model for evolutionary trees.

  Francesca D. Ciccarelli, Tobias Doerks, Christian von Mering, Christopher J. Creevey, Berend Snel, and Peer Bork. Toward Automatic Reconstruction of a Highly Resolved Tree of Life. Science 3 March 2006: 1283-1287.

According to this short blurb in Science, a bunch of musicians led by Tim Westergreen are trying to figure out what the ‘genes’ are in music. In this case, the ‘genes’ are basic features of music. They’ve identified 400 so far. You can check out their work at www.pandora.com.