Food:
Where’s the schmaltz? Look no further…
How religious curbs lead to great food (take with a grain of salt….and pepper and garlic).
My mother’s sarma recipe will come shortly…
Drink:
Ask the expert on vodka: Just Like Water, But Better
What are you drinking tonight at midnight? The Friday Fermentable: Champagne and Sparkling Wines for New Year’s
Good news for the liver cirrhosis (and the grapevine genome): Eat, Drink and Be Merry (but Not Too Much)
Books:
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (which I have reviewed ealrier this year) is now available, in its entirety, on the Web, for free (thanks Richard Ackerman)
Is There Another Harry Potter Book on the Way?
Golden Compass:
Henry did not like the movie: On Religious Allegory and Talking Animals
Amanda loved the books: Review: His Dark Materials Trilogy
(You may recall my own take on the movie: Golden Compass – it’s about sex, really)
Sports:
Even Gregg Favalora understands American Football better than I do: Exclusive Coverage of Evidently Quite Important Sporting Match
Journalism:
Andy Oram: So when will the job of a technical editor be abolished?
Jay Rosen: Most of them are not ideologically driven; they just want to get on the front page (via Ed Cone).
Chris Bowers: Moderately Lobotomized: The Closing Of The American Pundit’s Mind
Matt Nisbet: Horse Race Coverage & the Political Spectacle
Digby: Bipartisan Zombies
Science, Society and Culture:
The OpenLab 07 anthology entries have been judged and the final 50 (plus a poem and a cartoon) will be revealed here in a couple of days – stay tuned.
Science Is Now… Cool
Global Warming will bring strange diseases to the U.S.: Why “neglected tropical diseases” are going to bite us in the *$ and Neglected Diseases and Poverty in ‘The Other America’: The Greatest Health Disparity in the United States? kinda go together.
Revisiting my sex predictions for 2007
It’s not that expensive, though I may still prefer to be turned into silage for a tree – The Neptune Memorial Reef .
A strange history of the telephone. And to think that Alexander Graham Bell was a hero to me when I was a kid!
Cool Science News:
A newly-discovered virus is threatening endangered western barred bandicoots. Anne-Marie and Jeremy Bruno comment.
Brian Switek: Evolution’s Arrow. Long and thoughtful. A must read.
Science 2.0:
Attila: Science.TV joins the club but exactly which? and Matt Thurling on the concept of science.TV
Euan Edie: Open notebook pt1, Open notebook pt2 – question, theories, approach and Open notebook – what’s a disease again?
Presentations from the Publishing in the New Millennium conference at Harvard, are now available as MP3s (and some PDFs) (hat-tip: Peter Suber)
The new journal Neuroethics is really Free Access and not Open Acces in the true sense of the term: New free journal from Springer – but no Open Data
Politics:
The Airport Security Follies and Follies d’Air and Airport Security and Liquid Contraband
Atrios, Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers endorse John Edwards.
A nice article on Steve Gilliard in the NYTimes. Driftglass, Jesse and Amanda comment.
Paul Rosenberg has a series of excellent posts on the Myth of Bipartisanship and Polarization: Martin Luther King and The Moral Imperative For Polarization, The Myth Of A Polarized Public, Collapsing The Ideological Overlap: The Gulf Between Issues and Candidates, Sorting By Party–Polarization By Party Without Polarization of People, Geographic Polarization: Myth Vs. Reality and Elite-Mass Polarization: 30+ Years of Guns Vs. Butter.