Society:
I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you...
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Posted on April 22, 2008 4:11 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I am having a blast in Trieste - FEST is fantastic, people friendly, program interesting, the smell of Adriatic evokes nostalgia (I learned to swim in the northern Adriatic), but I am really pissed with the Jolly Hotel I...
Posted on April 17, 2008 7:25 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A May 9, 2007 post, wondering to telecommute or not. I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will...
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Posted on April 9, 2008 4:51 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bee and Michael and Chad and Eva and Timo and Cameron will be there. And so will I. And many other interesting people. Where? At the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Ontario) on Sep....
Posted on April 7, 2008 11:04 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Obligatory Reading of the day: Why I feel so strongly about redundant digitization...
Posted on April 6, 2008 10:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of...
Posted on April 1, 2008 11:47 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Words of wisdom (via): The internet isn't a decoration on contemporary society, it's a challenge to it. A society that has an internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn't. I agree. And people, regardless of...
Posted on March 31, 2008 8:32 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ignore the mysogynist commentary over on YouTube.......
Posted on March 30, 2008 8:39 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some people only know the language of power. They see conciliation and compromise as weakness. Show strength. If they are sissies hiding behind machismo, slam them hard. You have nothing to lose. Some will convert and come to your side....
Posted on March 25, 2008 11:09 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sir Arthur C. Clark has died at the age of 90....
Posted on March 18, 2008 9:48 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Lindsay Beyerstein: Spitzer linked to prostitution ring Spitzer's Nixonian hubris Sex and taxes: How Spitzer allegedly got caught Spitzer and Suspicious Activity Reports and sex stings Enough is enough: Feds probe Spitzer's records back to 1999 Amanda Marcotte: Cut out...
Posted on March 13, 2008 9:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[rant]So, if you organize a study-group online instead of in meat-space, the old fogies who still remember dinosaurs go all berserk. A student is threatened by expulsion for organizing a Facebook group for studying chemistry. Moreover, as each student got...
Posted on March 8, 2008 11:16 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sretan Osmi Mart!...
Posted on March 8, 2008 6:28 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Book excerpt in today's Wall Street Journal: Chapter 6: Wired: It is likely that insomnia will increase with the expansion of the 24-hour economy into more and more lives, and more of each life, because wakefulness and the wired world...
Posted on February 29, 2008 7:02 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
...from different points of view: Anne-Marie: Culinary revelation Mark Powell: Saving the ocean with guilt or desire? and Does the sustainable seafood movement rely on guilt? (blogfish poll) Miriam Goldstein: Guilty as charged Amanda Marcotte: Save your soul with recycling...
Posted on February 19, 2008 10:03 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Brian Russell, who is building a coworking space in Carrboro, just alerted me to an excellent new article about this in the San Francisco Chronicle: Shared work spaces a wave of the future. Well worth a read....
Posted on February 19, 2008 4:27 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've heard this one last year (02.16.2007) but heard it again today (it will probably re-air tomorrow - check your local NPR station) - the This American Life episode about Quiz Shows. It was composed of three stories: The first...
Posted on February 2, 2008 4:14 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at...
Posted on January 22, 2008 8:59 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sleeping & Dreaming exhibit hosted by Wellcome Trust will be open until 9 March 2008: Why are scientists still perplexed by sleep? What do the insights that our dreams bring us mean? And is a life without sleep conceivable? Sleeping...
Posted on January 21, 2008 6:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Reed alerts me that the Darwin Awards 2007 are up for voting right now - all nasty and stupid ways to die. The only one of these stories that I have heard of before is the story of the guy...
Posted on January 13, 2008 8:28 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Coming up tonight at midnight, according to the Julian calendar....
Posted on January 13, 2008 1:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Why isn't there a birth control pill for men?" is the latest "Ask A ScienceBlogger" question. I am sure my SciBlings will rise to the occasion and explain both the biological and social barriers to the development, production and marketing...
Posted on January 10, 2008 9:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is the third post in the series. I mentioned before that my Mom taped her story for the Shoah project. You can access the tapes through the RENCI site. Also, regulars here know that my Mom reads this blog...
Posted on December 26, 2007 10:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Then read this and the comment thread below it. That's all you need to know....
Posted on December 23, 2007 1:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
And the next generation cannot think in any other way. Because it is a natural way to think. We need to re-think our own outdated notions of intellectual property: The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality Recently, however, I spoke at...
Posted on December 21, 2007 9:35 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This weekend, with 70 degrees F in Chapel Hill, it would have bin a sin to remain indoors. So I didn't. But in the end, at twilight today, my daughter and I went to see Golden Compass, the movie whose...
Posted on December 10, 2007 2:57 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Subscription-supported journals are like the qwerty keyboard: Are there solutions? One reason for optimism is that changing how we pay the costs of disseminating research is not an all-or-nothing change like switching from qwerty to Dvorak keyboards. Some new open-access...
Posted on December 8, 2007 1:26 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
..that is adolescence. And the research on what adolescents find attractive. For a few years. Until they gain the gift of speech and hearing, look up, and find beauty in the mind. Unfortunately, some never do....
Posted on November 26, 2007 9:25 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Group eating - how to carve a turkey. Group eating - pros and cons of pack-hunting. Group eating: not just vertebrates. Group eating: calculate your inclusive fitness....
Posted on November 22, 2007 12:35 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is such a cool and novel idea - to let the public have a say in what gets patented and what not! Check out the Peer-To-Patent homepage, download and read this paper by Beth Noveck (another SciFoo camper) which...
Posted on November 12, 2007 4:01 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Not that it's a good thing.......
Posted on October 28, 2007 12:50 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Since I was gone to two meetings and nobody else can walk the dog as regularly as I can, the dog spent the week at Grandma's in Raleigh. Today I went to pick her up (the dog, that is) which...
Posted on October 27, 2007 9:54 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development (which I mentioned a few days ago here) was a great success. You can see all the articles associated with it here. PLoS has collected all the poverty-related articles from its Journals...
Posted on October 24, 2007 8:42 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I thought the LiveJournal debacle taught them a lesson. I guess not. Melissa posted about this a couple of weeks ago, and Tara did it today again because the issue has not been resolved yet. So did PZ Myers (Janet...
Posted on September 20, 2007 11:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Come see Sapolsky, Deacon, de Waal, Rosenberg, Dennett, Fox Keller and others talk about what it means to be human (or chimp).
Posted on September 14, 2007 9:16 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tara of Aetiology, after reviewing Danica McKellar's book "Math Doesn't Suck", posted an exclusive blog interview with Danica, which you can (and should) read here....
Posted on July 26, 2007 2:40 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Let's start with some Essential Facebook Readings of the day: The Facebook Juggernaut...bitch! Where are Facebook's Early Adopters Going? Hmmm, Facebook: a new kind of press release All your widgets are belong to Facebook Why We're Like a Million Monkeys...
Posted on July 22, 2007 3:16 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week. As I am at work and unable to...
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Posted on July 9, 2007 8:59 AM • • 0 TrackBacks
TR Gregory of Genomicron blog is trying to help his parents as they sell their house and move to Zambia to do good work there, working with the Livingstone Performing Arts Foundation to try to rebuild the old Livingstone Theater.:...
Posted on July 9, 2007 1:13 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I don't know, but Grrrl and Archy tried to answer that question......
Posted on July 3, 2007 10:40 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this...
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Posted on July 2, 2007 10:52 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Early reviews of the movie are coming out. Definitely read Ezra Klein's take on it. And Amanda Marcotte's. Also Mark Hoofnagle. And why Rob does not want to see it. Perhaps it is my upbringing, but the fact that one...
Posted on June 30, 2007 11:47 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What Archy says... Related......
Posted on June 28, 2007 12:32 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Apophenia, danah boyd's blog is one of the first blogs I ever read and have been reading more-or-less continuously over the past 3-4 years (since she took a class on framing with George Lakoff and blogged about it). She is...
Posted on June 26, 2007 8:50 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Online and Offline. Obligatory Readings of the Day....
Posted on June 25, 2007 1:34 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
For medical reasons, if nothing else....
Posted on June 19, 2007 11:45 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What's in a name? It's just a word, a tag we use to talk about people so everyone knows wo we are talking about, isn't it? Or at least that is how it should be, don't you think? But it...
Posted on June 19, 2007 3:39 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What is it?: Blip is a forum for artists, scientists and members of the public interested in new forms of art that explore generative and procedural processes, interaction, emergence and artificial life. We are based in Brighton, UK, and in...
Posted on June 16, 2007 2:57 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?" This headline (in a French paper, of course), prompted Sally Green to pen a fine, fine post - an Obligatory Reading of the Day - about class, education, the psychology...
Posted on June 13, 2007 3:37 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days. Enrique has...
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Posted on May 31, 2007 1:28 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
First, as I reported earlier, Archy persuaded PZ Myers to host a one-time carnival about the opening of the Creation Museum - and here is the carnival - a lot of good stuff to read. I especially liked the only...
Posted on May 27, 2007 1:05 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Before I start telecommuting, I need to learn some basic rules of behavior......
Posted on May 26, 2007 10:07 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Well, it's been a while.... since I hosted the CotL #3 about a year and a half ago. It's ripe time to do it again. Not that it was ever easy to choose ten best written and most creative posts...
Posted on May 23, 2007 12:07 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A must-read by Sara Robinson. You can use it to understand the persistence of Creationism. Or the lack of Internal Locus of Moral Authority in people belonging to Moral Majority....
Posted on May 17, 2007 9:50 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it.
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Posted on May 9, 2007 12:34 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In a large proportion of the surface of our planet, people are not supposed to go to work today. Not here, though. Eh, the good old days back home when my parents would go off for a ten-day vacation on...
Posted on May 1, 2007 8:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Last week's Casual Friday study on Cognitive Daily tried to look at the way various curse words are used and perceived by their blog readers. Today, the results are in and, though not surprising, they are quite interesting. The sample...
Posted on April 27, 2007 5:38 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
They are asking you to rate them here. I have never heard of about half the people on the list - perhaps they are 'influential' in their small circles. Others are celebrities, and they may be influential in distracting people...
Posted on April 26, 2007 8:01 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here, have a go at it. Even better, if you can get the actual paper and dissect it on your blog, let me know so I can link to that. Have fun! Good Behavior, Religiousness May Be Genetic: A new...
Posted on April 8, 2007 2:55 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science" Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford...
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Posted on April 7, 2007 3:33 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When I ask a guy for something, I may get Yes as an answer half the time and No half the time. Yes mostly means Yes and No means No. If the answer is "Let me think about it", that...
Posted on March 31, 2007 2:29 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On The Scientist website you can find their new experimental feature - an article with questions to the public that will be used in forming the articles for the print version of the magazine next month. Go see Special Feature:...
Posted on March 29, 2007 10:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Times are changing and the variety is endless. See what Anton and Erin, The Woomers and Jenny F. Scientist ended up doing and why. Then, read the posts and comment threads by Amanda and on Chaos Theory....
Posted on March 29, 2007 12:27 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Apparently, in Denmark, the 'larks' (early-risers) are called 'A-people' while 'owls' (late-risers) are 'B-people'. We all know how important language is for eliciting frames, so it must feel doubly insulting for the Danish night owls. Today, in the age of...
Posted on March 23, 2007 2:21 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You know how on comment threads on blogposts about evolution you, sooner or later, get a commenter saying something that reveals complete lack of understanding of even the basics of evolutionary biology? It is usually accompanied by some creationist canard...
Posted on March 20, 2007 2:23 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Growing up in Eastern Europe, there was no avoiding March 8. It was an official holiday, though still a workday (only in the USSR did people get a day off from school and work). It has also evolved over time...
Posted on March 8, 2007 4:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
And you don't even have to believe in dinosaurs to share their fate. From here. And the preceeding paragraph? Another great quote: "You know how taking so long to end slavery is a shameful part of our history, and how...
Posted on March 5, 2007 11:41 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Evolution works according to a very small set of simple rules. If a) there is variation in a trait in a population and b) that variation is heritable and c) one variant is better adapted to the current local environment,...
Posted on February 23, 2007 9:04 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You know that I think that Wimp Factor is one of the most important yet least appreciated books about ideology and politics in recent years. So, I was really glad to see an excellent review of it by Amanda: Regardless...
Posted on February 20, 2007 1:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This (from March 09, 2006) was a precursor to this......
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Posted on February 14, 2007 10:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yup, like Amanda, Atrios and Ed, I hate the telephone. That is why I don't have the cell phone. That is why my landline phone has an answering machine. If you call and the machine picks up and I actually...
Posted on February 11, 2007 2:13 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ah, why do I have to be so busy on a news-filled day (no, not Anna Nicole Smith)? I barely saw the computer today. I'd get home, have about 5 minutes before I have to go out again and so...
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Posted on February 9, 2007 1:27 AM •
