Linkage

Been a while, but I thought I'd start doing this again now and then. First, the serious link. If you haven't read about the doctor and five nurses who have been unjustly sentenced to death in Libya, you should. Unfortunately, I don't think any amount outcry in this country will change the verdict, but it can't hurt either.

On a less serious note, over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, there's a post about "experimental history of science." This is cool stuff (though I'm not entirely convinced it's all that useful; but I've never really been a pragmatist when it comes to nerdy stuff anyway, so what the hell). Here's a description of the field from Paolo Palmieri, quoted in the post:

I am starting a research program with the objective of establishing the foundations for a totally new approach to the history of science. I call this new approach "experimental history of science". Experimental history of science consists in re-creating as faithfully as possible the experimental apparatus of landmark experiments in the history of science, and in re-performing the experiments especially when we know little about the details of the original setups, a fact which has been a consistent source of sterile disagreement between scholars. In this way I am convinced that we will cast new light on crucial scientific events.

Next up, two posts from John Hawks' blog. The first is about lions preying on elephants. They do it more than I thought, and the frequency with which they're hunting elephants is going up.

The second post from Hawks is on constructive memory and voodoo. I link it mostly because I'm happy to see anyone talking about constructive memory, since that's like, you know, the main focus of my own research. So, go read it.

Over at 3 Quarks Daily, there's a post on an article about seeds that were brought to Britain from South Africa in 1803, some of which scientists were able to germinate. I find this incredibly fascinating, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

There's a new blog out there, called Babel's Dawn, that advertises itself in its first post thusly:

This post begins the creation of a blog that aims to become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges.

The blog looks like it might have potential. Also, since I was talking about music cognition recently, I thought some of you might find the book discussed in this post interesting.

Finally, via fellow ScienceBlogs blogger Abel Pharmboy, I learned about Pandora Internet Radio. Since I'm always the last to learn about these things, most of you probably know about this already, but if you don't, then man, you're missing out. I am listening to Nina Simone sing "I Loves You Porgy" as I type this, and you could be too if you created a "Nina Simone" station on PIR.