Blogroll Amnesty Day

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Blogroll Amnesty Day means:

...take a moment to write a post linking to (and pointing out to your readers) 5 blogs w/traffic smaller than yours. this inclusive and magnanimous yet easy-to-do gesture will not only expose your readers to new voices and those voices to new readers, it will foster a sense of community, support and all-around kumbaya amongst the progressive infrastructure.

I know I'm a week late to this party but I have a couple that may interest my readers:

1. Le blog d'Acroline - not a science blog, but rather a display of the drawings of a French fashion artist now living in Switzerland. I first learned of Acroline from ...tom..., a commenter at Isis'. Why I suggest Acroline is that while I understand little French, her drawings evoke from me many visceral feelings of loneliness, love, curiosity, and childhood. Since these emotions have their origins in neurotransmitters, I feel justified in listing this blog here. Hell, even without science justification, go look at her art and get in touch with your soul.

2. the path forward - leigh is a graduate student whose path is shared by many but is not told as often as it should. Although I have met her in person, I have no idea of her real identity. For me, that is the sign of a great blogger: I was far more interested in talking to her as a person than knowing who she was actually.

3. Shell's Space - I've known shell in her other iterations. She's had some changes in direction in her career, topically and geographically. I just like her.

4. Canadian Girl Postdoc in America - Canadian women have figured prominently in the early success of Laboratory Pharmboy. What we USians don't always realize is that Canadians are treated here like any hostile, terrorist-harbouring furriner. Nature Neuroscience-published PharmCanuck and her I'll-golf-with-you-but-smoke-your-ass-in-the-lab husband could not qualify for a US credit card (even in the late 1990s) because they were considered furriners. Canadian Girl Postdoc, now in the NW US, reminds me that while times have moved on, US policies have not moved forward. Specifically, look at her category of differences between Canada and the US. Let my words go forth from this time and place: Canadian postdocs are the finest and should be given all allowances necessary to live here without hassle because of how much they contribute to the US scientific enterprise.

5. The Extrovert Scientist - The blogger launched by the euphoria of ScienceOnline'09. TES is the answer to single-mom, Hispanic, kickass scientist returning-undergrads who make up far more of our student population than we think. She's embarrassed me about how little I've retained from my years in the National Spanish Honor Society.

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wow, thank you for the linkage and the kind words. you know more than enough to find out who i am, if you really wanted to. i think it's cool that you didn't really care.

now i feel guilty for having worked a billion hours recently and not really having blogged anything of real substance! :o i should get on that.

A nice set of choices. I think it is crazy that BAD happens once a year. Should be once a month.

(I try to do something like this even more often than that, actually.)

you know more than enough to find out who i am, if you really wanted to. i think it's cool that you didn't really care.

come to think of it, leigh, i also spent a lot of time with scicurious and still don't know her name either. i guess i was just pretty fired up to simply hang with you awesome people. and don't worry about the blog - graduating is far more important but i suggested you because when you do post, it is gold.

@GirlPostdoc: No worries. You're probably just working so hard in the lab that you have little time to pay any attention to silly little blog exercises. Keep up the great writing, great work, and keep us honest about the challenges of the awesome scientific entity known as the Canadian Postdoc.