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Sunday Function

Draw the graph of a function. Roughly speaking, if there's no holes, jumps, or other choppy weirdness it's a continuous function. The function is connected to itself like a curvy rope laid out on the ground, with no cuts. Now if that function has no sharp points, it's a differentiable function. Again roughly speaking, imagine that the rope is free of kinks or sharp bends. The absolute value function is an example of a function which is not differentiable at the origin: there's a sharp point there. It's well known that if a function is differentiable, it's also continuous. This is…

Class Warfare

This is one of those times when being a non-anonymous blogger is a little inconvenient. Nonetheless, I think I can make things a little vague and change a few names and I'll be ok. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I'm taking two classes. I thought nothing of it when I signed up for them; they're the natural next classes I'm supposed to take. One of these classes is taught by a professor who has a reputation of being... well, we'll just say teaching is not his natural gift. But so what? I've had difficult classes with non-ideal professors before. On the other hand, over the summer I'…

Carrying Guns on Campus

Greg Laden responds to the recent change in policy allowing teachers with concealed carry permits to carry in one particular public high school in north Texas should they so choose. If only the teachers had guns.... (Texans = Morons). Here's CNN's original story. The school is a 30-minute drive from the nearest police station, and the board decided that it was better to have somebody armed than waiting so long for the police to respond. Greg does not think this is a good idea, to put it mildly. Neither do most of his commenters. I have another perspective. Every public college in Utah…

Crow for Tuesday Breakfast

Sunday night I was thinking about what to write for Monday morning and settled on the moment of inertia of the tires on a vehicle. If I may say so, it's a pretty good illustration for an interesting topic. Friction was a possible hitch for my proposed experiment, but I figured that cars were specifically designed to minimize friction, and both cars and tires are pretty heavy. Surely friction can be ignored safely. I wrote up the post in about half an hour and went to bed feeling pleased with myself. Well. I know from experience that physics Ph.D. holders are not infallible even when…

Magnificent Desolation

This is K2. 11 people died this month trying to climb it. At 28,251 ft (8,611 meters), K2 is the second highest mountain on this planet, and is technically a much more difficult climb than Everest. I've never climbed anything higher than a few hundred feet. Even a passenger jet slashing through the darkness will not reach much higher. To me the appeal of climbing is manifest in photographs like that one. The stern and austere beauty of these peaks is the closest even the most adventurous people can get to something like Buzz Aldrin's magnificent desolation. In some respects K2 is more…

Sunday Function

The Sine Function. Calm and dignified, it sits among the royal court of the Elementary Functions, presiding with undulating grace over the trigonometric functions, partnered with the Exponential Function, and showing forth his power over the realms of physics and mathematics. On one of the less subtle TV networks, this installment might be called When Good Functions Go Bad. The sine function is ubiquitous in physics. Figuring out vector components, solving differential equations in E&M and quantum mechanics, decomposing Fourier series, you name it. It's about as well-behaved as…

The truth is worth more than an iPod

So... the SCQ is back from its summer hiatus, and needs to get rid of a 30G 5th generation video iPod. Sort of like this one: And it actually couldn't be easier to win. Here are the details: After a much need hiatus over the summer, the SCQ is back for it's third volume. We thought we would begin by making a few announcements, tantamount to the giving away of free stuff. First on the agenda is a oh-so-pretty white 30G video iPod we still have in our possession. Essentially, when Mike won our last contest, he elected to choose the Amazon gift card option, leaving us with this fine piece of…

They're all the same, I'm afraid: Stepford Creationists

Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I'm already functioning on a pool of fatigued neurons). Zedler really is an idiot; the entire interview is a series of non sequiturs as Zedler blindly recites from the creationist script. Here's an example: Mother Jones: Are you a creationist? Bill Zedler: Evolutionists will go "Oh, it just happened by chance." Today we know…

Excerpt from "Short Protocols in Molecular Biology: Mad Scientist Edition."

Since we were discussing lab work the other day, let's look at it from another angle. How cool would it be to be able to get a "mad scientist" version of a journal or a protocol book? It might go something like this: * * * 1. Vortex each overnight bacterial culture thoroughly, and transfer 1ml into a clean microcentrifuge tube. HA HA HA! SOON, MY DARLING BACTERIA SOON!! 2. Spin the cells down for 30 seconds at maximum speed in the microcentrifuge. Remove all of the supernatent by pipeting out the last bit of media left. YES... YES... YES!! 3. Add 200ul of STET buffer to your cells and…

Environmentally-Conscious Scientific Field Research

One "newsmakers" blurb in particular from last week's issue of Science (Vol. 315, No. 5817, 09 March 2007) stood out to me. It was about how Taranjit Kaur, a pathobiologist at Virginia Tech, is working to reduce the ecological footprint of her own research. (Consider this a nice and brief addition to the ecological footprint-related posts Dave and I have added to the site over the past months, but instead of Tom Cruise, or me, it's about ecologically conscious scientific practice, maybe more like this.) Here's the full text of the story: PACK 'N PLAY. While studying to diagnose disease in…

This kind of science writing I'd love to see more of (or why I'm jealous of Ben)

The other day, I read Shelley's great account of the Challenger explosion, called "The Blight Upon the Sky," and it just got me thinking that I wish there were more outlets for that kind of science writing. By outlets, I do mean those in the print arena, like a magazine here or there that is condusive to these type of pieces. I think I speak from experience, because whilst I've done the occasional traditional science piece, most of the stuff I have fun with are things that are little different, on the humourous side, creative side, or reflective side. And although the web has many outlets…

Molecular Biology Comic a la Far Side (and also a sidebar about degrees of separation in the web-o-sphere)

Alright, it's 2007, and already I'm feeling the soft squeeze of all the different things that need tending to. In fact, there are two comics at the Science Creative Quarterly today that, perhaps to greater extremes, emulate my current mood (i.e. this is what it feels like when you've effectively been away for 2 to 3 weeks and then come back to a deluge of correspondence). Here's one of two graphics by Lena Webb, and captioned, "Cap-Snatching: What the Mechanism Doesn't Show You..." Actually, getting pieces like this does a great job of illustrating the wondrous interactivity and community…

We love Bill Hick, the Science Prick

Today the SCQ has a great humour piece, entitled "Bill Hick, the Science Prick, Houses on Fools" which of course is a direct play on words with the truly great science communicator, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. When I recieved the piece, it was initially submitted using Bill's real name, but having colleagues that actually know him as a nice guy overall, I thought that maybe using his actual name was too close for comfort. Which is why Eric and I kind of played around with other possibilities, and ultimately moved from ideas such as Bill Bass, the Science Ass, or Bill Rude, the Science Dude.…

Nerd-Off: I'm so down with that.

Well Janet has decreed a nerd-off, and I think I'm game to compete (albeit a little late). The truth is, is that I am a nerd at so many levels, whether this gauged by my application to the Super Friends, wearing t-shirts with Epithelial Cell Barbies on my chest, or owning a life size cardboard cut out of Han Solo (although it's currently carefully folded, because it scares the begeezus out of us everytime we forget about it and walk by). As well, I have it on good authority (via a vote actually) that I am one of the "coolest geeks" around. Which I'm not sure how to take, and also not sure…

Sunday Function

Just a quick one today, as I get caught back up from Thanksgiving. We all know and love the very basic quadratic function. Any second-order polynomial will give you a nice little parabola, which of course is ubiquitous in physics. We all know what that looks like. But what if we're willing to square complex numbers instead of just real numbers? Traditionally we denote complex numbers with z instead of x, so our Sunday Function is: Ok, so what happens when we square a complex number? Well, we can write any complex number as (a + bi), where "a" and "b" are real numbers. "a" is the real…

The Color of Water

"Why is the sky blue?" It's one of those questions that most people don't know the answer to, while others know at least the basic explanation that the atmosphere scatters blue light more strongly than the other visible wavelengths. Ask why that happens and you'll enter the realm of some interesting and somewhat complicated physics. We'll do that later, and do an easier one today. Kids sometimes also ask why water is blue. The most common answer is that it isn't - the blue of the ocean is attributed to reflected sky or something similar, while the water itself is clear. There's some truth…

Electron Microscopes

We're not too far from the end of the Physics 202 class I'm helping teach, and as we finish things out we're learning about the particle nature of light and the wave nature of matter. It's really the very basics of quantum mechanics. One of the applications of this kind of knowledge is the electron microscope. Light microscopes have a problem. As a rule, you can't resolve features smaller than the wavelength of the light you're using. Since this might be in the neighborhood of 600 nanometers for visible light, you have no real hope of seeing smaller things, or even of seeing objects a few…

Michele Bachmann writes a letter

Minnesota's own pious Republican idiot (uh-oh, I repeated myself three times) has chastised Obama for his wickedness in a recent letter. His crimes are many. In a recent speech in Indonesia, he 1) referred to our national motto as E pluribus unum, not "In god we trust", 2) quoted a small part of the Declaration of Independence that did not include the word "Creator", and 3) mentioned that the US is unified under one flag without saying the magic phrase, "under god". Now I know that Bachmann is an amazing expert in American history, so I think Obama should give this letter all the attention it…

Silly gay people — don't you know you aren't supposed to like sports, anyway?

Yeah, you're all supposed to go antiquing, or to musical theater. How dare you intrude on manly events! Mainly because they're monitored by sanctimonious bigots. So, two women go to a baseball game in Minneapolis, and a guard noticed that they kissed each other. Taylor Campione and Kelsi Culpepper -- two lesbian women from Minneapolis -- were recently scolded by a Target Field security guard for what they call a "brief kiss." After seeing the quick peck on the lips, the guard told the women that "we don't play grab ass here" and that they must "adhere to the 10 Commandments" while at the…

To Harvard with you my dear

In contrast to neuroscience journals who Shelley reveals are still mortally under-representing women, James Lileks is at least trying to bring out some feminism in his daughter. He has this little episode about trying to teach his daughter to go to Harvard in the Bleat. Unfortunately sometimes lessons don't take (sort of): Every time you think you're raising a level-headed child you get a bit of TV culture seeping into their play. She wanted me to play Polly Pockets after summer school; it was a simple routine. They were going to Hollywood. In a helicopter car. In their underwear. (Aspiring…

Itâs always our decision who we are.

Philosopher Robert Solomon in Waking Life: The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair…

IARPA Withdraws Funding From Major NIST Quantum Computing Groups

David Wineland runs a world class lab at NIST Boulder which has been at the forefront of ion trap quantum computing. William Phillips is a Nobel prizing winning physicist who also does quantum computing at NIST, this time at NIST Gaithersburg. To say that these are two top researchers in quantum computing, is a massive understatement. Both of the groups have produced their ground breaking work with the support of numerous alphabet soup government agencies throughout the years. Now comes word, via a Nature news article that IARPA, the intelligence community's version of DARPA, has decided…

CSE 322 Week 2: Nondeterminism Rocks

Last week, in the class I'm teaching, we talked about the basics of deterministic finite automata. In week two we moved on to more interesting and slightly less basic material. In particular we introduced the notion of a nondeterministic finite automata and, by the end of the week, had showed that the class of languages accepted by deterministic finite automata is exactly the same class of languages accepted by nondeterministic finite automata. What I love about this basic material is that you take a seemingly crazy idea: machines that can follow multiple computational paths at the same…

Happenings in the Quantum World: Nov 7, 2007

SQuInT 2008. Quantum postdocs. Christianity as a laser. Toshiba opens lab with a quantum bent. SQuInT 2008, my favorite conference, has been announced and will be Feb 14-17 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Speakers include Eddie Farhi (MIT) Patrick Hayden (McGill University) Alex Kuzmich [unconfirmed] (Georgia Tech) Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano (University of Pavia) Irina Novikova (College of William & Mary) Ray Simmonds (NIST Boulder) along with tutorials Steven van Enk (University of Oregon) "Entanglement and Verification" John Martinis (University of Californian, Santa Barbara) "…

Science and Yale Environment 360 on Climate Fatigue

Richard Kerr's recent news feature at Science magazine offers a compelling look at the many communication challenges on climate change, especially at a time of apparent "climate fatigue." As Roger Pielke comments in the Science article, by sounding the alarm on climate change too loudly, campaigners may be causing important segments of the audience to tune out their message. In a separate article at Yale Environment 360, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger offer a similar argument to those I have made in the past, most recently in a paper at the journal Environment. Here's how…

Safina Responds to Criticism of His Call to End Darwin Worship

Not surprisingly, Carl Safina's Feb. 10 essay at the NY Times calling for an end to Darwin worship generated a fair amount of criticism. Safina's suggestion to frame information in terms of the nature and benefits of evolutionary science rather than the more traditional "great man of science" narrative is a sound one. In fact, it's the exact strategy that the National Academies used in last year's educational backgrounder on evolution. In the Academies report, Darwin is mentioned only a few times, same thing with the Galapagos (for more on the framing and structure of the report, see this…

On PZ, Don Imus Atheism, and "Atheistblogs.com"?

Myers with Richard Dawkins: Does his atheist punditry damage the scienceblogs.com brand? Call me agnostic on the controversy that has erupted over the Catholic wafer incident in Florida. On the one hand I see the outcry from conservative groups as opportunistic and ridiculous. The reported death threats are outrageous, should be condemned by all parties, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The calls for expelling the student or the firing of PZ Myers are equally ridiculous. Yet I also recognize that the Communion wafer has deep symbolic importance to the Catholic community and in…

Crickets chirping and Collider Whales

Sorry it's been a bit quiet here lately. Things have been busy at the museum, and I've also been writing in other places. In particular, These days I'm a guest blogger at Boing Boing, and on top of that, I'm also having fun starting a children's novel. This novel has a mouthful of a title, Lizzie Popperfont and the Collider Whale Tale, and it's been partly inspired by my time here at the Natural History Museum. More importantly, there's going to be an underlying and subtle narrative that asks, "What happens to society and culture when only self interested elites are aware of the…

Tragedy in Brazil

Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here's the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you'll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation: First of all you should know that the impure can't touch me without gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their marriages and haven't been adulterous may touch me with no gloves, i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with…

Not sure why it is, but Hummers really tick me off.

@dnghub Twitter Feed A while back, I was trying to think of phrases that "sound pleasant but are actually maybe bad" and I remember one of the silly ones I thought of was: Hummer coming through. Get it? "Hummer," as in a person who hums (yes, I know - kind of lame). Just for the record, this post is about the car not people who make sounds with their mouths closed. Anyway, this subject came up because recently I read that the Hummer will be discontinued, and also I was surprised at how seeing a Hummer (the car) on the road really kind of bothered me. In fact, I could not help but assume…

Hawking's hawks didn't fly through the Astrobiology 2010 Conference

While driving to the Astrobiology 2010 Conference last week, I and a graduate student from my lab briefly discussed Stephen Hawking's recent declaration that humans should try to avoid contact with what would surely be hostile aliens. It seemed odd to be attending a conference where a primary aim is finding extraterrestrial life while the news media and the blogosphere was reverberating with Hawking's hawkish alien opinions. What really made the whole situation even more odd, however, was the almost total absence of any reaction to, or even general acknowledgement of Hawking's remarks at…

A Few Random Questions

Does it bother you when people say: "Wow, it's been so cold this winter, so much for global warming."? And you have to remind them that global warming means that the average temperature of the earth is increasing, and that, in fact, the average temperature of North America is predicted to get colder, by maybe even as much as ten degrees (on average). And does it bother you that many of the people that say this have Ph.D.s and work at a university? And does it bother you that this completely incorrect interpretation of our colder winters is making it into the general consciousness and…

This post is for those who have always wondered when their Pokemon card playing skills would be finally used for good and not evil.

Well, now it can be used for the Phylomon project. You know, the one where we're hoping we can guide an open source project into a free and massive card collecting game that is fun and even perchance (oh no, here it comes...) educational. Now that we're at a stage where we're confident that the mechanics of obtaining images is sound (check out the submissions pool here, and the few from this pool that we've already lined up for beta testing as shown below), we're ready to move onto other crucial components of the project. Namely gameplay and content on the card. In many ways, we think these…

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and the 50-Year Farm Bill

Two outstanding and influential thinkers and writers, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, contributed an op-ed to the Times yesterday. More or less, here's the gist: [W]e...need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities. They argue that a farm bill needs to envision decades, not years, in its scope, so as to accommodate and accept the ecological dynamics of agricultural landscapes. They…

Barbara McClintock and that famous joke about the gene, the cell, and the hatless Bolivian

(Cartoon by Randall Munroe, at XKCD, here) Here's what we have: "ENTERTAINING SCIENCE" at the Cornelia Street Cafe. It's the next in a monthly cabaret-like series run by Roald Hoffmann. He's a Nobel Prize winner, you know. Chemistry, '81. And he writes plays. Like Oxygen. We are not Nobel Prize Winners, as it were. Although I (Ben) did once win a baseball signed by the World Series-contending Baltimore Orioles in 1980 (after their '79 defeat) at their winter traveling caravan. That was huge. And it predates Hoffmann's Nobel Prize, you might notice. This is the title for the…

Alton Brown, Food Science, Chemical & Engineering News

Chemical & Engineering news has a profile of Food Network guy Alton Brown. (Did you know the Food Network is about the only family-friendly station I can ever find? True story. Ergo, I've seen Alton Brown before.) If you've not seen him, Brown's "presentation style [is] a combination of Julia Child, British comedy troupe Monty Python, and Mr. Wizard." He's influenced in part, he says, by James Burke's Connections and he uses a lot of multi-syllabic words. Like multi-syllabic. Extended excerpt below the fold: He believes that the interest in molecular gastronomy detracts from a larger…

Spamming me doesn't work, OK?

I know you're out there, and I'm laughing at you. Something happens to me occasionally: some clever dick decides that they'll torment me by signing me up for all kinds of internet newsletters and advertising, so that my in-box will get flooded, or they sign me up for magazine delivery and then presumably chuckle at my discomfiture at receiving unwanted mail. What they don't understand is that I live in spamville. I get several thousand emails a day right now. Putting me on an acupuncturist mailing list, or the newsletter of a chiropractic cult, simply throws a few more drops into the torrent…

NY as an historical center of libertarianism

Brian Doherty from Reason has an interesting article on NY's place as a libertarian mecca: New York City is the celebrated center for many vital aspects of American culture: publishing, finance, and the arts. It rarely has been credited, however, as a cutting-edge leader in political ideologies. But New York also is the breeding ground for a unique and growing American political tendency -- the modern American libertarian movement. It might seem ironic that a city that has been, at various times, one of the most overly governed and poorly governed of American cities should be a launching…

People to Cows: "Could you make mine skim, please?"

Researchers have discovered cows with genes that allow them to make skim milk: Herds of cows producing skimmed milk could soon be roaming our pastures, reports Cath O'Driscoll in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. Scientists in New Zealand have discovered that some cows have genes that give them a natural ability to produce skimmed milk and plan to use this information to breed herds of milkers producing only skimmed milk. The researchers also plan to breed commercial herds producing milk with the unique characteristics required to make a butter that is spreadable straight…

ID needs a "big event"

PZ has noted that the boyos over at Uncommon Descent have deep-sixed a comment thread that (rightly) pointed out that he bested DI-fellow Geoffrey Simmons in their debate yesterday (it will be interesting to see how the DI spins this one). Happily, After The Bar Closes has the comments archived. Therein, you can find this gem from Louis Savain (yeah, that Savain): The ID movement is wasting its time and resources, in my opinion. This ID vs. evolution fight will never be won with either debates, arguments, brochures, web sites or what have you. The opposition has a propaganda machine that is…

Schulte responds to Oreskes

Following on from Oreskes' reply to Schulte, the endocrinologist replies with an open letter over at SPPI, a contrarian mouthpiece. Schulte notes: I drafted the paper because I had become concerned that patients were being perhaps unduly alarmed by media reports of catastrophic climate change and were coming to harm through resultant stress. Peer-reviewed studies of patients' views on the subject of climate change had reinforced my concern... I am an endocrine surgeon with numerous published papers in the medical journals. My sole concern in this debate is the welfare of patients. Ummmm.…

While we're talking about advocating equality…

…let's not forget that other gigantic issue, racism. The secular movement ought to be clearly on the side of the angels on that one, too, and we need to listen more to people of color. I know well the phenomenon of speaking at secular events and looking out to see that sea of paleness — I swear, I could work on a tan off the reflected light from those audiences. And the only way to put more black and native American and Asian faces in the seats is to put more of them on the podium. We do have a problem with the white assumption of privilege. And the scary thing is that some people think…

Synodontis species flocks in Lake Tanganyika

Regular readers may remember that I have a softspot for catfish and earlier this year purchased a lace catfish (Synodontis nigrita), a species native to many African countries. The genus Synodontis (Cuvier 1816) is interesting for a number of reasons. For example, S. multipunctatus (the gorgeous fish pictured above) is the only fish known to practice brood parasitism: it manages to mix it eggs with those of mouthbrooding cichlids in Lake Tanganyika, its larvae grow faster than those of the host and feed on them. Lake Tanganyika is, of course, famous for the cichlids which have been studied…

Arnhart on ID

I have a student currently working on conservative reactions to the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling. As part of the preparations, I'm having him read Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism [amaz] and John West's response, Darwin's Conservatives [amaz]. Over at his blog, Arnhart has made the following trenchant observation that I felt was worth sharing: I claim that intelligent design is mostly a negative argument from ignorance with little positive content. That is to say, the proponents of ID attack Darwinian science for not satisying the highest standards of proof, and then they conclude that…

No surprises here

Apparently, I'm a liberal. Whoda thunk it? Liberals represent 17 percent of the American public, and 19 percent of registered voters. Basic DescriptionThis group has nearly doubled in proportion since 1999, Liberals now comprise the largest share of Democrats and is the single largest of the nine Typology groups. They are the most opposed to an assertive foreign policy, the most secular, and take the most liberal views on social issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and censorship. They differ from other Democratic groups in that they are strongly pro-environment and pro-immigration,…

All Eyes are Watching Kansas

As I type this, votes are being counted in Kansas in primaries for the State Board of Education. You can keep track of the results here. For the record, Bacon, Morris, Willard and Patzer are ID supporters. It seems as good a time as any to repost this from June of last year, in the spirit of hoping that the good people of Kansas reject an ignoramus like Connie Morris: When an elected state school board member such as Connie Morris (KS) can write a newsletter [pdf] that reads as if it was written by an illiterate thirteen year old, then you know there is something wrong with the system in…

In other news

With all the attention being paid to the stem cell issue, it's worth remembering that the House yesterday also voted on H J RES 88 "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage." Some soundbites from the floor are worth repeating: Rep. John Carter (R-TX): "The reality is, marriage has always been a union between a man and a woman. Now in China, they might say a civil union. In Rome they might say a church union. But it's always been a union between a man and a woman. In my faith, I believe it's part of God's plan for the future of mankind." Rep. Mike…

What Bird Brains Can Teach Us About Language

When Pepper (my African Grey parrot) was just a wee bird, I talked to him constantly. I was told by the bird breeder that not all Greys talked; even though their mimicry is famed, there's no guarantee that the bird will ever mutter a word. But, to my delight, at about one year old, Pepper began making sounds. These sounds were strange because they kinda sounded like the things that I was saying to him, but just barely. He was playing with the word, the syllables------he was babbling! This phase lasted about 2 months, after which he became much more proficient at repeating sounds and words.…

New stars rising, old ones fading

I hate to say it, but there's no avoiding the stinking corpse on the living room rug: Scienceblogs.com is dead. It might be twitching still, but that's just the biota working beneath the skin, and soon they'll erupt and start looking for new hosts. Many already have. Scientopia was one of the early products of a Sb diaspora, and now Bora has announced the Scientific American network, which also has a swarm of very good bloggers, some formerly of Scienceblogs, but also some new and interesting faces. Scienceblogs won't be competing with SciAm; it can't, and there's a lack of interest in doing…

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