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Recently in the IEEE

A bunch of recent journal & magazine issues to catch up on. There's lots of cool stuff to highlight, so I'll only list a couple of articles from each issue. Unfortunately, most of it will be behind the IEEE paywall. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2 Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, J.W. Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, D. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v28i2 K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A. Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by…

Father's Day!

Yesterday was Father's Day, of course, always a fun occasion for us dads. I'm generally not a huge fan of fake holidays but I usually find a way to make peace with them if they're all about presents for me. In any case, I thought I'd share my take for this year as I think at least some of the items I received have a broader interest. It's also worth noting that in my family we usually take an attitude of enlightened self-interest for fake holiday gift giving -- in other words, the giver is allowed to give something they themselves would be interested in. We've come to calling that practice…

More on Excrement

Check out Carnal Carnival #1: Essentials of Elimination, hosted by Bora at A Blog Around the Clock. It's a fascinating collection of blog posts all about poop. (The post I put up yesterday on sanitation is among them.) Many of the posts are about the interesting things scientists can learn by studying excrement - human or animal, fresh or fossilized. A couple of the posts deal with a topic that seems to be attracting more and more attention: gut flora, or the microbiome. Basically, our digestive systems are colonized by a range of microbes, some of which assist us with digestion and vitamin…

Crandall Canyon 1st Anniversary

by Nathan Fetty An editorial in today's New York Times is the latest media piece about the abysmal failures surrounding last summer's Crandall Canyon mine disaster in Utah.  Now that investigators have revealed how the company knew of the mine's dangers, the Times says, a criminal probe is in order. Plus, MSHA's deference to the company's flawed engineering plan only made matters worse. Clearly, as the Times points out, MSHA's aversion to hands-on enforcement has led to disastrous consequences. The New York Times' editorial: Greed Above, Death Below or (full PDF) reminds readers of why a…

North Carolina newspapers - yesterday's front pages

NC Press Asociation's front pages from Wednesday. Due to narrow margin - about 12,000 in Obama's favor - the state has to count all the provisional ballots (which usually favor Dems) and all the mail-in ballots (mostly from the military personnel abroad - who knows who that favors any more!). There is little chance, though, officials and statisticians say, that the additional counting will reverse the order, but the official business has to be done in an orderly way. Unofficially, North Carolina went Blue this year. This will become official in a couple of days, I guess. How? Large influx…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bonobo Handshake: What Makes Our Chimp-like Cousins So Cooperative?: What's it like to work with relatives who think sex is like a handshake, who organise orgies with the neighbours, and firmly believe females should be in charge of everything? On September 11, researcher Vanessa Woods will journey to Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Congo with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute in Germany to study our mysterious cousin, the bonobo. Rare Breeds Of Farm Animals Face Extinction: With the world's first global inventory of farm animals showing many breeds of African, Asian, and Latin American…

Cash for Grades Scandal

Cash for Grades? In Middle School? I am speechless. Raleigh News & Observer: "The News & Observer of Raleigh reported Wednesday that Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro has come up with a novel fundraising plan after last year's chocolate sale flopped. The school will sell 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20-dollar donation. Students can add 10 extra points to each of two tests of their choosing. The extra points could take a student from a "B" to an "A" on a test or from a failing grade to a passing grade. Rosewood's principal Susie Shepherd rejected the idea that…

Best Science Books 2009: Globe and Mail Gift Books

Yet another solid list from the Globe and Mail, assembled from a few different categories. This list focuses on gift/coffee table-style books; I've left out a few of the many science and nature books that seem a bit more peripheral to my main mission. Aviation in Canada: The Formative Years by Larry Milberry Gil Cohen: Aviation Artist by Gil Cohen Eco House Book by Terence Conran Illustrated Birds of North America by Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer Whole Green Catalogue: 1,000 Best Things for You and the Earth edited by Michael W. Robbins Birds of North America: The Complete…

God, A Poem

tags: God, A Poem, James Fenton, poetry, National Poetry Month April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day, this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). Today's poem was suggested by a reader and friend. God, A Poem A nasty surprise in a sandwich, A drawing-pin caught in your sock, The limpest of shakes from a hand which You'd thought would be firm as a rock, A serious mistake in a nightie, A grave disappointment all round Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty, Is all that you'll get underground. Oh…

Open Laboratory 2007: I'm In!

tags: books, Open Laboratory I just wanted to let you know that the book, Open Laboratory 2007: The Best Science Blog Writing of 2007 is now in production, and one of my submissions will be included in the book. So, to give you a synposis of the book, the two main editors, Reed and Coturnix chose the top 70 or so submissions (out of 486!), according to the judges' ratings. After that, they tried to cut the list down to 50 (+2; one poem and one cartoon) -- a task that they found to be much more difficult. After much discussion, they decided to include 51 essays, one poem and one cartoon. As…

Here's Where I am at This Very Moment

tags: Tvärminne, zoological field research station, Finland, nature Tvärminnen eläintieteellinen asema (Tvärminne Zoological field research station) in southwestern Finland. [read more about it: English Suomeksi PÃ¥ Svenska] Image: GrrlScientist, 14 July 2009 [larger view]. (raw image) The view from the dock (looking east?), just outside the cafeteria windows. It brings tears to my eyes, this place reminds me of my many happy times spent at the University of Washington's field research station in Friday Harbor, Washington state. Tvärminnen eläintieteellinen asema (Tvärminne…

More fun with Schwartz

Thanks to Inel for finding this; look there for the links. So Schwartz (yes that Schwartz) said: "The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assesses the skill of climate models by their ability to reproduce warming over the twentieth century, but in doing so may give a false sense of their predictive capability". Exactly why they think this gets quite messy but seems to amount to not knowing the aerosol forcing too well; and they go on to link this to AR4 estimates for climate sensitivity. This reads wrong to me; and Forster et al reply "However, they have…

This Will Make Your Stomach Turn

Testimony from military investigators in the trial of 4 US soldiers on trial in a military court for the rape and murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl. At the hearing into whether four U.S. soldiers should be court-martialled for rape and murder, a special agent described what took place in Mahmudiya in March, based on an interview he had with one of the men, Specialist James Barker... Special Agent Benjamin Bierce recalled that Barker described to him how they put a couple and their six-year-old daughter into a bedroom of their home, but kept the teenage girl in the living room, where Barker…

Secret Service Facing Lots of Lawsuits

And rightly so. One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration has been their policy of not allowing any dissent or protest anywhere near the President anywhere he appears. And we're not just talking about protests. There have been dozens of incidents where even people with a Kerry/Edwards sticker on their car, or a button on their shirt, have been removed from the premises wherever Bush is speaking. In Kalamazoo, where the President was speaking at a campaign stop in 2004, a group of students were kicked out of the event merely because members of a Republican group on campus identified them…

Mirror, mirror

Still on the rowing I'm afraid. A row-over today: two years ago we'd have killed for a high-quality row-over like tonight, but after yesterdays superb bump-up, tonight felt like a let down. Thinking (and drinking, in the Waterman again, a pub I'm coming to like) about it afterwards, it all seemed like an unwelcome mirror of last years M2, also on day 3, albeit at a far higher standard. Just like then, we'd bumped up the day before so had no fear of what was behind us; just like then we had a crew ahead that we knew we were faster than; just like then we were a bit too confident of grinding…

"Perpetual Ocean" from NASA

Here is a pretty awesome video from NASA showing a 3D earth view of global ocean currents as they were from June 2005 to December 2007.  It is fascinating to watch the behavior of both large and small features and how they interact.  Notable for neighbors of the Atlantic ocean is the Gulf Stream bringing warm water from the Gulf of Mexico area north and east to keep the Queen warm in winter, and notable for the Antarctic ice sheets is the relative isolation, in terms of mixing, of the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic climate in general.   It is constructed with a combination of observed and…

Ask Ethan: Is The Universe Finite Or Infinite?

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” -William Blake When it comes to the ultimate question of the size of the Universe, we have to look to greater scales than what we can possibly observe. Although we can place constraints on how big the unobservable Universe must be, coming up with a lower limit to its overall size, there’s a bigger question that we don’t yet know the answer to: is it finite in size, or is it truly infinite? The observable…

Ask Ethan: Where Does Quantum Uncertainty Come From? (Synopsis)

"In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time." -Richard K. Morgan It’s absolutely true that, in quantum mechanics, there are certain pairs of properties that we simply can’t measure simultaneously. Measure the position of an object really well, and its momentum becomes more uncertain. Measure its energy, and its time becomes more uncertain. And measure its voltage, and the free charge becomes more uncertain. Although this is disconcerting to some, it’s a fundamental part of…

There is sound in space, thanks to gravitational waves (Synopsis)

"We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd." -Janna Levin You’ve likely heard that there’s no sound in space; that sound needs a medium to travel through, and in the vacuum of space, there is none. That’s true... up to a point. If you were only a few light years away from a star, stellar remnant, black hole, or even a supernova, you’d have no way to…

Heisenberg's Astrophysics Prediction Finally Confirmed After 80 Years (Synopsis)

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." -Werner Heisenberg Empty space, according to quantum mechanics, isn’t exactly empty. Take away all the matter, radiation and anything else you can have populating your space, and you’ll still have some amount of energy in there: the zero-point energy of the Universe. One consequence of quantum electrodynamics is that this sea of virtual particles is always present, and a strong magnetic field can lead to some really bizarre behavior. VLT image of the area around the very faint neutron star RX J1856.5-…

Michael Mann Gets Hans Oeschger Medal

Here's the press release: Mann to receive Hans Oeschger Medal from European Geosciences Union UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Michael Mann, professor of meteorology and geosciences and director, Earth System Science Center, Penn State, was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. The medal was established in 2001 in recognition of the scientific achievements of Hans Oeschger to honor outstanding scientists whose work is related to climate: past, present and future. Mann's research involves the use of theoretical models and observational data to better understand Earth's…

Tell the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Don’t promote climate change denial

This from The Big E at MPP: The LA Times recently instituted a policy change: they no longer print letters to the editor from climate change deniers. The LA Times believes that peer-reviewed work by established scientists have overwhelmingly proven that our planet is warming and this is leading to significant climate change. And those scientists have provided ample evidence that human activity is indeed linked to climate change. Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a body made up of the world’s top climate scientists — said it was 95% certain that we fossil-fuel-…

Karate In A Hijab

Here's an interesting case regarding Muslim women's veils. They're instruments or symbols of patriarchal repression, right? Well, check this out. Dania Mahmudi is from my area, Fisksätra. She's 14 years old and wears a veil. Mahmudi has been practising karate for years. Two weeks ago she went with her club to the district championship, eager to compete. But the umpire disqualified her – for her veil's sake. It covered her throat, and karate competition rules state that the umpire needs to be able to watch for damage to each contestant's throat. OK, said her coach after a heated argument, so…

Links for 2012-06-18

In which we look at basketball analytics, complaints about ancient Rome, the latest dispatch from the imminent death of publishing, and the optics of spy satellites. ------------ Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com The shooting patterns for the players on the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder reveal where they are most dangerous on the court. Below, compare each player’s strengths using court maps and analysis by Kirk Goldsberry, a geography professor at Michigan State. The Seven Plagues of the Ancient Roman City Dweller | The Getty Iris…

Ask Ethan: Why doesn't Earth's atmosphere turn sunlight into rainbows? (Synopsis)

"It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It's an interesting place to be. I recommend it." -Neil Armstrong There are many impressive optical phenomena that we can see with our own eyes here on Earth. The right configuration of raindrops or ice crystals can produce rainbows, shining light through a prism will separate it into its individual wavelengths, and from high altitudes in the pre-sunrise or post-sunset skies, a full spectrum of colors become visible. From very high altitudes in…

THIS is How You Insult Mary Cheney

From Agape Press: A Virginia pro-family advocate says the people who helped re-elect President Bush don't support homosexual relationships -- the administration apparently does. Joe Glover, president of the Family Policy Network, has worked tirelessly for family values, including the fight against legalized homosexual "marriage." He says it was conservative Christians who put the president back in office and who held to the belief that the president shared their views. But Glover says the day after the election, that all seemed to go out the window. "The day after George Bush was elected…

Sandefur on Substantive Due Process

Timothy Sandefur has been writing furiously since his return from Memphis on Friday (a trip that made me quite jealous. Memphis is known for two things, blues and BBQ - if there's a heaven, it must look a lot like Beale Street). If you're at all interested in constitutional law, his latest essay, on substantive due process, is a must read. He writes: One strong argument against this theory is that the phrase "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law" merely requires some fair procedure to be satisfied before a person is deprived of life, liberty or…

Hovind Trial, Day 2

This trial is going to be a lot of fun to watch. The local paper reports that two of Hovind's employees, the ones he says he didn't withhold taxes from or pay taxes on because they were "ministers" and he runs a ministry, testified that they thought they were employees. And they quoted from memos from Hovind himself calling them such: Heldmyer asked Popp to read from ministry memos that referred to the workers as "employees" and included rules about timeliness, payroll, vacation days and salaries. Yet Hovind claims they weren't employees. And his attorneys attempt to spin this: Richey pointed…

Kasparov on Fischer

Via The Chess Ninja, I see that Gary Kasparov has commented on the death of Bobby Fischer. I have copied his remarks below the fold. With the death of Bobby Fischer chess has lost one of its greatest figures. Fischer's status as world champion and celebrity came from a charismatic and combative personality matched with unstoppable play. I recall thrilling to the games of his 1972 Reykjavik world championship match against Boris Spassky when I was nine years old. The American had his share of supporters in the USSR even then, and not only for his chess prowess. His outspokenness and…

Kasparov on Fischer

If you can forgive another chess post, the current issue of The New York Review of Books has a review, by Gary Kasparov, of a new biography of Bobby Fischer. The chessplayers among you won't find much you didn't already know, but the essay is well done nonetheless. Go have a look: It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a…

Links for 2010-12-04

The 12 Days of Christmas | The Language of Bad Physics "On the fifth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: Five Ci-ta-tions... 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read." (tags: academia education silly music blogs kavassalis) A is for Ackbar | brandonpeat.com "When my wife Emma and I found out we were pregnant with our first child, Tycho, we began thinking of fun ways to decorate a baby boy's room. Since we live in an apartment and aren't allowed to paint the walls, that meant posters or prints of some kind. And, being artists, we naturally wanted to create…

Great Moments in Targeted Advertising

We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff. In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the…

links for 2009-04-18

slacktivist: T.F.: By the rivers of Babylon "That's a change from the view of apocalyptic types from older times. They used to fear people like Napoleon -- those who sought to conquer the world through force, riding forth on literal, flesh-and-blood white horses, intent on empire. But to premillennial dispensationalists, would-be imperialists get a pass. They're obviously not "peacemakers," so there's no need to worry that they might be the Antichrist. This is another example of how the PMD view that the Antichrist will be a wolf in sheep's clothing leads them to be suspicious of all sheep…

Purdue adopts 4 year math requirements for undergraduate admission; who is left out?

My university has reported that we have just increased our math requirements for admissions into the university. I guess that Purdue's requirements had been to require students have taken 3 years of math to be admitted, and now it will be 4 years starting in Fall 2011. The argument is that "[t]he vast majority - 95.1 percent - of Indiana students attending Purdue already takes four years of college preparatory math, such as algebra, trigonometry, precalculus and calculus" (no word on out-of-state students) and that there is research that suggests requiring students to have taken 4 years of…

How do we know when the world will end?

Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He's always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he's got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh. I've always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here's a short article that lays the math out for us. According to them, Noah's great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., 'exactly' 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a…

Charles Krauthammer's embryonic brain

A little press-commentary comparison shopping is in order following the recent news of a breakthrough in the effort to produce stem cells without using embryonic cells. I promise this won't take long. First, the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who announced that Bush was right all along to restrict federal funding for embryonic stem cell research: That Holy Grail has now been achieved. Now, the words of the editors of New Scientist: Impressive as this research is, it is not yet the hoped-for panacea.... there is still a long way to go before they can be used as transplants. ... For one…

Time, money no object

This week's "ask a science blogger question" from the SEED gang is: "Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?" First, to be fair, I don't really have an area of expertise, at least, not like most of the folks at scienceblogs do. No PhD, not even a masters in any scientific discipline. But I do have a BSc in marine biology,so I guess I can't choose to spend more time whale watching. My choice: Given the enormous challenge facing society at the moment as we come up on peak oil, and…

SLIDESHOW 1A: Definition of "Global" - the science jist.

O.K. so to begin the ASIC course, we thought that part of this should be an attempt to look at historically what may have defined "global" - as in both the humanities and sciences context (maybe about 20 to 25 minutes each). Here is a preview of my first few slides. Essentially, I'll probably do what I almost always do to start off a train of thought - that is to try and "google" a definition (hence the first cartoon slide, taken from Ben's post earlier this year). Except that when you do this with the word "global," you get a whole ton of different things, quite frankly a lot of which I…

Baubike: Adventures in Design

OK, folks, explain this to me.  It is a bicycle.  Bicycles are cool.  But from the looks of this thing, it seems as though it would be like riding an anvil around town.  Sure, it'd be great if you got hit by a Hummer.  The bike would be fine. style="display: inline;"> There are href="http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/6712/michael-ubbesen-jakobsen-baubike.html">more photos at designbloom, and href="http://www.yatzer.com/1741_baubike_by_michael_ubbesen_jakobsen">Yatzer.  One person href="http://www.thisnext.com/item/023FBE0D/09F57E93/The-Bau-Bike-A-Stunning-Two">…

How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb (Landscape and Modernity: Series 3)

These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal Lit Review site says this by way of couching the images: Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space. On August 5, 1963, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty,…

ID and the Arts ... featuring designed poetry

Back in July I reported on the "ID Arts Initiative" - an attempt by Access Research Network to establish the relevance of their particular brand of creationism to the fine arts. Well now they have a website and a blog featuring some fairly horrific poetry. Witness "GIGANTOPITHECUS, WE HARDLY KNEW YE: IN SEARCH OF MISSING LINKS" by Robert Voss (shouting caps in the original): BUILT UP FROM A SKULLCAP AND ORANGUTAN'S JAW, IN MANY OLD TEXTBOOKS, PILTDOWN MAN WE ALL SAW, TEETH FILED TO LOOK HUMAN, AND STAINED TO LOOK OLD, HIS LESSON FOR US: DON'T BELIEVE ALL YOU'RE TOLD. TEN YEARS LATER,…

A Call to Bloggers Around the World: How First-World-O-Centric Are We?

Jennifer Jacquet at SB blog Shifting Baselines just returned from the Galapagos, where she got the feeling that blogging has not made much of an impact, even among the scientists at the research stations. It left her wondering if science blogging is mainly restricted to the so-called "First World"--i.e., affluent places such as the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan. If true, that would be a shame, since it is potentially such a powerful tool for getting scientific information, no matter where you are in the world. It's a fair question, but an answer really demands more data than one trip by…

Eat chana masala to prevent Alzheimer's!

Yes, that title is a bit ostentatious. But the foods we eat contain many compounds that can be beneficial to brain health. One strategy for optimizing our brains for long-term peak performance is to identify these compounds and discover how they are beneficial. Head-healthy chemicals have previously been isolated from curries and spices before, and it looks like we've found another curcuminoid, bisdemethoxycurcumin, which may be useful in combating Alzheimer's Disease: Researchers have isolated bisdemethoxycurcumin, the active ingredient of curcuminoids -- a natural substance found in…

Live birth in newly discovered species of frog

Male (left) and female L. Larvaepartus frogs discovered in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Image from Figure 2 of PLOS ONE article. A new species of frog (Limnonectes larvaepartus) has been discovered in the rain forest of Sulawesi island in Indonesia. This species challenges the grade-school wisdom that taught us: 'frogs lay eggs'. It looks like textbooks will need to be revised as this is the only known exception to that rule. Study author Dr. Jimmy McGuire (University of California, Berkeley) said the following as quoted in Reuters, "Reproduction in most frogs could not be more different…

scio10: Podcasting workshop

PalMD taught this workshop Friday, January 15. These are my quick notes. use an external mic â doesnât have to be that expensive, if you have multiple people in the room, you might want a 2 channel mic use audacity and plan to do a lot of editing find a place to host these things, he found that even with 30-40 downloads of a 30 minute podcast, his bandwidth charges would be really high, so he is hosting his on ScienceBlogs.com (I wonder if OurMedia.org is an option?) Need to save and then export to MP3 create an RSS file so people can find new entries â he manually edits one each time and…

Could Evolution Stop?

Let's see if we can figure this out from first principles. Limiting ourselves to biological evolution, evolution needs a few things to work in practice:- -a mechanism of inheritance. Genes in our case. Consider stones. Stones don't have genes. Stones don't evolve (biologically, that is. I know a pebble back in my village river that somehow manages to accumulate little pebbles around it that are more smooth. I think it's cheating.) -one or more heritable characteristics. For instance, Lactose tolerance. Our ancestors couldn't stomach milk--until about 30,000 years ago. Lactose tolerance…

Effect of Kennesaw law on burglaries

brian.m.leary said: In the five months after the passage of the mandatory gun ownership law in Kennesaw, Georgia the residential burglary rate was down 89% from the same period the year before. Does this prove the law worked? No - proof is difficult in these matters. However, is it clear that the law had no effect? Hardly. The source for this claim appears to be Kleck's paper in "Social Problems" v35p15, where he states there were five reported residential burglaries in the seven months after the law, while there were 45 in the corresponding seven months of the preceding year. As you have…

Quick dip: Free firefight; digital dumbness; scijourno conference; doctors that don't talk

What's been distracting me lately from the big story I really really need to finish writing ... A splendid, rich fracas over Chris Anderson's Free, set off particularly by a pan from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. The net fairly exploded -- search, and ye shall find -- with many noting that a pot was calling a kettle black. E.g., Itâs like War of the Speakerâs Bureaus and a more gently titled but equally damning (to Gladwell) post by Anil Dash. ,And one young writer accused Anderson of being a feudal lord. Anderson himself has been remarkably unfiltered in his tweet-pointers to reviews,…

I'm [nearly] one year old

Everyone else is noting the pulse of migration to the SEED stable that occurred here a year ago. Oddly, my ecto links tell me I first posted here on the 25th of June, not the 9th, but who cares. Below the fold is my first post at Science Blogs. How'm I doing? Welcome to the new Evolving Thoughts. As you all know, change is inevitbre, inevatible, unavoidable. So when I was asked to join this growing resource, I agreed, so long as the under the counter payments were large enough. To avoid tax problems, they gave me shares in some American company named Enron, which I'm told are worth a lot.…

New NASA Policy: A Small Victory

NASA is to be commended for a new media policy easing up restrictions on scientist communications. Most importantly, scientists don't have to have little PR minders on their phone calls any more. Bravo. See here to learn more about the policy. NASA's move is entirely positive--it represents progress. Still, it's pretty scant progress in light of years and years of abuses against science perpetrated by the Bush administration, and the wide range of agencies where these problems have manifested. The great danger, now, is that NASA will be pointed to as a success story in order to neutralize…