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New Punk

Sb has a new guy who calls himself SciencePunk (aka 'Frank Swain'). He's from the UK and claims a history of 'making zines, being a filthy scenester, stage-managing burlesque shows, climbing buildings, hanging out with strippers, arguing the toss and generally being a force for good.' I haven't followed his stuff, but the way this reads, we'll either get on like old friends from Gilman Street or fight like hipsters for the last pair of black rimmed glasses. So welcome to the Sb blogosphere Swain. As for our online relationship, only time will tell... But for now, this goes out to you:

Immortal Animals and Other Curiosities

Can animals be immortal? This question is explored by RocketBoom in an interesting way - providing examples of regeneration in nature, from fungi to jellyfish to...well, I'll let Molly explain. Nothing lasts forever, but the animals on today's episode stick around a lot longer than the rest of us. Molly In case you're not familiar with their website, it provides fresh perspectives to a wide variety of topics: Rocketboom is a daily international news and entertainment network of online programming based in New York City. We cover and create a wide range of information and commentary from…

Around the Web: Breaking up with ebooks, Blogging in the classroom and more

I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too) Ebooks Choices and the Soul of Librarianship Blogging in the classroom: why your students should write online The Last Future Uncovering the world's 'unseen' science (preprint) HBO Rightly Decides Not to Cater to Cord Cutters In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment Is All Too Real High and low: what RIM's failure is doing to the people of Waterloo The Online Pecking Order: 'Conventional' online universities consider strategic response to MOOCs Digital Deadline (campuses will be completely digital in 3 years, textbooks that is) Supporting Public Access to…

A job opportunity for a grad student

Position Description: Communications Assistant Chicago-area communications firm seeks communications/journalism/PR undergrad or grad student for part-time position, 10-15 hours per week at $20/hour. This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a team that is building a cutting-edge new-media communications platform for a New York health-care client. The work is varied, but includes helping maintain a website and blog, copy writing and editing, assistance with online video projects and support for special projects. You will have a high level of autonomy and can work flexible hours online - no…

Global Hunger Games

Hunger Games - World Food Programme. Hunger Games portrays a grim future in which the "bottom 99%" must ration their food to reduce the chance that their children will be sent as "tributes" to compete in a game to the death. But - What if, together, we can identify thousands of new paths out of poverty around the world in just 48 hours? Imagine thousands of Katniss Everdeen-inspired avatars battling hunger - for real. {Today} the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) will join forces with people across the globe and ask them to help solve global poverty through…

Scientific American Blogs Responds

UPDATE: Happy to announce that @Dnlee5 post is now back up: http://t.co/XVentvp35T #SciAmBlogs — Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) October 14, 2013 This just in... A Message from Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief Scientific American bloggers lie at the heart of the SA website, pumping vitality, experience and broad insight around the community. Unfortunately our poor communication with this valuable part of the SA network over the recent days has led to concerns, misunderstandings and ill feelings, and we are committed to working to try to put this right as best we can. We know that there are real…

Did the Far Left Blogs Turn Lieberman Into a Republican?

That's the take in this recent profile at New York magazine. The far left blogosphere first stung Lieberman when his 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination fell flat but then really turned him towards the GOP following his 2006 Senate primary race. In Lieberman's view, powerful bloggers have hijacked his party, especially on foreign policy. From the article: The 2004 debacle was Lieberman's first introduction to a new force, the netroots, a loose collection of leftist blogs including MoveOn.org and DailyKos. The way the senator sees it, those groups have been "taking the party in…

The Exporatorium: Science Communication Innovators

I'm back in DC after spending the previous two weeks in San Francisco as an Osher Fellow at The Exploratorium. It was my second visit this year to the world's greatest science center. Each time I go out there I tell my friends that I feel like Tom Friedman in The World is Flat, trading ideas with really smart and innovative people. (I'm not the only one to offer high praise for The Explo, check out this rave from Jennifer Oullette at Cocktail Physics.) During my two weeks, I held several brown bag lunch discussions with staff on topics including science and the media; the effective use of…

Why I now pay for online news, in two words: Mark Henderson

The whole idea of actually paying to read mainstream news online is rather alien to me, having grown up immersed in a world of free content readily available via Google News. Indeed, I can't help but see free news as some kind of inviolable human right. Thus when the Times recently set up a paywall blocking free access to all of its online content (including its blogs), I was faced with a serious dilemma: there are only a few mainstream science journalists in the world who write sensibly about genetics, and my favourite example (Mark Henderson) was now locked away behind a web-form requiring…

PLoS In Nature : The Big Picture

OA pillars The following are excerpts from the journal Nature regarding the Public Library of Science. These were located with a simple search for the phrase "Public Library of Science." For each item, I provide the source, and a selected bit of text. I have no selection criteria to report, but I do have a reason for doing this: To give an interesting view of the history of PLoS as a concept and an entity, and to some extent, the reactions to PLoS from various quarters. I ignored passing reference to PLoS or redundant items. Personally, I find this textual sequence fascinating. I…

Links 6/11/10

Have a Fabulous Friday. Links for you. Science: The Human Phenome Project Ten things you didn't know about bees The ASCO Meeting: The swag disappears! (2010 edition) Snakes in mysterious global decline Other: Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It? Rand was mediocre. But she had a preternatural ability to translate her sense of self into reality. Doomed Pelicans: British Petroleum Neglecting Booms in Pelican Rookery Americans want to Soak the Rich MMCCLXXVII

Arctic Sea Ice Retreat: When Will the Arctic Ocean be Ice-Free During Summer?

Asks climatematters@columbia. But they ask it in a way that suggests they think the trend is going to be steep. So I offered them the standard bet. We'll see. Meanwhile, anyone interested in whether 2009 is likely to be a record can get some action over at ipredict (thanks Gareth). I've bought some; current price is about 0.23. I'm not really sure what a fair price would be; I have some buy orders in. Its quite educational.

I'm going to ruin the punchline for you

Scott has discovered an odd little book: The Faith Equation: One Mathematician's Journey in Christianity. Yeah, another guy finds Jesus and uses math and science after the fact to claim Christianity is the one true answer. What, you may ask, is this wonderful faith equation that leads directly to one of the Abrahamic religions? Faith = (Mind) + (Heart)+ (Will) Hey, who knew you could make pablum out of crap? At least now nobody needs to buy the damn book.

The Environmental Cost of Physics Research

I burned out some diode lasers a while back, and needed to buy replacements. Here's one of the replacements on top of the tube containing the other, with a US quarter for scale: Here they are, with the box and packing material used to ship them to me: I realize that this is probably due to somebody at the laser company deciding to save money by standardizing on a single size of shipping container. Still, this seems just a tiny bit excessive...

Reading in the USA

Seen via Boing Boing: 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school. 42% of college graduates never read another book. 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year. 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. If these statistics indeed represent the state of reading in this country, they go a ways to explaining why anti-evolutionism and ID have gotten a toe-hold.

Mmmm...tasty.... clown brains

A boingboing reader visited Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus recently and discovered some absolutely crazy dessert delivery devices... Clown and Horse Brains! If anyone happens to take their kids to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus we here at Omni Brain would be eternally grateful if you'd buy us one of the clown heads! (You don't have to send along the accompanying snow cone - the FBI or whoever might think it's some sort of terror device)

The Weakling Dollar: Expected but Embarrassing

In the land of the euro, the dollar is treated like a banana republic(an) currency. The devaluation of the dollar isn't such an awful thing: it was long overdue. We can't have a $9+ trillion dollar debt (almost half of which was accumulated in the last seven years), a humongous trade deficit, negative personal savings, and an economic recession, and still expect our currency to be worth something. But this is embarrassing: The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local…

Copenhagen, Claus & Christ

The climate summit in Copenhagen came to a tenuous conclusion on Friday, as five nations pulled a non-binding "agreement" from thin air. This agreement recognizes the threat of rising temperatures and pledges financial aid for developing countries, but sets no emission guidelines and is not legally enforcible anyway. On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk fears what global warming will do to Santa's Workshop, writing that the major players at Copenhagen were "afraid to do hard things," and content to "pretend to do something" instead. Meanwhile, Greg Laden on his blog points out that Copenhagen…

Recalculating Round Numbers

The price of human genome sequencing has fallen spectacularly since the turn of the century; what then cost $100,000,000 is now promised for only $1000. This race toward zero makes even Moore's Law look like a snail's pace, but the $1000 price tag does come with a couple asterisks. For one, providers will need high demand to pay off the multi-million dollar sequencing array that makes it possible, and low demand should result in higher prices. For two, $1000 will only buy you a rough draft of your genome. On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Todd Smith writes "While some sequencing…

About last night

The Drinking Liberally event was packed. I don't know how many people were there, but I think it was somewhere within a few orders of magnitude of a gazillion. Kos speechified briefly, exhorted us to buy his book because every copy sold makes a conservative cry, and then answered questions from the crowd. Dr B and The Connoisseur did show up fashionably late, and didn't even make it in the door before she was intercepted by her fans. We all had many pleasant conversations, and I think there may be a few new converts to the Drinking Liberally phenomenon. I also learned something very…

Mexican Corn Farmers Reap Big Profits

Rogelio Zacaula plucks an ear of corn from his field with the pride of a prospector unearthing the gold that legend says is buried in the slopes surrounding the nearby Orizaba volcano. International corn prices driven by the burgeoning U.S. ethanol industry have soared to their highest in a decade, making farmers like Zacaula feel like they just won the jackpot. ''I have never seen prices like this,'' said Zacaula, 66, who has been growing corn since he was 10. "We suffered for so many years, years in which no one even wanted to buy our crop -- until now.'' Corn had languished around $2 a…

OCO launch failure

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory had a launch failure. Taurus launch out of Vandenberg last night, tried to stay up to see if I could see the launch - often possible from the area - but I crashed before scheduled launch time. Apparently payload failed to separate after stage burnout and the whole lot crashed near one of the poles (south pole - thought that was what they said but wasn't sure till I saw the formal press release). Total loss. I guess we know what NASA's SMD will use their $400M stimulus for now - that should just about buy a replacement. It is a bad loss, the OCO, or…

Sailing Camp

I've spent three days with my son's class at Ãngsholmen summer camp where the 12-y-os got a chance to reaquaint themselves after the summer and do some fun stuff together. My job, like that of the other three parents who came along, was basically crowd control and security. The camp is on a small U-shaped island, a former base of the coastal artillery, which once defended the GÃ¤llnÃ¶ port narrows on an important shipping lane. There's a sizeable decommissioned underground fort at one end, probably dating from the inter-war years. The kids swam, canoed, sailed Monark Avanti skiffs, did…

Home Owner

For the past ten years, I've lived with my family in rented apartments in a 1970s housing estate that covers the erstwhile infields of the poor tenant farm of FisksÃ¤tra. Yesterday, my wife and I signed a contract to buy a 114 sqm house on one of the surrounding hills, BÃ¥thÃ¶jden, "Boat Hill"! We need another bedroom for our 10-y-o, and we calculate that it won't be all that much more expensive to pay a mortgage on the house than it would be to rent a four-roomer instead of our current three-roomer. The main proponents of buying a house have been my dad and my wife. My conditions were that…

Weekend Diversion: The Math of Powerball (Synopsis)

“I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.” -Fran Lebowitz It's a thought that's occurred to almost everyone at some point or another: what each of us would do if we happened to hit the lottery Jackpot. Have a listen to Camper Van Beethoven sing about it in the band's interesting song, When I Win The Lottery, while you consider the following. Image credit: me. The (very small) differences in these odds and the Powerball official odds are due to rounding. This past week, the Powerball Jackpot crested past $500 million, one of…

Michael Pollan Interview: On Bookshelves Near You

The Michael Pollan interview I did for The Believer is at long last on booksehelves at fine retailers near you. For those not familiar with that publication, it was recently nominated for two National Magazine Awards, was last year nominated for a few, and will next year be nominatd for some. It's run out of San Fransisco, a monthly cultural and literary periodical edited by the writers Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida. Although called "The Believer," it has no religious bent. They've been gracious enough to publish two prior interviews of mine as well (on Darwin, on Sex and…

âJesus was half-chimpanzeeâ

Via Red State Rabble: "These evolutionists are saying that Jesus was half-chimpanzee, so was Mohammed and Buddha," said Alan Detrich, a 58-year-old Lawrence Republican who takes classes at Kansas University. "I dont think thats right." In this story, Detrich gives us the minimalist version of Paley’s watchmaker argument: The question is the story of the rock and the clock. If you find a rock in a field, no big deal. If you find a clock in a field, you look around for who created it. Did we just appear like the rock? Or did it take intelligent design to make us? I think it took intelligent…

Caleb Crain sums up the MSMer's Media 2.0 anxiety

In the intro to his self-published (on Lulu.com) collection of blog posts, The Wreck of the Henry Clay, New Yorker contributor Caleb Crain sums up nicely the anxieties shared by at least one other writer-with-blogging-addon about blogging, and, by extension, about self-publishing books. Which I may just do myself soon -- a collection -- because I CAN. Ellipses are mine. I came to blogging ... as a veteran of print.... [and so] came to blogging nervous about losing what footing I had there... The quandary: If I wanted to communicate an important discovery, shouldn't I write it up formally,…

Would you bronze your daughter's first poop? Tom Cruise would

I don't even want to know how he got it: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have yet to show their baby daughter off in public, but eager fans were given an unusual preview with the chance to see a bronze cast depicting her first solid stool. The scatological sculpture -- more doodoo than Dada -- is purportedly cast from 19-week old Suri's first bowel movement and will be shown at the Capla Kesting gallery in Brooklyn, New York, before being auctioned off for charity. The artist behind the work, Daniel Edwards, previously courted controversy with a life-size nude sculpture of pop star Britney Spears…

Contagious Altruism and Starbucks

It's the latest Starbucks advertising campaign: they are handing out free subway passes and movie tickets in the hope that all the niceness and holiday cheer will be contagious: Starting today Starbucks is surprising its customers with free gifts. The catch is Starbucks wants consumers to pass on their benevolence by performing a good deed for another person, say, to hold open a door or buy someone a cup of coffee. With each deed, the recipient is handed a "cheer pass," a numbered card that serves as a tracking device for the effort's viral component. It's actually a brilliant idea. Why?…

Hippy-Crites

British papers are fun. The Daily Mail recently ran a deliciously nasty article on hippy-crites, those pious celebrities (like John Travolta, Chris Martin and Brangelina) who talk endlessly about global warming and yet still fly in lots of private jets. Travolta, for instance, recently few by himself from Europe to the United States in a Boeing 707, which can normally hold more than 100 people. But this isn't just a problem for celebrities. A new paper in Conservation Biology looked at how the "environmental attitudes" of individuals affected the location of their home in the Teton Valley of…

OSHA news releases rarely name company's work comp carrier

When OSHA proposed penalties in January 2011 totaling nearly $1.4 million against two Illinois grain handling companies, I noticed the agency's news release mentioned the employers' workers compensation insurance carrier. It was the first time that I'd see this in an OSHA news release, and I wondered if it was the start of something new. Apparently, not. I reviewed the 280+ news releases on enforcement cases issued by OSHA between February 2011 and August 24, and only identified two in which the agency mentioned the employers' work comp insurance carrier. One appeared in an April 2011…

Samsung Galaxy S4 Review

Samsung Galaxy S4 Looking at just the specs, the Samsung Galaxy S4 looks like a good phone. That's why we got one! But there are a few things you need to know that may impact your decision. These problems lead me to not recommend this phone. First, the Android Lollipop version that Samsung produces is a much modified version of the basic Android operating system. Nothing useful or interesting is provided, but the "miscellaneous" storage, which for most normal Android Lollipop phone takes up about 300 - 400 megabytes of space, takes up several gigabytes of space, in order to have these…

Charles Stross, Glasshouse [Library of Babel]

My intention of reading all of the nominees for the Hugo Awards in the fiction categories hit a bit of a snag yesterday. I finished all the short fiction (novella, novelette, short story), and most of the novels, leaving only Peter Watts's Blindisght and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. James Nicoll described Peter Watts as the sort of thing he reads when he feels his will to live becoming too strong, and the description of Glasshouse did not fill me with joy. Plus, my copy of Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson just arrived (a birthday present), and I'd really rather read that. (I'll pause here for…

Have e-books killed tree-books?

Have e-books killed tree-books? I hope not - I love hefting a brand-new book in my hand and letting the pages fan open. It's sensual and anticipation-laden, like opening a bottle of good wine. But perhaps science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer is hedging his bets on the future of paper books: he's released his latest collection, Brain Cuttings, exclusively for Kindle, iPad, and other mobile devices. I clicked over to read an excerpt, and this was the first passage I saw: Let's say you transfer your mind into a computer--not all at once but gradually, having electrodes inserted into your…

The Friday Fermentable: Little-Known or Under-Publicized Grapes

Another Wine Experience: Little Known or Under Publicized Grape Varieties by Erleichda It was my turn again to name a theme for the almost monthly get together of our wine dinner group, "Jim's Disciples". I thought to push the envelope a bit by asking everyone to bring a wine that used a grape variety they hadn't heard of before, and which represented at least 70% of the wine in the bottle. There were no other restrictions or guidelines. Unfortunately, only about half my tasting notes survived the evening, and so I can only relate a portion of what occurred. I also chose a BYO Italian…

Heureka!

Heureka is an online popular science magazine in Austria which you should check out, especially if you can read German. But some things are in English, including this interview with yours truly... There also blurbs about it (in German) in derStandard online and hardcopy, as well as on their science blog Sciblog.

Victory in Germany

Back in October, I sent you off to vote in an online poll that pitted real social workers, SozialHelden, against homeopaths, in a contest that actually had consequences: the winner would get a "Dedication Award" for their work. We just got word from SozialHelden on the outcome of the poll: haben gerade den Deutschen Engagementpreis 2009 gewonnen. Danke für Eure Stimmen! They've won the German Engagement Prize for 2009. Thank you for your votes!

We've lost another good one

One of the early blogs that I very much enjoyed was The Rittenhouse Review, a Philly blog which I discovered shortly after leaving Philadelphia. It had gone quiet a while ago, rather mysteriously — it's another of those odd things about this medium that there can be so few signs of what's going on in real life from what we see online — but sadly, we now learn that the author, Jim Capozzola has died after a long illness.

Can we please get rid of the R******s name?

From WaPo: When sports fans tuned into the NBA finals Tuesday night to see the San Antonio Spurs take on the Miami Heat, they got a look into another fierce standoff. A California tribe paid for the anti-Redskins advertisement “Proud to Be” to run in seven major cities during halftime. The airing marked the first time the ad, which initially appeared online in time for the Super Bowl, had run before such a wide television audience.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The sixty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the The Swedish Osteological Society's Blog. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology from a bony point of view! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 22 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

The word for today is "literally"

I know I'm far from the first to go off on this commercial, but... No, vehix.com commercial lady, you cannot go online and "literally take a test drive". It doesn't work that way. The tubes that connect your computer to the interwebs aren't big enough. The wheels get stuck every damn time. So stop saying that. Or at least learn to stop overacting first. And lose the hat. It makes you look like a moron.

Students: Give your CV a digital makeover

In a reputation economy, social media can provide a powerful set of tools for establishing and enhancing your reputation. An enhanced reputation can lead to enhanced opportunities, in the form of job offers or other professional opportunity. Academia is a reputation economy, of course, but really any knowledge economy/creative class job is going to be easier to get if you have a good reputation. Which brings us back to social media. It seems to me that in a competitive job market, students can really make their own applications stand out if they can refer potential employers to a really…

Librarians and social media engagement

Or, Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing, Part 2. A month or so ago, I poked a little gentle fun at social media extremists, basically exploring the idea that engaging online is the be-all and end-all of the library profession versus the idea that much of what we do online is peripheral to the main thrust of what librarianship is all about. To a certain degree, I guess I was setting up a couple of straw people just for the purpose of knocking them down but at the time it seemed like contrasting those extremes was a useful way of looking at the issue. Of course, I don't believe either…

The Great Debate

Since my laptop was stolen, it's time for me to think about getting a replacement. My last laptop was a tablet PC, a Toshiba M400 Portege, which was "Vista capable," which I'm pretty sure means that it was "just barely Vista capable." I loved having a tablet PC, but the Toshiba wasn't exactly behaving great under Vista (slow, slow, slow.) So now the question is what should my next laptop be. In particular I am almost tempted to (close you ears Seattlites)....buy a Mac. Tablet PC benefits: All my notes are on my tablet for the last few years. This is very convenient. Unfortunately the…

Scienceblogs: Clearly More Popular than Steven Colbert

If you are one of the many people who was trying to contribute to the Scienceblogs.com DonorsChoose challenge today, you should know that there's one person you can blame for the trouble you had accessing the site: right-wing spinmeister and wannabe Presidential candidate Steven Colbert. That's right, folks. Like a typical heartless Conservative, Colbert's not content merely trying to shrink government to a convenient, easy to drown size. No, he's not going to rest until he makes it harder for un-American liberal weenies like you to waste your hard-earned dollars by using them to buy things…

Poverty and the Public School Classroom

When you hear the word "poverty," what do you think of? Starving children in Africa? Subsistence farmers in Asia? Is poverty some distant concept? Something terrible, but far off? Yes, and no. Because, while poverty is terrible, it can also be close to home. Maybe as close as the public school down the street. Poverty is the vexation of the junior high school science teacher with no budget to buy paper to print worksheets, tests, and notes. She teaches in a "low-income, rural district in southwest Mississippi" and $243 would give her a year's supply of paper for 120 students. Poverty is the…

Antarctica: Others Think I'd do a Helluva Job, Too

Image: courtesy of Bob O'Hara, author of Deep Thoughts and Silliness. Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter (remember Morris, Minnesota in January? Or how about Helsinki, Finland in November, then again in February?), I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all…

From the Archives: Ebook Business Models

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from November 7, 2007. It generated quite a few interesting comments, so you might want to check back at the original post. My feeling on a lot of these points has shifted a bit with time, so I'll probably revisit the topic in the fall. ===== This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, as we (at York and as a profession) start to move in a coordinated way to making ebooks an important part of our collections. What's the…

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