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The American Astronomical Society responds to "Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?"

A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going. I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any comments from any of the various societies themselves. I did find that a bit disappointing in that the public conversation seemed to be happening without them. Never a good thing in the digital age. Today, however, Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society added a comment to my original…

More from the BCCE: Atkins and Harpp on talking chemistry with the people.

It was another full day at the BCCE, starting with an excellent plenary address by Peter Atkins (who wrote my p-chem text, plus dozens of other books) and David Harpp (of the Office of Science and Society). Each of them spoke about the best ways to talk about science with people who are not scientists, science teachers, or science students. Some highlights after the jump. Atkins, it turns out, is not just a scientist and author, but also an accomplished artist. So, it's probably not surprising that he sees the most promising route for spreading chemical understanding as a visual route. A…

Bat sex is not protected by academic freedom

Whoa, dudes. Did you hear about the bats who have oral sex? Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does…

links for 2008-12-22

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / How to talk to writers "Writers are people, and they were people before they were writers. They change light bulbs and buy groceries just like everyone else. Really. Because they're people, they vary. Some of them are jerks, but many of them are very interesting people to talk to." (tags: blogs culture SF books writing) Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » How long could a black hole remain in the center of the earth? I don't know, but I expect a panicky Gregg Easterbrook column about it any day now. (tags: science physics blogs silly…

Unfollowing

So a couple of weeks ago I unfollowed every science-type person in my Twitter feed. Not because I don’t like them, in fact, many were friends and colleagues. But there’s something sickly in the online science community, and this was an experiment in ways I might build around that. I have mixed feelings about Twitter. On the whole, I think it’s a marvellous invention, which exposes me to people and ideas that I might not ever come by otherwise. I’ve gotten work through it, made pals, and learned many interesting things. But there’s also a certain predisposition to sourness. It’s a poor format…

A stunning new Mesozoic bird... well, new-ish

Better late than never, I've only recently gotten hold of Zhou et al.'s paper on the enantiornithine bird Pengornis houi, published online in Journal of Anatomy back in January but now available in hard-copy. I must say that I really dislike the new trend of publishing things in special, online versions prior to their 'proper' publication. Anyway... Pengornis (which is from the Lower Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Dapingfang, Liaoning, China) is particularly interesting for several reasons... It's very well preserved, with one of the best-preserved skulls of any Mesozoic bird [skull…

ScienceOnline2010 - Program highlights 6

Continuing with the introductions to the sessions on the Program, here is what will happen on Saturday, January 16th at 4:30 - 5:35pm: A. Online Reference Managers - John Dupuis and Christina Pikas moderating, with Kevin Emamy, Jason Hoyt, Trevor Owens and Michael Habib (Scopus) in the 'hot seats'. Description: Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information. A few years ago, the options were limited to expensive proprietary desktop clients or BibTeX for people writing in LaTeX. Now we've got lots of…

Dinner With a Dinosaur X

You are cordially invited to Dinner With a Dinosaur X—that's a Roman numeral, not a mysterious appellation. The event happens March 12, 2010, in the Great Hall at Chicago's Union Station, located at 210 South Canal Street, 60606. Yes, there will be a dinosaur, and no, it will not be alive. Other relics include Honorary Dinner Chairs Governor Pat Quinn and Senator Dick Durbin. More importantly, proceeds from the event will benefit Project Exploration, "a nonprofit science education organization that makes science accessible to the public—especially minority youth and girls—through…

Darwin Day in the Guardian

Karen is excited this morning, reading the enormous Guardian edition full of good Darwiny goodness, chockful of articles by Dawkins and many others, as well as extracts from Darwin's works. The only part I find a little too narrow is The best Darwinian sites on the web which mentions only a small handfull of such sites, e.g., Darwin Online, Darwin Correspondence Project, Darwin Day Celebration, AboutDarwin.com and Darwin Today (the last one yet to launch next month). I know, I know, these are the biggest and bestest, but there are so many others that I feel are snubbed by being left out -…

Climate Research Unit e-mails

There has been a lot of chatter about the e-mail cracked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (not to be confused with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the UK Met Office in Exeter). I would like to post abou it, but, I really can't comment. Since PSU is involved in the issue and there is an ongoing inquiry into the issue, I can not comment: there is a slightest possibility anything I say could be considered in some sense official from PSU; or, prejudicial to the inquiry; or, biased, as I have some connection to some of the people involved…

Weekend Fun

I had some bad news about two Boomer dudes that I know and like(d): one died of lung cancer the other day, and the other was diagnosed with leukemia. But apart from that I had a pretty good weekend: Played Eclipse again, got royally whipped. Gave a talk and did some debating at a skeptics' event in Eskilstuna, met loads of friendly people, all while wearing a suit and tie because I was heading directly to the following do afterwards. Celebrated my oldest friend's 40th birthday. Met lots of surprising greying 40-y-o versions of his friends that I haven't seen much since leaving the Tolkien…

Fornvännen's Winter Issue On-Line

The new version of a slab from the Kivik cairn. Fornvännen 2015:1 is now on-line on Open Access. Sven Sandström on fake Paleolithic art in France. Andreas Toreld and Tommy Andersson on sensational new discoveries on the carved slabs of the Kivik burial cairn. They've been endlessly discussed for over 200 years, and now the whole game just changes. Birgit Maixner on a new Late 1st Millennium elite site at Missingen/Åkeberg in Norway. Inger Jans et al. on the last users of runes in the unbroken tradition from the Iron Age on – around 1910! Anders Söderberg on one of these lovely little…

The Huge Fish

Great images of my childhood are appearing on-line from an unexpected source. My dear Connecticut nanny Lynn Leavey is scanning choice pix from her time with us in Sweden in 1978-79. Here's my India-goin', safety-match-pushin', ABBA-accountin' grampa Ingemar with a big fish and three small boys on the shore of Lake Lillsjön in Kungsängen west of Stockholm. If I recall correctly, the monster pike weighed 8.3 kg, and I still haven't seen a larger one get caught. Ingemar took it with his favourite method, dragrodd, where you trail a wobbler lure after your boat and row along the edge of the…

Nomenclator Zoologicus online

Every taxonomist has to check before they name a genus that the name hasn't been used before, or that their own taxon isn't a synonym of some previously named group. Eliminating synonyms is a complex task, involving a slew of literature from the 1758 edition of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae to the modern era. So a number of reference works were published which list where a taxon name was first published. One such was the ten volume Nomenclator Zoologicus which covered the zoological nomenclature from 1758 to 1994. It is now available in electronic format online, in a database format that can be…

Plimer is not entitled to his own facts

The ABC's quality control at Unleashed appears to have failed. They have published an article by Plimer that merely repeats many of the claims from his discredited book. Plimer has enlarged his claim from his book that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities. Now it is: Over the past 250 years, humans have added just one part of CO2 in 10,000 to the atmosphere. One volcanic cough can do this in a day. Tamino proves him wrong even if you count supervolcanoes. And note that it is dishonest for Plimer to use supervolcanoes to argue that humn emissions don't matter, since supervolcanoes…

The History Of Cooking in Five Courses

FROM OPEN FLAMES TO SOUS VIDE: The History Of Cooking in Five Courses Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - 7 p.m., doors open at 6 p.m. Cost $50. Reservations required. Call 612-624-9050 Join Chef Chris Olson and local experts on an exploration of the evolution of cooking in five delicious courses. With the Bell Museum's wildlife dioramas as a backdrop, Olson, cook at St. Paul-based Meritage and co-creator of Paired, will take diners on a culinary journey through the ages, from the invention of fire to the scientific approach to food through molecular gastronomy. Biological anthropologist Greg Laden…

The Tribulation flops

If you've been wondering how it would turn out, the first review of the Left Behind video game is online. It doesn't get any thumbs up. Don't mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it's a Christian game. Mock it because it's a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the…

Who has the weird eyes?

That guy Ben Goldacre just blew my mind. What is the most popular cosmetic surgery in Asia? Blepharoplasty. Many people want to have the Western "double eyelid", while I didn't even know I had a double eyelid until I saw a few comparison pictures! In addition to plastic surgery, people buy cheap plastic gadgets to create a wrinkle, or use ugly do-it-yourself methods with acid and double eyelid tape (yes, there is such a product). I am rather weirded out. A wrinkle I never even noticed before, or at least took for granted, is apparently a mark of beauty to some people who lack one. That's…

Get thee behind me, Satan!

I have been tempted many times by that over-expensive sexy slab of technology called the iPhone, so I don't need Seed adding to the temptation with a list of science apps for the iPhone. Fortunately, the strongest argument against the iPhone for me right now is that it's closed and only supports one carrier…who does not offer good service in the wilderness of western Minnesota. If ever they opened the gadget up, though, or if ATT built a cell phone tower in my neighborhood, I'd have to rely on my wife's ability to slap and shackle me to prevent wasteful spending.* *Which is, obviously, a…

Around the Web: Digitizing your personal library, Librarian tribes interact, Piracy trumps obscurity again and more

Slice and Scan After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control? The smart scholar's publication-venue heuristics; or, how to use open access to advance your career Piracy trumps obscurity again Open to All: Preserving Library Values in a Digital World Proposing a Taxonomy of Social Reading How Should Peer Review Evolve? Why Peer Review Matters Mutations of citations: Just like genetic information, citations can accumulate heritable mutations Bookstores: dead or alive? Over It Yet? Privacy, That Is An Amazon Digital Book Rental Plan? In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to…

Speaking Schedule Oct/Nov

Wednesday 5 Oct. 17:00. About Fisksätra before the 1970s housing development. Fisksätra shopping centre, HAMN project office. Thursday 13 Oct. 10:00. About Bronze Age sacrificial sites. Uppsala, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3, Dept of Archaeology. Monday 17 Oct. 18:30. About pseudoarchaeology. Stockholm, KTH, Lindstedtsvägen 5, lecture hall D2, Swedish Skeptics. Thursday 27 Oct. 14:00. About the late-1st millennium aristocracy. Norrköping, Saltängsgatan 7, Senioruniversitetet. Thursday 3 Nov. 14:30. About the new media. Kristiansand, Vestre Strandgate 7, Radisson Blue Caledonien…

Pharyngula kindled?

Look: you can buy me on Amazon now, for 99¢ cheap. It's all through this strange new device Amazon is selling, called a Kindle, which is a fancy new e-book reader with some nice display technology and an absolutely evil business model. Now instead of buying books that you can do with as you please, you can lease them and get digital copies all bound up in DRM hindrances. The hardware is a step forward, the software lock-up of all the content is a big leap backwards, one that is going to doom it all to failure. Kottke seems unimpressed, Business Week likes it, John Gruber hopes it flops. I'm…

Great Moments in Hubris

I stopped by a Sports Authority store yesterday to buy a couple of whistles before tonight's intramural basketball game (a persistent problem in the last few years has been that the students refereeing the game don't have whistles, and thus fould go uncalled). There were laser-printed signs taped to the front doors saying (approximately): When the Patriots win on Sunday, we will have official locker-room championship hats and T-shirts for sale after the game. Now, this is a corporate entity unaffiliated with the team, so I'm not sure if the woofing theorem applies, but if San Diego wins…

Friday Beetle Blogging: A mealworm comes of age

Tenebrio molitor, pupa Tenebrio molitor is a darkling beetle known more for its immature stages than for its adults. It is the ubiquitous mealworm. You can buy these granivorous beetles at any pet store as food for fish, birds, and reptiles. The above shot of a developing pupa requires two sources of light. A flash head positioned behind the insect backlights the subject to produce the translucent glow. A second, positioned above and in front, is powered down and provides the highlights and details of the head and appendages. Tenebrio molitor larva and pupa Stronger backlighting gives…

Even Pharma Sales Reps Couldn't Rescue Exubera

We wrote a few days ago on the disappointing discontinuation of Pfizer's Exubera, the first inhaled insulin product. The always-insightful Dr Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline has an excellent commentary on this case, including his own take on the futility of putting lipstick on a pig: 1. Marketing isn't everything. The next time someone tells you about how drug companies can sell junk that people don't need through their powerful, money-laden sales force, spare a thought for Pfizer. The biggest drug company in the world, with the biggest sales force and the biggest cash reserves, couldn't move…

Clever? Or Just Confusing?

This month, WIRED magazine offers 10 green heresies, such as the suggestion to buy conventionally grown foods over organic ones and to embrace nuclear power, to save the planet. I certainly support their efforts to bring attention to some fallacies of the green-marketing movement (the authors suggest, for instance, buying used cars over hybrid vehicles) but I also realize, once again, that one needs a Ph.D. in ethical consumption to be a proper environmentalist these days. Furthermore, many of their suggestions focus superficially on energy/carbon issue while ignoring other issues, such as…

Crochet your own coral reef

UK Reef (detail) - with candy striped anemone by Ildiko Szabo (foreground) and anemone grove by Beverly Griffiths (background). Photo by George Walker.source This afternoon at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, physicist Margaret Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring will be giving a lecture and workshop on crocheting coral reefs with the "hyperbolic crochet" technique. While her creations can't replace the real reefs that are rapidly disappearing, they are purdy, and some of the forms are remarkably similar to real species of coral, diatoms, and anemones. More about the crochet…

Welcome, OmniBrain!

I should have posted about this yesterday, but, well, I'm a slacker. One of my favorite blogs, OmniBrain, has moved to ScienceBlogs. Both Stephen and Sandra are great bloggers, and they always manage to have fun with cognitive and brain sciences. Stephen is a perception researcher, but I try not to hold that against him. He's done some cool work, though. Some of you might find this paper interesting, for example. Sandra, in addition to her lighthearted blogging, also posts on important mental health issues, which has been something generally lacking on ScienceBlogs. She also makes really…

Sunday Garden Blogging

I am not sure that it would make sense to grow artichokes, if the garden were serving to supply food in a crisis.  But we are not having a crisis yet, so we can have fun.  Artichokes are good, but the amount of food you get, per unit of garden, is not great. The artichoke was sort of an impulse buy.  I thought it was an attractive plant.  Perhaps there will be a trend to make gardens both attractive and edible. This photo was first converted to "black and white" (actually grayscale) because it seemed that it might look good that way.  Then I gave it a sepia tone, but did not really like…

StickyBot and Directional Adhesion

StickyBot is a robot designed by researchers at Stanford Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab as part of the Robots in Scansorial Environments project (RiSE). The robotic gecko tests their hypotheses about the "requirements for mobility on vertical surfaces using dry adhesion. The main point is that we don't need more adhesion, we need controllable adhesion." The site boils down the "key ingredients" as follows: * hierarchical compliance for conforming at centimeter, millimeter and micrometer scales, * anisotropic dry adhesive materials and structures so that we can…

Seagate: You done us bad...

Seagate's new "Free Agent" (ha!) drives are all broken, it would seem in an interesting way that makes them partially incompatible with Linux and other *nix based operating systems, including Macs. Seagate representatives claim that there may be workarounds for this, but they do not intend to find out what they are and will not support them. Solution: Never, ever buy a Seagate product again. It really isn't necessary to do so. There are plenty of other disk manufacturers. Also, wait for the next bit of news on this, about how Microsoft bribed Seagate to pull of this particular…

Am I supposed to take this seriously?

Some real estate agent, Bill Wiese, had a bad dream: he thought he was in hell, and that Jesus had put him there so he could see what it was really like, and testify to the people. Alas, some people think this guy's fantasies are reality. That link is to a painful half-hour interview with Sid Roth, a crazy Jew-for-Jesus kind of guy, and they go on and on together, plugging a video you can buy, all about this guy's pathetic dream. I skipped most of it, I'm afraid, and got just enough of a taste to feel nausea. So this is what happens when you mix up stupid people and religion. It's hell on…

Dembski vs. D'Souza

Billy Dembski complains about Dinesh D’Souza's handling of ID, then adds: I encourage anyone who has personal contact with him to provide him with better information. A point of leverage is that D’Souza presumably wants Christians, many of whom support ID, to buy his book. To be clear, then, Dembski's position is that D'Souza ought to abandon a carefully considered intellectual position in order to boost his book sales. (Note that I no more endorse the notion that D'Souza's position is carefully considered than I endorse the idea that it is intellectual.) To rephrase, Dembski thinks that…

Joe Basel's behavior is not my fault

Yeesh. This is not how we want our university to be known. One of our former students, Joe Basel, is accused of being an accomplice in a break-in to wiretap a senator's office. I knew him slightly, but he never took a course from me. He claims he was "pushed" into conservative activism by our liberal campus, which is complete nonsense: the campus isn't that liberal at all, as most of our students are from rural communities, and in my few encounters with Basel I found him to be a conservative lout from the very beginning. I know he wrote about me a few times in the awful conservative rag he…

Anthro Blog Carnival

The forty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza. Archaeology and anthropology, and all regulated by the rota system! The Rota System, from the Old Church Slavic word for "ladder" or "staircase", was a system of collateral succession practiced (though imperfectly) in Kievan Rus' and later Appanage and early Muscovite Russia, in which the throne passed not linearly from father to son, but laterally from brother to brother (usually to the fourth brother) and then to the eldest son of the eldest brother who had held the throne. The system was begun by…

How many catfish are there?

The old story goes that JBS Haldane felt that God had an inordinate fondness for beetles. It also seems he likes catfish. CJ Ferraris has produced a checklist of fossil and living catfishes and estimated that there are 3093 valid species in 478 genera (and 36 families). Of these 72 species are known solely from fossils. No one who knows catfishes will be surprised that the largest family is the Loricariidae (716 species in 96 genera), but interestingly, three genera of living catfishes could not be assigned to existing families: Conorhynchos and Phreatobius from South America, and Horabagrus…

Negotiating the Ideal Faculty Position - A Workshop

Rice University is hosting a workshop called Negotiating the Ideal Faculty Position. From an email announcement about the workshop: At Rice University we are strongly committed to increasing the diversity of science and engineering faculty and students. As part of this goal we are sponsoring an exciting new workshop for senior women graduate students and post-docs who are interested in pursuing an academic career. The workshop, Negotiating the Ideal Faculty Position, is designed to provide participants hands-on experience to enhance their knowledge of and ability to find the right…

Another NNB Pub Night, this Thursday

I'll try to be there this time. From Corie: Hi everyone, The next Nature Network Boston-hosted pub night for local scientists/researchers will be: Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 6:30pm Location: Middlesex Lounge, 315 Mass. Ave, near Central Square on the Red Line (also on the route of the M2 shuttle from Longwood) For those of you new to NNB (http://network.nature.com/boston), the networking website for Boston researchers, we host monthly informal gatherings at a local pub for Boston-area scientists (including a few Nature editors from Nature's Boston office) to meet, chat, and have a drink…

ROTFLMAO!

Online Opinion has published my post Andrew Bolt gets a perfect score on global warming as part of its Best Blog posts of 2006. This comment from Jennifer Marohasy is priceless: Interestingly this piece by Tim Lambert was published at OLO today as it is considered one of the '40 best blogs' written in 2006. Given its content, I can't imagine the judges of the '40 best blogs' know that much about global warming? But they should have known Andrew Bolt has a great blog at the Herald Sun ... and they could have probably found a much better written and more factually correct piece at his site.…

WTF? Dumbest poll ever

What kind of idiot decided to put this poll on CNN? Should information about women who get abortions be posted online? No 93% Yes 7% What kind of information are they thinking of? Home addresses, phone numbers, that sort of thing? If you read the associated article, you discover that an even bigger idiot in the Oklahoma senate, Todd Lamb, wants women in his state to fill out a 10-page, 37-question questionnaire before allowing them to get an abortion, and that information would be published online. It's good to see the poll is going the right way, but jebus…this is another low in the long…

Never Say Goodbye: Loggerhead Sea Turtle

tags: Loggerhead Sea Turtle, Caretta caretta, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day Loggerhead Sea Turtle (Caretta caretta) 90,000 remaining. Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. The photographer writes: Biologists tally nests, not individuals. Some 47,000 to 90,000 nests were counted each year on the Atlantic Coast over the past decade. Joel Sartore has shared some of his work on this blog before, so I am thrilled to tell you that National Geographic also appreciates his exemplary work. You can view more endangered animals of the United States that were…

What does Spain think of the atheist bus campaign?

Well, if you believe in online polls, they don't like it very much. But hey, you know what we think of online polls! I suspect that we'll be able to win over all of the beautiful country of Spain with a few clicks on all of our computers. Here's the question, and the current state of affairs: Que opinas sobre esta campaña ateista? (What do you think of the atheist bus campaign?) Pésima (very bad): 83% Mala (bad): 4% Antiliberal: 8% No se (don't know): 0% Buena (good): 5% Will it become buena in the next few hours? By the way, the slogan sounds much prettier in Spanish: Probablemente Dios no…

Navier-Stokes Still Open

On October 2, Nature published this news brief about a claim of a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations: A buzz is building that one of mathematics' greatest unsolved problems may have fallen. Blogs and online discussion groups are spreading news of a paper posted to an online preprint server on 26 September. This paper, authored by Penny Smith of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, purports to contain an “immortal smooth solution of the three-space-dimensional Navier-Stokes system”. If the paper proves correct, Smith can lay claim to $1 million in prize money from the Clay…

Beware of alternative medicine sites offering breast cancer advice

There are responsible ways to present medical information and irresponsible ways. I will say at the outset that I have no ethical issues with discussing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with cancer patients, as long as the information presented is based in fact. So it was no surprise to me and actually quite alarming to read a recent report suggesting that while only 1 in 20 breast cancer websites offer incorrect information, CAM-focused websites were 15 times more likely to contain inaccurate or incorrect information. The study to which I refer will appear in the 15 March issue…

IPCC warning: read with caution

Before anyone reads the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, the one released today on the impacts, there are a few things to keep in mind. Chief among them is the level of political interference in the final document. According to the AP Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. However, some scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vowed never to take part in the process again. "The authors lost," said one participant. "A lot of authors are not going to engage in the…

Quantum Postdocs

Two quantum postdoc advertisements crossed my desk this week, from two fine institutions. Good postdocs if you can land one! The first advertisement is a double wammy from Caltech CENTER FOR THE PHYSICS OF INFORMATION CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Postdoctoral Research Positions The Center for the Physics of Information at the California Institute of Technology will have postdoctoral scholar positions available beginning in September 2009. Researchers interested in all aspects of the interface between information science and physical science are invited to apply. The appointment is…

Keeping up-to-date with the cool conference scene

I recently had an interesting online exchange with Andrew Colgoni, Science Fluencies Libraries at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON. (blog). He's interested in how I somehow seem up-to-date on all the various cool conferences and happenings in the Science 2.0 space. While I'm not sure I have all the answers on this issue -- and that we all really need to find our own way in our professional development activities -- it is interesting to be able to provide some mid-career advice to an early-career librarian. Here it is, a slightly edited version of our FriendFeed DM conversation: Andrew:…

1040

I assume that all my Americans visitors have filed their income taxes by now? Well, if not, just nod your head up and down anyway because the IRS has been looking at my blog this past week (yikes) and who knows what sort of spyware they might be testing! I mistakenly assumed that all online income tax services were the same, that it didn't matter which one I used, but I learned the hard way that this is absolutely not true. But I finally filed my state taxes -- late. I've never filed my taxes late before, and I certainly hadn't planned on that happening this time, either, since I had…

Dabbi is a good boy!

the director of the central bank does what all bad boys do the director of the central bank was late to work this morning, late enough the protests had fizzled by the time he showed, apparently however, the intrepid reporters at Vísir tracked him down they had the insight, that as with all naughty boys being accused of misbehaviour, Dabbi would have gone home to mummy; where they picked up his trail and followed him from the west end to town, where he pulled into the national hospital when a reporter tried to ask him questions, he reacted rather negatively claiming to have a doctors…

Asteroids Killed Newspapers, GIF at 11

This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait: It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation. I'm not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line-- newspapers are too slow…