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Significant SF

I see the Sciblings are reading most significant science fiction and fantasy I've read 46 of the 50 for what it is worth, never could finish "Little Big"... I see most people are missing Cordwainer Smith, his work is mostly out of print, but the New England Science Fiction Association has a nice new edition for sale online It is well worth reading, the short stories include some of the best written.

On BBC radio…

I was interviewed by a rather baffled radio announcer about the destruction of crackers (I know! Who would have thought such a silly event would be the focus of so much attention?) on BBC Radio Ulster. Reader DaleP tells me that it will be available online only until Saturday, so if you want to hear another flat-voiced nasal American talking to the lovely lilting voice of an Irishman, here's your chance.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The seventy-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than two weeks, on 7 October. No need to be an anthro pro.

Culture and Tradition

Science Education Researcher Marie-Claire Shanahan, primatologist Eric Michael Johnson, and I joined Desiree Schell on on Skeptically Speaking to have a conversation very apropos this time of year in The West: The concept of Tradition. We said a number of very smart things which you can hear by clicking here and listening to the podcast. I should mention that all four of us will be at Science Online 2012 in January.

Four Stone Hearth Celebrates First Birthday

The twenty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Tim is celebrating the carnival's first birthday, yay! Archaeology and anthropology to make you and take you for the ride of your life. The next open hosting slot is on 5 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The twenty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The John Hawks Anthropology Weblog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to scratch your itch and soothe your yearnings. The next open hosting slot is on 24 October. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. You don't have to be an anthropologist -- you don't even have to be anthropoid!

Vendel Period Manor at Slöinge

Check out Lars Lundqvist's web site about the Slöinge excavations in Halland, Sweden! It's been on-line for ages and I only found it just now. All in English. The above picture shows a tiny gold foil figure of an embracing couple -- possibly the divine ancestors touted by Vendel Period aristocrats. You find them in the post holes of the period's mead halls. If you wet-sieve, that is.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The seventieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!

Anthro Blog Carnival

The sixty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Wanna Be An Anthropologist. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 29 July 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeoporn. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 3 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!

The HHMI Bulletin on Science Blogging and Sciblings

The HHMI Bulletin, the monthly magazine of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, runs a lengthy feature on science blogging in its November issue. I am quoted in the article with fellow Sciblings Tara Smith and Alex Palazzo. Readers of Scienceblogs are likely to find the article of strong interest along with the other features at the online version of the Bulletin. You can subscribe for free to the print edition here.

SDB 2011: Posters!

Those of you who've been to a poster session at a science meeting know that they're noisy and chaotic and entirely reliant on interaction to work…so I'm not even going to try and describe it. Instead, I strong-armed Eric Röttinger into describing his poster on video for me, and here it is. He's describing his work on Kahikai, an online database for collecting information about the development of marine invertebrates.

Dawkins at ASU

Richard Dawkins was talking here tonight. Unfortunately because of family commitments I wasn’t able to make it and ended up giving my ticket to Wilkins who has his thoughts already online. Jim Lippard (whom Wilkins and I are grabbing a beer with on Saturday) has a comment or two on the talk up. By either account, I didn't miss much beyond what I already read in The God Delusion. I suspect Saturday's discussion will be interesting!

Darwin online

I've been waiting for this for a while. The Darwin Online project is now live and ready for customers - your one-stop-shop for scans and transcriptions of not only Darwin's published works (and reviews thereof) but also his notebooks, lesser known papers, and other materials. Props to the good folks at Cambridge University, especially John van Whye, for making this valuable resource available to the history of science community.

Pottery Bwahahahaharn

Skeleton appetizer plates Pottery Barn I usually just toss my Pottery Barn catalogs, because I no longer have a house to decorate. But the Halloween edition just arrived and there's some good medical-specimen stuff in there. In addition to the skeleton appetizer plates above, which I totally covet, they have a skull tray, vampire teeth placeholders, and glossy black skull candles. But alas! This smashing skull cocktail shaker set is "no longer available" online. . .

Promenade 'Round the Cochlea

A great learning tool online is Promenade 'Round the Cochlea, which is in both French and English. I've just been swamped during the conference, but my presentation went great yesterday and I got lots of feedback to keep me busy with experiments forever and ever Ramen. Anyway, check out the app, as it does a great job of explaining some aspects of inner ear biology with pictures. Also, Happy Valentines!

ScienceBlogs Book Club meets October 1-10.

The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back! The online fans of dead-tree books will be springing back into action tomorrow to discuss Autism's False Prophets by Paul Offit. It's worth noting that Dr. Offit himself will be participating in the discussion, so you won't want to miss it. I'm planning in joining the discussion, but first I will try to post a brief review of the book here. Stay tuned.

The latest Seed

My latest column for Seed, Variant Genes-in-Waiting, is now online. If you subscribed, you would have already read it earlier this week. By the way, my mom subscribes, too, and she gives it a thumbs up. I'll have to find out what she thinks about my next column, which is all about beetle testes (and that's all you get to know about it—you'll just have to wait).

Happy Blogiversary to Orac!

One of the blogosphere's best known skeptics hit a milestone today. Orac at Respectful Insolence has now been fighting ignorance for five years. That's like, oh, about 30 in blog years. Why don't you go over there and wish him a happy blogiversary. He deserves it. Folks like Orac who publicly call out quacks get a lot of online and real-life harassment. It's nice to get well-wishers coming by once in a while.

The Most Influential Female Atheist of 2010

Jen McCreight is running an online poll to determine the most influential female atheist of the year. Uh-oh. You'd think she'd learn. But given that the results will be utterly meaningless, it's still useful — there's quite a long list of good XX godless folk, and commenters keep mentioning more that were left out. Go there to see the depth and diversity of atheism, even if you don't vote.

Flex your graphic design skills

The National Center for Science Education is looking for a new logo. The nation's premier force standing up for accurate science education has decided that their old logo lacks pizzazz. They want to enlist the vast online evolutionist cabal and naturally select the very finest ideas. Send your intelligently designed logo to them by August 10, and do read the guidelines in the link. The successful designer gets pretty fancy swag.

Floyd Landis, Again

The defense is now presenting its case. I've sifted through Landis' online powerpoint, and I'm not that impressed. For starters, he still maintains that his abnormal testosterone ratio was simply a matter of too much whiskey. Sure. And while he makes a decent case that the carbon isotope test wasn't perfect, he doesn't show how the minor flaws might have conjured up a positive result. I still think this is the most plausable scenario.

The fountains of Etna

Over the weekend, Mt. Etna (Italy) had some spectacular Strombolian fire-fountaining. Lucky for us, Marco Fulle and a group went up to the summit on Friday (the 13th) and got some great pictures of the current (ongoing) eruption which have been posted on Stromboli Online. Sounds like the eruption has been increasing in the past week, so it could be a busy summer in the Aeolian Island of Italy.

Battling misinformed consent: How should we respond to the anti-vaccine movement?

As Vaccine Awareness Week, originally proclaimed by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher to spread pseudoscience about vaccines far and wide and then coopted by me and several other bloggers to counter that pseudoscience, draws to a close, I was wondering what to write about. After all, from my perspective, on the anti-vaccine side Vaccine Awareness Week had been a major fizzle. Joe Mercola had posted a series of nonsensical articles about vaccines, as expected, but Barbara Loe Fisher appeared to have sat this one out, having posted nothing. Well, not quite. More like almost nothing. I noticed…

A Good Summary of How That New Fangled Money Works (with Two Minor Disagreements)

We typically don't think of money as technology, but money is very different than it used to be. Over at the Agonist, Bolo has two very good posts about the implications of having a fiat, non-gold standard currency, and in doing so, he gives a very good summary of modern monetary theory ('MMT') that is accessible to non-economists (Bill Mitchell and James Galbraith are great, but they aren't good explainers to a 'lay' audience; it's frustrating). For me, this is the key implication of MMT (italics mine): 1) The total amount of money is not constrained by some fixed amount of gold. Instead…

The Foster Parent Diet

Given that January is the season for regretting excesses and making new starts, I thought I'd offer Sharon's patented formula for losing 10lbs fast - absolutely guaranteed to take off the weight like lightning.; Day 1: Spend most of the day getting ready for a weekend event - running errands, shopping at local markets, prepping to prepare lunch for 20+ people. Run into friends and acquaintances and chat about the upcoming event. 3pm Day 1: Get a call from your caseworker announcing that she has four children, 4, 3, 2 and 1 in need of an emergency placement - can you take them RIGHT NOW?…

Predictably Irrational, behavioral economics in 13 chapters

I first encountered Dan Ariely on the radio show Marketplace, where he offers up little nuggets of research data from the new field of behavioral economics. Because of the individual scale of the research many of Ariely's findings have some personal finance implications. Consider the pain of paying. This is the finding that when people pay with credit as opposed to cash for dinner, they are willing to spend more. Why? Because credit cards decouple the psychic "pain" of payment from the specific act. The act of deferring reduces our pain at the damage done, and allows consumption with less…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Beatrice Lugger

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Beatrice Lugger, the founding editor of ScienceBlogs Germany, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and…

Update on redhead "hoax"

Yesterday I posted on the resurrection of the "redheads going extinct" meme (as I noted, this story seems to cycle every few years). The current source is National Geographic Magazine, which doesn't have the "article" online. I went to the bookstore and checked out the September 2007 issue, and a write up does exist about the redheads going extinct. Unlike the secondary sources it isn't as sensationalist, and makes more than a passing nod to the Hardy-Weinberg logic from which the inference is derived. That being said, the write up in National Geographic Magazine simply recycles older…

Kaitlin Thaney moves on... [Common Knowledge]

I tend to want to make posts on Creative Commons related topics at the CC blog, but this is essentially a personal post, and I also want to have it as widely read in our community as possible. Today is Kaitlin Thaney's last day at CC. She's been working for us on the Science Commons project for a long time - starting part time in mid 2006, full time in early 2007 - and she's been an absolutely essential part of our success over the years. I first met Kaitlin because she was interning, while finishing at Northeastern, for a joint MIT-Microsoft project called iCampus. She started showing up at…

The Trump War on Science: What Can the US Learn From Canada's Experience?

Sarah Boon's post yesterday, The War on Science: Can the US Learn From Canada?, is an excellent answer to a very popular topic on Twitter yesterday. With the Trump government seemingly determined to roll back decades of environmental protections and at the same time make sure no body in government talks about it, everyone wants to know what advice the Canadian science community might have for our cousins to the south. Read Sarah's post to for an excellent first answer to that question. In the four days since Trump’s inauguration, however, it has become increasingly clear that Trump is…

Seattle cabs are naturally gassed

As they say, there's nothing like travel to learn new and unexpected things. Especially from cab drivers. One of my ScienceBlog Sibs, Shelly, spends time talking with cabbies about earwax, but I seem to invite other kinds of lectures. Often times, my driver are Sikhs. So perhaps you can guess the topics. Can I have Indian religious holidays, for twenty, Alex? And other times I learn about the challenges of adapting to life in the U.S. But not yesterday. After a short plane hop over the mountains, I got to listen to a cab time lecture on clean energy. We were having a nice chat…

Tweetlinks, 10-10-09

Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time: Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons To Touch Paintings A Harvard Skirmish in the Copyright Wars - 'Do your lecture notes violate your prof's copyright?' 60 people ready to discuss ScienceOnline2010 on FriendFeed Why Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize PLoS ONE in the NYT twice this week: Aerial View: Albatrosses Following a Killer Whale and Paper Challenges Ideas About 'Early Bird' Dinosaur The era of objectivity is over - 'Pro journalism didn't self-correct. It doubled down on neutrality' The psychology of…

Teaching Carnival and Tar Heel Tavern - call for submissions

I really need to start using one of those online calendars, like Google calendar or something....I have, again, signed up to host two carnivals on the same day! This probably means that both will have to be done the "regular" way without too much creativity. Ah, well! So, next Sunday, October 1st, I will be hosting the 13th edition of the Teaching Carnival, the blog carnival devoted to Higher Ed, teaching at the college level, and the life in Academia. So, if you are either giving or receiving instruction of any kind in college or beyond, and have a story to tell, let me know by Saturday,…

My picks from ScienceDaily

More Flight Than Fancy?: Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge have turned a textbook example of sexual selection on its head and shown that females may be more astute at choosing a mate than previously thought. New research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and published online on 5 April in Current Biology, shows that differences in the lengths of the long tail feathers possessed by male barn swallows are more about aerodynamics than being attractive. Female barn swallows favour mates with longer tails and the prominent male tail 'streamers' that extend beyond the tail…

Legionnaires' Disease Linked with Wiper Fluid

By Anthony Robbins On 14 June 2010 stories appeared on the BBC and AFP. Google news displayed 70 story links. The European Journal of Epidemiology had published the research article online on 8 June. The very nice study strongly suggests that about 20% of sporadic cases of Legionnaire's disease in England and Wales may be caused by bacteria in windscreen wiper fluid. The exposure can be eliminated easily by adding "screenwash." It appears that the Legionella bacteria (Legionella pneumophila) can thrive in the warmed water that is held for the windshield washer system, often located in the…

Mushu the dragon eats a large toy lizard. Toy lizard passes through digestive tract. Mushu lives!

No time for anything substantive lately, though thoughts on the ZSL caecilian meeting coming up soon. Meanwhile, here's another short article in the 'over-enthusiastic swallowing' series: note that the articles aren't all about cases where animals choke to death. Some of them concern cases where the animals swallow insanely large objects, and still live to tell the tale. This time round, we look at the case of Mushu, a pet Central bearded dragon Pogona vitticeps, who was noted by her 7-year-old owner (Finley Collins) as having something unusual protruding from her vent. Finley was (according…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Oldest Gecko Fossil Ever Found, Entombed In Amber: Scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum in London have announced the discovery of the oldest known fossil of a gecko, with body parts that are forever preserved in life-like form after 100 million years of being entombed in amber. Black-footed Ferrets Sired By Dead Males Via Frozen Sperm: Two black-footed ferrets at the Smithsonian's National Zoo have each given birth to a kit that was sired by males who died in 1999 and 2000. These endangered ferrets--part of a multi-institutional breeding and reintroduction…

Two More Avian Anatomy Books -- Free Downloads

tags: online books, ornithology, birds, anatomyAvian Anatomy books A reader of mine sent me the links to two more avian anatomy books that are available for download from FlipDrive. How long these two downloads will last is anyone's guess, though. But I know that my overseas readers, particularly those two of you who are working on your dissertations, will be interested in these. Both books are important additions to your bookshelf, for different reasons. One book is in full color and both books are more up-to-date than the Baumel book I made available to you for download earlier (However,…

Archaeological Namesakes

I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up. In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a bibliographical essay in Fornvännen titled (and I translate), "Notes on the bibliography of Swedish numismatics and archaeological historiography". It covers writings about coins and the history of archaeology. And on page 285 we find mention of one G.H. Rundquist who had published a "Catalogue of the coin…

Andrew Marr is a Tosser

See the Grauniad for the proof. But ZOMG now I've proved him right so I must be wrong. <pfft!> - that is me disappearing in a pile of logical smoke. More seriously: yes, vast numbers of blogs are full of junk, and probably rude aggressive junk (though I don't know this from personal experience, since I don't bother read those). Most (measured by volume) of journalism is junk too - it is just that in general it is fairly polite, well-written junk. At least in the UK the most obviously trash stuff gets conveniently dumped in the Sun, Mirror, Mail and so on. But there is plenty of rubbish…

ISCID RIP?

Remember the ISCID? That's the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. From their website: he International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Football, Harmonic Oscillation, Parallel Worlds, Citizen Science, and Optics

I was out of town last week, and doing talk prep leading up to that, so it's been a little while since my last collection of Forbes links. Here's the latest from over there: -- Football Physics: The Forces Behind Those Big Hits: A look at force, momentum, and acceleration in tackling. -- The Science Of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: What Is Quantum Harmonic Oscillation? A question on Twitter provides an excuse to use some video of The Pip bouncing on playground equipment to discuss the physics of the harmonic oscillator in both classical and quantum forms. -- The Science Of Alternate Worlds: The…

"Why is the penis shaped like that anyway?"

Researcher and science writer Jesse Bering delights in being provocative. From the description of his new book, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human: Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does “free will” really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway? In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than thirty of his most popular essays from Scientific American and Slate,…

Birka Graves On-Line

Ulf Bodin and his team at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm have built a really, really sweet database and search interface for Hjalmar Stolpe's Birka graves. Between 1871 and 1895, Stolpe dug about 1100 graves in the cemeteries surrounding the Viking Period town of Birka on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. His painstaking fieldwork and documentation ensured that the Birka record will always be one of the standard databases for Viking studies. And now it's all on-line and searchable! A massively useful research tool. This morning I attended Anna Linderholm's viva/…

Elusive Randomness

Computers are built to preserve information, not to be creative, and certainly not to be random. Therefore it is a problem to get a really random number into a computer when you need one. A common source, looking at the hundredth of seconds in the computer's clock, is not all that good as it leads to predictability if you pull two numbers from the hat with a recurrent time interval between them. You really need to link the computer to something non-digital if you want real randomness. A legendary 80s science fiction computer game, Elite, used pseudo-randomness to generate its world. The game…

links for 2008-12-02

Schneier on Security: Lessons from Mumbai "If there's any lesson in these attacks, it's not to focus too much on the specifics of the attacks. " (tags: news society security blogs) Does the broken windows theory hold online? "Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters?" (tags: culture internet blogs psychology society) Good Math, Bad Math : Public Key Cryptography using RSA How to encrypt and decrypt with RSA, with a worked example. (tags: math science blogs computing) Follow the Leader :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for…

Links for 2010-07-14

Can I build an ansible to communicate across the cosmos? "In this week's Ask a Physicist, we answer a question that's on everyone's mind: Can we use quantum entanglement to make a mockery of the speed of light, and create intergalactic communications devices like Le Guin's "ansible"?" (tags: science physics quantum sf education blogs io9) Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Technology Doesn't Help "In most industries, new technology is adopted because it's expected to lower costs and/or improve productivity (which lowers costs over time). It doesn't always succeed, of course,…

links for 2009-05-08

Evolution and the Second Law | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "Without even addressing the question of how âlifeâ should be defined, we can ask what sounds like a subsequent question: does life make thermodynamic sense? The answer, before you get too excited, is âyes.â But the opposite has been claimed â not by any respectable scientists, but by creationists looking to discredit Darwinian natural selection as the correct explanation for the evolution of life on Earth. One of their arguments relies on a misunderstanding of the Second Law, which they read as âentropy always increases,â…

Move Over, Schrödinger's Cat

A couple of quick book-related items that I can't resist posting, even while on vacation: First, the sales rank cracked the top 500 on Amazon last night, peaking at 396. I don't know if this is just a matter of relative sales volume being low, or what, but it's a huge kick all the same. For the moment, it's the top seller in the Physics category, and #35 in Science as a whole. Statistical fluctuation or not, that's very cool. Even better is this excellent online review from New Scientist: Talking quantum physics with a dog may seem a tad eccentric, but Orzel's new book is a true delight to…