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My article on Mirror Neurons

My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action -- or even, as it turns out, when we read, think, or hear about someone performing that action. This mechanism, discovered about a decade ago, seems to underlie much motor, social, and even cultural learning. You can read the story here or buy the digital version online via Scientific American Mind.

How much should the president know about the Internet?

Apparently the blogosphere is abuzz with McCain's recent disclosure that he has to force himself to use a computer, that the closest he comes to using email is his staffers showing him email, and that his wife makes all the online reservations when they go to the movies (source NYT). This is in stark contrast with Obama who, on top of looking super-presidential and cool, is apparently a whizz with the technotoys, and even had his own podcast since early days of his senatehood. In the NYT piece, an interesting comment was posed by both the McCain campaign and a blogger associated with the…

The Sam's Club Model of Environmentalism (Buy More!)

This post was written by Wyatt Galusky.* If you love the earth too, buy, buy, buy. So, I suppose it had to happen at some point - the Sam's Club model of environmentalism. Buy More (consumables imprinted with the imprimatur of the Earth). Save More (of aforementioned planet). Alex Williams reports in Sunday's New York Times on the burgeoning commoditization of the environmental movement, and the various views people have taken on this process. This on the heels of the two biggest big box stores - Wal-mart and Home Depot - taking the "green" plunge. As a committed environmentalist, I have…

Pink and Cheap Is No Way To Go Through Space

Around ScienceBlogs recently there's been some discussion about the following eyebrow-raising Toys-R-Us advertisement: The ad has caused rumblings of discontent because it's pretty obvious the pink microscope and telescope are supposed to be "girl" editions, and in both cases the pink one is the smallest, dinkiest, and lowest powered. The bare fact of pinkness in and of itself isn't really something I'd care about - if the same dopey company wants to make "boy" microscopes in MARPAT it would be stupid but as long as it's a good scope then I have no objection to the consumer getting what…

The Encyclopedia of Life is Over-Hyped

The imminent release of an embryonic Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) has journalists buzzing about an exciting new online resource. I wish I could share their enthusiasm. EoL has announced 1.7 million species pages within a decade, providing biological information for all of the world's described species. That's a lofty goal, but their plan for getting the content for those pages goes something like this: Let's build a snappy website, and then the site's awesomeness will spontaneously cause all the biologists in the world to shower us freely with their knowledge. And maybe they'll buy us a pony…

Links for 2012-04-02

MacRecipes | Fathom Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)? Or perhaps you forgot about your favorite episode (season 1, episode 12) when Mac escapes via a casket that transforms into a jetski. And how many times has Mac made a diversion? In order to placate all of your MacGyver-related curiosities, we offer you MacRecipes. Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive » Should science journalists actually read the scientific paper before reporting? And other questions from UK science journalists…

AFA Distortions on Walmart and Gays

The American Family Association is really obsessed with Walmart's decisions to court gay customers, so much so that it is willing to completely distort reality in order to whoop up its mostly mindless followers into an anti-gay frenzy. Look at this Action Alert, where they make it look as though Walmart made the decision to donate a huge amount of money to a gay rights group: In a show of support to help homosexuals legalize same-sex marriage, Wal-Mart has agreed to automatically donate 5% of online sales directly to the Washington DC Community Center for Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and…

Open Lab 2007 - Up For Sale!

Well, The Day has arrived! The Open Laboratory 2007, the 2nd anthology of the best science blogging of the year, is now up for sale on Lulu.com! Yes, you can buy it right here! In a few weeks (and I will be sure to tell you), the book will also available in online and offline bookstores. You can read the background story, see all the submitted entries and the winning 53 posts. All the kudos go to this year's editor, Reed Cartwright for doing a magnificent job on every aspect of the process - from summoning posts for submission, getting volunteers to judge the posts and providing all sorts…

Zombies defend Christmas!

That's all I can imagine: this imaginary conflict has gotten so stupid that it must be mindless undead droning out their need for brains who are still fighting it (oh, hi, Bill O'Reilly!). The latest instance is one of these always-affronted religion organizations that has made a Naughty and Nice List, to "make sure that Christmas does not get secularized or censored from its essence, namely the birth of Jesus Christ". On the naughty list: Disney, because their online store is called the "holiday shop". On the nice list: Best Buy, because Jesus wants a new digital camera they use the word "…

Links for 2011-06-20

Minneapolis "[Don] Rawitsch, a lanky, bespectacled 21-year-old with hair well over his ears, was both a perfectionist and an idealist. He started dressing as historical figures in an attempt to win over his students, appearing in the classroom as explorer Meriwether Lewis. By now he'd made it through to the western expansion unit, and he had in mind his boldest idea yet. What he had so far was a board game tracing a path from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The students would pretend to be pioneer families. Each player would start with a certain amount of money…

Scholarly Journals Anthology

Last week an anthology I've edited was delivered from the printers. Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future. The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar. Stockholm, 21 April 2006. Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 65. Stockholm 2007. 109 pp. ISBN 978-91-7402-368-8. On 21 April 2006 a round-table seminar took place on the premises of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm. The occasion was Fornvännen's centenary, and the theme was the current status and future prospects of such scholarly journals. This volume…

Finally, iTunes might be sort of worth it

I have purchased a few songs from iTunes, but I don't like doing it. I have the sense that you are not really buying the song in the same way you do when you buy a CD. But I do use the iTunes software (for now) on my Windows box to keep track of the CDs I own. Eventually, I'll change how I do that (I find iTunes to be a bit annoying). Anyway, there is some important and interesting news about iTunes that you may want to know. Multiple UK news outlets are reporting today that Sir Paul McCartney has reached a deal with Apple to offer the Beatles catalog on the iTunes Store. The deal,…

Hansen Profile in the Latest Issue of Seed

The new December/January issue of Seed is now out [it has been out for weeks now, where have you been? - ed] and I wanted to draw attention to a piece that I have in there. The article isn't online and so can't be linked yet, but it's a profile of NASA's James Hansen, who I had the pleasure of meeting with last October. A lot has been, and will continue to be, written about Hansen; knowing this, I wanted to see if I could actually say something new. I'm not sure if I succeeded, but here's the upshot: I argue that Hansen has "shattered some long-held convictions in the scientific community,…

Upcycled Purse Honors Howard U. Grad - it could be YOURS!

Penny Richards has created a new purse, available on her Etsy site. Here's some info about it she shared with me (details about the purse construction available on the site): [the purse honors] Melba Roy, a Howard University graduate (undergrad and masters) who was a mathematician at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1960s. She led a team (four women, seven men) who did computations to track the movements of satellites. I wish I could find more about her, but there's nothing much online--can't even find a birth year (or death date, but she might still be alive). Get it while it's…

On the evilness of the emerging ebook app ecosystem

The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel. This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side." My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…

Cognitive Daily -- now full text RSS!

That's right, you can now get the full text of every Cognitive Daily post via RSS. There's just one catch: You must buy a $399 Amazon Kindle and pay 99 cents (per month, I assume) to subscribe to Cognitive Daily. I don't know if this subscription will allow you to view images, and I'm pretty certain video, polls, and other interactive features won't be available, but for some people this might be a very attractive way to get Cognitive Daily. You can also get the amazing ScienceBlogs Select feed, which includes the best CogDaily posts as well as the best from dozens of other ScienceBlogs for $…

Frank Schaeffer throws the ‘atheist fundamentalist’ bomb

Frank Schaeffer really detests most of the New Atheists (except for Dan Dennett; he loves Dennett to pieces). He thinks they're just like the Christian fundamentalists, and he should know, since his father was one of the most fanatical evangelicals around, and he was part of that radical Christianity himself. He starts off with a damning assertion. The most aggressive members of the "New Atheism" movement have quite a bit in common with religious extremists like Pat Robertson and Ted Haggard. Whoa. That's a strong accusation. I wonder what these points of commonality are? I read his whole…

Does Shirky's Cognitive Surplus undervalue meatspace?

  Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions. He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…

Probably not the approach to instilling ethics most likely to succeed.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California is getting serious about ethics -- by requiring all of its 230,000 to take an online ethics course. Yeah, throwing coursework at the problem will solve it.* Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even want to count this as "coursework" given the article's description of what the employees will be getting: The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC's 230,000 employees on the university's expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. ... Although the course was developed to support an ethics policy…

Anything but the obscurity!

I've already mentioned this interesting set of ideas Cory Doctorow brought up. In particular, this part of the introduction made me think: Cory is an author of science fiction (SF) and is published in the US by Tor books (which happens to share a parent company with Nature). He also gives away books on the web. As Tim O'Reilly says, the main danger for most authors is not piracy but obscurity. The number of people who don't buy a book because they can copy the electronic version is trivial compared to the number who buy it as a result of finding it online. Now the biggest factor determining…

Hey to Bristol Instruments

Last week, I made an oblique mention of an equipment failure, and commented about the positive experience I had in dealing with their engineers on the phone. I carefully avoided naming the broken product or the company I was dealing with, out of some obscure sense of blogging ethics. I shipped the broken item off to them, and on Friday got an email telling me it was fixed: Don't ask me what exactly we did; but after some alignment and power-on-power-off, it seemed to come online and give proper readings. Perhaps the power surge mentioned in your blog hung up some logic gates? I did a double-…

Anderson, Chris. Free: The future of a radical price. New York: Hyperion, 2009. 274pp.

This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!" But, as much as I argued with it, as much as I wanted all of the main points to be wrong, as much as I disagreed with many of the details, by the end I grudgingly accepted that Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price might just have a few very valid things to say about the way the economics of online content is evolving. This is the Google generation, and they're grown up online simply assuming that everythng digital is…

Biological SF and "Getting" the Web

Andre at Biocurious points out an interesting piece in Nature. They interviewed four prominent SF authors--Paul McAuley, Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski, and Peter Watts about biology in science fiction. The resulting article is a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and examples, and if you go to the supplementary information page for the article, you can get a longer version, including bits that were cut out of the print edition. That is, of course, assuming that you are surfing the Web from an institution that happens to have a site license for Nature, or have a personal…

Global Warming Opportunities?

This week's Ask a Scienceblogger Question involves an article in The National Review Online that was clearly written by a complete bloody moron. The question is this: I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point? The author of the paper actually does have a point, but not much of one, and it does not justify his line of argument. If the point that the author is trying to make is that global warming can create…

PSP Pre-Conference: The Culture of Free: Publishing in an Era of Changing Expectations (part 1)

I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010. I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.   Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining.  Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had  13k sales, but…

Towards a library ebook business model that makes sense

Over the last week or so a huge issue has sprung up in the library and publishing world, which I touch on in my eBook Users' Bill of Rights post. The publisher HarperCollins has restricting the number of checkouts an ebook version of one of their books can have before the library needs to pay for it again. The number of checkouts is 26 per year. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested. There was a comment on my post by William Dix: Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot on this issue. As well as alienating a lot of the potential market with idiotic…

Couple new philosophy entries in SEP

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online, but highly regarded, source of review articles on philosophical topics, edited by Ed Zalta. Three new articles have popped up lately that have attracted my attention: The first is on Metaphysics, by Peter van Inwagen. Metaphysics is a hard discipline to define, by van Inwagen does a good job of presenting it for first time philosophers. The second is Causal Processes by my colleague Phil Dowe. Dowe is a leading light in the topic of causation, which itself is a topic of metaphysics, and he has proposed a "conserved quantity" account…

New Visa Rules, Lessened US Hospitality

Three years ago I visited the US. Security at Newark was a little slow, but I just showed them my Swedish passport and sailed in. You see, there was a visa waiver agreement back then. And I thought there still was until 1½ hours before I was scheduled to take off to the US again this morning. I don't know if any country still has that agreement with the US. Sweden doesn't, and I found this out at the luggage drop. There's an on-line application routine for the visum (sing.) that often works really swiftly, but in my case it didn't. It's a black box and nobody knows how it works. So I missed…

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store

A little Sunday reading: "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store," one of several wonderful short stories by San Francisco writer Robin Sloan. It's sort of like magical realism for techies: Back at Supply and Demand. The air is crackÂling with wi-ââfi; Kat and I are havÂing the only spoÂken conÂverÂsaÂtion in the entire place.She's wearÂing the same red-ââand-ââyellow "BAM!" t-ââshirt as yesÂterÂday, which means a) she slept in it, b) she owns sevÂeral idenÂtiÂcal t-ââshirts, or c) she's a carÂtoon character--all of which are appealÂing alternatives. I don't want to come out and conÂfess…

Tiny cities made of crystal

Ken grows crystals. Specifically, he grows free-standing crystals made of bismuth, a metal resembling lead. It has some very interesting properties - it crystallises at right angles, and tends to form shell-like "hoppers", and natural oxidation gives the crystals a very beautiful iridescence. The end result is something that looks like a tiny futuristic city of gleaming metal skyscrapers. The good news is, Ken sells his crystals online, and of you can't afford to buy one, you can win one by correctly guessing its weight. Ken says: Ever drink Pepto-Bismol? Well if you have, then you've…

Book review: Exploring the Mystery of Matter

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator that the world has seen so far. It is a supreme expression of our collective scientific and technological ambition. It transcends national boundaries with components made in many countries and with more than 2000 people from more than 170 institutions worldwide participating in the experiments. The construction of LHC and the detectors is a story that is as varied and as interesting as the people involved in it. LHC has six detectors. Of the these, ATLAS is the largest and most ambitious. Commissioned by CERN…

Free Books in My Phone

I got the Aldiko e-book reader for my Android phone the other day - for free over the net. It came with two apparently random free books in epub format: H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Sun Tzu's Art of War. And whenever I like I can get more books for free over the net from within the e-reader: either old ones whose copyright has expired, or newly written ones with a Creative Commons licence. Austen, Doyle, Lovecraft, Twain, you name it! I can also buy copyrighted e-books and put them on my phone. The cost works out to about the same as if I mail-order a used paperback from the UK, the…

The Latest from Awful Yuppie Town: Green Divorce

One of the less attractive features of the New York Times is its tendency to feature little profiles of horrible people. They're not presented that way, of course, but that's the effect-- I read these articles, and just want to slap everybody involved. Today's story on marital tensions caused by environmental issues is a fine example of the form: He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store. Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough. Ms. Cobb…

Kate MacDowell: bloodless bodies

Entangled, 2010 handbuilt porcelain, cone 6 glaze Kate MacDowell sculpts partially dissected frogs, decaying bodies with exposed skeletons, and viscera invaded by tentacles or ants. It's the imagery of nightmares, death metal music videos, or that tunnel scene in the original Willy Wonka (not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be growing. . . ). But her medium - minimalist, translucent white porcelain - renders her viscerally disturbing subject matter graceful, even elegant. Some of her pieces, like Sparrow, below, play off the porcelain's resemblance to delicate bleached bone.…

Anthology update....

The entire file is now finished - the last quick round of proofreading is all that's left before the Grand Unveiling right at this place (likely tomorrow morning). Since people nominated the best science posts and those tend to be the most substantial posts which tend to be very long posts (sometimes in two or more parts), the book will be much thicker than I expected - around 330 pages! This, unfortunately, will also make it a tad little bit more expensive (still not hugely expensive - this is online, print-on-demand model of publishing after all). I got 13 out of 50 letters of agreement/…

You have been granted permission

This is very strange. After all the kerfuffle over that ridiculous online bookstore, they just sent me this message: Hi! Abunga CustomerService (CustomerService@abunga.com) has used the Abunga.com Email-A-Friend service to send you this message. Personal message: Please help us Empower Decency by encouraging as many of your readers to register with us. Their votes are needed now more than ever. Thank you Please click this link or copy and paste it into your browser: http://abunga.com Did you know that on Abunga.com ... + You support non-profits with 5% of every purchase? + You can help us…

Have a Poor Diet, Blame the Kids

I knew the children were up to something -- with their beady little eyes: Adults who live with children eat more fat, and more saturated fat, than those who do not, according to a new study. The report, published online last week in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, was based on data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Survey, a six-year nationwide study of more than 33,000 people carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to background information in the article, the correlation between adults' and children's diets has usually been…

Most Important Headline: Behavior Change

Each of the major papers has to choose one story to have the most prominent headline.  Today, USA Today chose this one: href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-17-gas-prices_N.htm"> href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-17-gas-prices_N.htm">Drivers cut back — a 1st in 26 years By Paul Overberg and Larry Copeland, USA TODAY The average American motorist is driving substantially fewer miles for the first time in 26 years because of high gas prices and demographic shifts, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal highway data... The growth in miles…

Eager For Better E-Book Deals

I'm eager to start reading more e-books. I rarely re-read books (except for work), and my friends rarely borrow paper ones from me, so I have little reason to hang on to paper books. E-books would be just the thing. But the prices aren't any good. I either have to pay more for an e-book than what it costs me to order a paperback from England, or I can get it for free through illegal file sharing. It's amazingly easy: just try googling a book's title, your preferred file format and the name of a file sharing service like Hotfile or Megaupload. I am well aware that I wouldn't be supporting the…

More on that really bad experiment by Blizzard

Blizzard, makers of the games Starcraft and World of Warcraft, is about to change their forum policies and require the display of real names, basically creating a massive privacy leak if you buy a silly game and go online to get some tech support. There's an excellent summary of why this was a really bad idea here, and apparently Blizzard has an inkling of possible problems — they're waffling about whether to publish employee names under their new terms. If it's not a problem for users, why should employees get an exemption? Also, I've been sent a few links to sites where people are…

Rebecca Black and The Teenage Celebrity Industrial Complex

Fourteen year old internet sensation Rebecca Black just released a follow up video "My Moment" after her debut of "Friday" that went viral with more than 167 million views. Attention at this scale landed her a spot on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a music video with Katy Perry, "Last Friday Night". Such opportunities for seemingly instant fame can affect these teens, and pre-teens, in a profound way: IRL (In Real Life)... Rebecca Black has had to endure the backlash of cyberbullying after her first video. And Black, 13, certainly never anticipated the social media uproar, mainstream…

Links for 2012-06-19

In which we look at an impassioned plea from a gay seminarian, a satirical video about the Singularity, and two more dispatches from the imminent death of traditional publishing. ------------ Letter from a gay Christian classmate « Mercy not Sacrifice I am asking you to set aside your quiet whispers for a potent disquietude; I’m asking you to turn over a few tables in the temple; I’m asking you to upbraid the violent language of your church; I’m asking you to openly speak truth to power, as one you said you would; I’m asking you to do risk crucifixion within your order; I’m asking for your…

The accidental deity

Once again those feisty young fellows at Frink Tank have caused my withered ovaries to twitch with faint lust. As a Simpsonophiliac, casual (and sometimes cynical) Dawkins observer, and admirer of All Things Irreverent, I was sent over the edge by this blog gobbet from Not Shitashi. Crazy Cat Lady. Ha! I will never think of Dawkins as Darwin's Rottweiler again. That cephalopodean dude wrote a review of The God Delusion which appears in the November '06 print edition of Seed Magazine. We coddled Science Bloggers get freebie print mags but you readers will have to rush to your…

Friday Grey Matters: African Grey Numbers Declining, EU to Blame

The wild bird trade, which is where exotic birds are trapped in their natural habitats and shipped away for pets, has devastated many types of parrot species. Thankfully this practice is now illegal in much of the world, however many parrot species have the unfortunate luck as to live in countries where these laws are enforced somewhat less that stringently. Up until now, African Greys have been spared this fate. However, recent data on their populations in the 23 countries in which they reside show their numbers rapidly on the decline. In fact, they may soon be added to the official 'red…

Might Be Bad...

I knew the economic news was bad, but I did not know how bad, until I saw href="http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8079134">this article in The Economist, thanks to a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/the_economist_g.html">link from Brad DeLong. EVERYONE knows that America's economy is slowing. Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble, overall GDP growth has fallen back sharply. The biggest short-term uncertainty for the world economy is whether American consumers stop spending and drag the country into recession. But beyond the business…

Flying Blind

From a Fox News online report: LOS ANGELES -- Jimmy Kimmel is going bicoastal as a TV talk show host. The host of ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" will fill in for a vacationing Regis Philbin on "Live with Regis and Kelly" in New York while still hosting his namesake show from Los Angeles. During the week of Oct. 22, Kimmel will fly back and forth across the country daily, co-hosting with Kelly Ripa in New York each morning and taping his own show in Los Angeles each night. That's two cross-country flights a day for five days. "I am a little bit insane," Kimmel told The Associated Press. "It will…

The future of bookstores is the...

...present of public and academic libraries? What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post, Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities. In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity. Like record stores and video rental places,…

September Pieces Of My Mind #3

Ben Aaronovitch = Benjamin Aaronson wrote The Rivers of London. I wonder if it's a pen name for my grandpa's grandpa Aaron Benjaminson, who was a farmer in Tanum. Two students are trying to play verbal chess while digging. The board is in their heads. "Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy / But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine / Oh my Lola" /Ray Davies Sudden thought: Christianity is a 2000-year extension of a state of spiritual emergency that Jesus thought would last a year or two. Sweden has recently reformed its coinage. Convenient for me and the students: when…

Pundits Aren't Experts (Usually)

Matt Bai doesn't get that. In the NY Times Magazine, Bai writes (italics mine): The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. A generation ago, you went to the doctor to find out about the pain in your knee; now you go to WebMD, diagnose it yourself and tell him what medicines you want. People used to trust stockbrokers and insurance agents; now they buy and sell at E*Trade and compare policies online. American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry. Suddenly,…

Royal Society Science Prize for Books returns

Very pleased to discover that after much uncertainty, the Royal Society Science Prize for Books has returned after securing a sponsor. They're currently seeking submissions for this year's award: Entries for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the world's leading science books prize, are being accepted from today 16 February 2011. The 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books will celebrate the best of 2010's new popular science writing for a general adult readership. The Prize is open to science books written for a non-specialist audience. The winner will receive…