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You Gotta Believe

A couple of weeks ago, when I bought the new Hold Steady album, I also picked up Sam's Town by the Killers. I bought it in spite of some pretty harsh reviews, but in the end, I think that The Onion's AV Club got it right: The Killers have created a batch of easily digestible pop songs that would be disposable if they weren't so catchy; in other words, they've more or less done their job. Sure, it would be nice if the hooks were sharper, and if songs other than "When You Were Young" could approach "Mr. Brightside"-like enormity, but overall, Sam's Town stays the course the way a sophomore-…

It is Elegant, but is It Feasible?

As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about feeding cities that includes a nice, rational (look at the comments for more good stuff) discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I'm glad to see the issue come up, because it has so much power. I'm grateful to Liz for providing such a balanced and rational discussion, since most of them aren't. I don't think I'm even overstating when I say that every time I go somewhere and talk about food, someone asks me what I think of the idea of Vertical Farming. It is the cool, trendy idea about feeding cities that gets tons…

Voices of Experience at Firedoglake Book Discussion

On Saturday, Firedoglake hosted an online discussion on David Michaelsâ Doubt is Their Product: How Industryâs Assault on Science Threatens Your Health â and David was lucky to have the chat hosted by Jordan Barab, whose wonderful Confined Space blog provided so much inspiration for The Pump Handle. In his introduction, Jordan not only did a terrific job summarizing the lessons contained in the book, but added some telling details from his own decades of experience promoting workplace health and safety. Here he is describing the demise of the long-awaited OSHA ergonomics standard: I first…

Darwin Quotes

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars. - Charles R. Darwin Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.

Darwin Quotes

I have called this principle, by which, each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. - Charles R. Darwin, The Origin of Species (ch. III) Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Celebrate Darwin Day Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin by yourself.

2008 Science Blogging Anthology Published

The 2008 Open Laboratory anthology collecting last year's best science blogging is now available on paper and for download. I'm not featured this year, but I was one of the judges, and I can tell you there's some great stuff in there. Jennifer Rohn of Mind the Gap put it all together. Buy one for your mom!

Friday Fun: New craze of 'Working' sweeping the internet

With The Onion implementing a new paywall with non-US users, I'm forced to look for a new source of cheap amusement. Yes, I'm too cheap to pay for The Onion online. For a paper copy, I'd easily pay $5 per week but online infotainment has no monetary value for me, and I suspect for anyone else. Writers starving? At a fundamental level, I'm ok with that. Hey, Onion, good luck with the new system. Can't win either way? Anyways, if you Yanks are going to make me pay, I'll be turning my comical attentions to Canada's colonial master -- the Brits. And that brings us to News Biscuit! And this…

Science Online Together 2014: Who are all the librarians? Who are all the Canadians?

I'll be at Science Online Together for the next few days. I missed last year so I'm really looking forward to getting back into the Science Online swing of things. As is occasionally my habit, I'll be listing here some attendees that are either Canadian, librarians or, in a few select cases, both. I'm adding websites and Twitter handles in the lists, but only if they're included in the directory listing. Librarians KT Vaughn Karen Ciccone Michael Habib (Twitter) Stephanie Brown (Twitter) Barrie Hayes (Twitter) Laksamee Putnam (Twitter) Zoe Pettway Unno (Twitter) John Dupuis   Canadians…

DonorsChoose Social Media Challenge 2009 Now Underway

This week kicked off the 2009 Donors Choose Social Media Challenge--a program ScienceBloggers take part in annually to help public school teachers build scientific literacy, engagement, and excitement among their students. DonorsChoose.org is an online charity where public school teachers from across the country submit requests for specific needs or special projects in their classrooms, such as microscopes for biology lessons or notebooks for a writing workshop. Readers can browse these requests online, and choose any classroom they'd like to donate to. The program has been an important event…

The changes in the business of science

In the comments to this recent post, Pedro Beltao points out his recent post - Opening up the scientific process - which I would suggest you read. First reaction will probably be - ah, how idealistic! But it will make you think, I believe. Many elements are already happening, e.g., open-source journals, open comments on online journal articles, as well as blogs and wikis that report research in real time, e.g., Useful Chem Experiments, RRResearch and UsefulChem Wiki. The world of academic science is slow-moving and resistant to change, but it is already changing nonetheless. And, as each…

The Flocking Party

Today, Chris Landau sent me a link to his Master's Thesis entitled The Flocking Party. Chris is in the MFA department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This a fascinating online production that describes one week in the life of two fictional young scientists, Frank, and his brother, Calvin, as presented in Frank's online journal. This very basic science fiction story takes place in the near future in the lab of the shadowy Doctor Harp: in the year 2035, Frank is studying invasive bird species that have been infected by the mysterious Hebbets virus. Hebbets virus is an innovative…

Oscarian Archaeology Journal On-Line

In its formative late-19th century decades, Swedish archaeology had three journals with a nationwide scope (sometimes also covering Norway with which Sweden shared a king at the time). All three were published in Stockholm by the same small group of people: the Royal Academy of Letters had the academic Antiqvarisk Tidskrift för Sverige (1864-1924) and the more pop-sci-orientated Vitterhetsakademiens Månadsblad (1872-1907), and the Swedish Antiquarian Society had Svenska Fornminnesföreningens Tidskrift (1871-1905). The two latter merged in 1906 and took the name Fornvännen. This journal is…

The 49th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The Medium is revealed

Those of you who have been kind enough to submit your skeptical blogging to this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle may have been puzzled by the replies you received. It appears that DoC relied upon a certain medium to transmit the entries telepathically or by distant reading to DoC. Well, now that the Circle is here, it would appear that DoC is AWOL. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), the Medium has taken a hand and channeled the entries to a certain very famous deceased skeptic named Harry, who is as we speak transmitting them from the other side to…

Biology of Genomes meeting report

Regular readers will be aware that my last attempt to report on the presentations at last month's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Biology of Genomes meeting resulted in some controversy, as well as some fruitful (if sometimes heated) discussion on the topic of conference blogging. My next attempt will likely prove less divisive: I was kindly invited to write a meeting report by the journal Genome Medicine, and the full text of the article is now available free online. Given the brevity of the article and the scope of the journal I've focused my coverage on the presentations most relevant to…

Rev. Haggard to get online MA in Psych - Also no longer gay.

I'm proud to report that Ted Haggard is no longer gay since he underwent three whole weeks of very intensive counseling. He was so impressed with his counseling that him and his wife are going to attend university and get their masters degrees in psychology (I'm psyched he's joining me in my chosen profession!). It sounds like they'll be going to Phoenix Online University or somewhere similar and hopefully counseling people to ungay themselves just like he was so successful in doing! All praise Rev. Haggard! The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced…

Google is building its own Wikipedia

Google is building its own version of communally-constructed online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which consistently ranks among the most visited websites in the world. The Internet search powerhouse is inviting chosen people to test a free service dubbed "knol," to indicate a unit of knowledge, vice president of engineering Udi Manber said Friday in a posting at Google's website. "Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," Manber wrote. "There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there…

Boston of the Future Viewed from 1908

The Boston Public Library has a really cool exhibit about postcards related to Boston. Here's one I thought was funny from 1908 (based on the postage, I think it's 1908): I want my own unidirigible! Too bad Boston doesn't really look like this.... If you can't get to the library, the postcards are online here.

Blogging Professor!

Is this the first such thing? A faculty position at UNC school of journalism. From the job ad: This person should be highly skilled in writing and editing online news, in blogging and in developing news content for the web. Apply if you think you can and want to do this.

Physicist Finishes 3rd at WSOP

I didn't realize that Michael Binger, who recently finished 3rd in the WSOP main event and won $4.1 million, is a PhD physicist. Seed Magazine did, however, and they've got an interview with him online. Very cool. I know that Sean Carroll, cosmologist from the University of Chicago, plays poker as well.

An "arrogant medico" makes one last comment on dichloroacetate (DCA)

I love it. You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate: I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment. I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…

New (and final?) Notes from Underground

The latest edition of the myrmecological newsletter is online here. It may well be the last, according to editor Gordon Snelling: We have close to 200 members and I can count on two hands the people that have regularly supported Notes by sending in material for publication... I feel like I am banging my head on a wall at times and honestly I am losing the motivation to keep this going. Notes from Underground has come and gone before. The printed newsletter was inaugurated in 1988 by Harvard…

Wealthy white people get more sleep

I did not find it surprising. If you have money, you can buy yourself time - to exercise, to eat a good meal at a nice restaurant or to fix healthy food at home, and to sleep as much as your body needs. As a result, you will be healthier overall. You can read about the study here (hat-tip:Sleepdoctor)

Will the rich save the planet?

Save the planet? Buy it: Millionaires are purchasing entire ecosystems around the world and turning them into conservation areas. Their goal? To stop environmental catastrophe. But will they know how to do it well? Will they inject some of their own incorrect ideas into their projects? Who will they listen to when designing these? Will their kids continue?

Darwin Quotes

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith? - Charles R. Darwin Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.

Darwin Quotes

On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: "An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'" - Charles R. Darwin Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.

Sourdough and Sunflower Seeds

We rarely buy bread. Instead I bake. Tonight's production involved a 5-day sour dough and a bag of roasted sunflower seeds. Pretty good, though I overestimated the amount of salt on the seeds and overcompensated. The sour dough was just for flavour: I can't wait for a proper lactobacillum leavening, so I put yeast in. [More blog entries about baking, bread; bakning, bröd, surdeg.]

Orcas Work Together for Adorably Tasty Meal

A pod of Orcas surrounds a seal on an ice sheet and creates waves to try and knock it off. This reminds me of when you buy a candy bar and it gets stuck by the wrapper and you have to shake the machine to get it out. Thanks to Zooillogix reader extraordinaire Don Quixjote (aka ali) for forwarding along.

Chirality matters...

Even in cosmetics. The scientific tour de force doesn't stop there; they also give you lessons on deuterium oxide, fullerenes, and liquid crystals. The deuterium oxide thing is puzzling - another cosmetics company purports to sell spritzers of D2O. It's almost enough to make you buy some just to stick in the NMR to see if they're for real.

Getting Your Science Online: Presentation at Brock University Physics Department

It seems that Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario really likes me. Two years ago, the Library kindly invited me to speak during their Open Access Week festivities. And this year the Physics Department has also very kindly invited me to be part of their Seminar Series, also to talk about Getting Your Science Online, this time during OA Week mostly by happy coincidence. It's tomorrow, Tuesday October 23, 2012 in room H313 at 12:30. Here's the abstract I've provided: Physicist and Reinventing Discovery author Michael Nielsen has said that due to the World Wide Web, “[t]he process of…

Online Weekly Colloquia?

Recently I've been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that's not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well...I was a bit disappointed. Sure there are a lot of videoconference companies out there...which almost all have limited version for use for free. But these limited versions almost all seem to restrict to only a few participants. Anyone know of some software which might be appropriate for attempting to…

The Scientific Paper: past, present and probable future

A post from December 5, 2007: Communication Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and…

The Scientific Paper: past, present and probable future

A post from December 5, 2007: Communication Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and…

Why the Price of Milk Matters.

In what is undoubtedly one of the more spectacular cases of bad staff work in recent political history, Rudy Giuliani flunked the "Mr. Candidate, what's the going price for a gallon of milk?" pop quiz. (His estimates for the prices of milk and bread were substantially too low, but he was pretty close on the gallon of gas question.) Some bloggers - both conservative and liberal - and some mainstream media commentators have been wondering what the big deal is. Mr. Giuliani, they point out, probably doesn't buy his own milk, and even if he does his mind is probably on other things. More than…

Who benefits from science blogging?

Science blogger Eva of Eastern blot has news that an article she wrote on the topic of science blogs, which includes interviews with PZ and Carl (in addition to myself and others), is now online. The article is titled, "Who benefits from science blogging?", and the .pdf can be found directly here.

Open Access Zoology Journal

There's some interesting articles in the first issue of the new journal, Integrative Zoology, which is freely available online. You can also register with Blackwell Synergy to receive free email alerts for new content published in a large variety of research topics ranging from medicine to the humanities. . tags: Zoology, research, open access

Rearranging the books, officially

We all know what online petitions are worth, but this is at least a worthy cause: some graduate students have a Petition by Informed Citizens to reclassify non-science books from science categories. The goal is to persuade the Library of Congress to reclassify books about intelligent design creationism into something other than science.

Brazilian science reporting site

Well, it may be the case that science reporting is dying in English speaking publishing, but it looks like in Brazil, they are still able to do it. I was just interviewed online (good use of the technology) by a reporter from this site, Pesquisa FAPESP. If you do Portuguese, go check it out.

Does Obama Lose Poorly, or Think He's Not Losing?

While I don't agree with Mike Konczal that Obama's greatest disappointment is his inability to lose well, for me, it's probably the second greatest disappointment (the greatest being the inability to focus on the employment deficit). At least, I did agree, but now I'm pretty certain I don't. A while ago, I wrote about the strategic importance of losing: This is something that the too-smart-for-their-own-good Democratic political operatives and their progressive apologists always fail to understand: you have to create your own opportunities for good politics. If you think a policy is a good…

Links for 2012-06-12

In which we look at a great commencement speech, the oversupply of mediocrity, the nominees for a science blogging award, and Facebook games distilled to their essence. ------------ Wellesley High grads told: “You’re not special” | The Swellesley Report Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been…

Latisse!

The existence of the drug Latisse is clearly a harbinger of the end of modern civilization, in more ways than one, but it is also intensely fascinating and creepy. When I first heard of it, about a year ago, I really thought it was some sort of satirical article about the current status of big pharma and their slow but steady drift towards more (and more profitable) "lifestyle" medications. But no...it's frickin' real! Its original use was (is) to control glaucoma, but it was noticed that a side effect of such treatment was long and luxurious eyelashes. So, since about the beginning of…

Dichloroacetate: One last time...

At the risk of irritating a fellow ScienceBlogger again, I thought I'd point out this little post forwarded to me by Norm Jenson as yet another example of exactly the inflated hype for dichloroacetate as a "cure for cancer" that will "never see the light of day" because it has little profit potential (and, by the way, that pharmaceutical companies will "probably lobby against it with all their might") that I was talking about in my original post on the subject. I should have taken a β-blocker before clicking on the link. Given the level of silly rhetoric in the post above and even despite…

The Endowment Effect

I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain. The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, the endowment effect stipulates that once people own something - they have an…

Washington Goes Berserk

I've written before about Washington's new law against internet gambling, one of the most obnoxious and hypocritical pieces of legislation imaginable. Remember how they assured everyone that they didn't intend to go after the players with this law? Apparently that's because they were planning to go after people who just talked about internet gambling. The Seattle Times reports: The first casualty in the state's war on Internet gambling is a local Web site where nobody was actually doing any gambling. What a Bellingham man did on his site was write about online gambling. He reviewed Internet…

Two-headed Cretaceous Reptile

A malformed embryonic or neonate choristoderan reptile from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of northeastern China is described. The tiny skeleton exhibits two heads and two necks, with bifurcation at the level of the pectoral girdle. In a fossil, this is the first occurrence of the malformation known as axial bifurcation, which is well known in living reptiles. Buffetaut et al. (2006) "A two-headed reptile from the Cretaceous of China" Biology Letters Early Online (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0580)

Boeing and the Myth of Beneficial Outsourcing

One of the justifications for outsourcing (firing productive U.S. workers and shipping the jobs overseas) is that it will lower costs. Then there's reality, in which firing productive U.S. workers and shipping the jobs overseas actually costs more. Consider this from the CEO of Boeing about their new plane, the 787: One bracing lesson that Albaugh was unusually candid about: the 787's global outsourcing strategy -- specifically intended to slash Boeing's costs -- backfired completely. "We spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we'd tried to keep the key…

Friday Random Ten 5/11

Baka Beyond, "Baka Play Baka": This is what happens when you take a bunch of great trad Irish musicians, and lock them into a room with a bunch of great African musicians from the Baka tribe in Cameroon. I don't know quite how to describe this. It really doesn't sound like anything else. You can tell that there's Irish roots, and you can hear some African things that sound a little bit like M'balah, but mostly, it's something different. Very cool stuff. Flook, "Beehive": Flook is, bar none, the greatest instrumental trad Irish band around. They've got the guy who I think is greatest…

Solis' Regulatory Plan for OSHA and MSHA

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis signed off on her first semi-annual agenda of regulations, which was published in the Federal Register on Monday, May 11.  She writes: "This document sets forth the Department's semiannual agenda of regulations that have been selected for review or development during the coming year.  The Department's agencies have carefully assessed their available resources and what they can accomplish in the next 12 months and have adjusted their agendas accordingly." I've griped before about not understanding the difference between the items listed on this "agenda" and the…

It's Not Just the Length, It's the Content

The never-ending discussion of whether the Web can or should replace books has shifted into the corners of blogdom that I follow again, with Kevin Drum arguing for more books, Henry Farrell arguing for shorter books, and Jim Henley agreeing with Henry, and expanding it to fiction. They're all at least partly right-- more shorter books would be a good thing. I do want to pick up on one thing Kevin said, though. He writes: This is, I grant, a purely personal reaction, but one of my occasional frustrations with the blogosphere is a sense that people sometimes think they can understand complex…

ScienceOnline2010 - what to do while there, what to do if you are not there but are interested?

ScienceOnline2010 is starting in three days! If you are not excited yet....well, I think you should be! And perhaps I can help you....with this post. First, see the complete list of attendees, or, if you want more details about everyone, browse through these introductory posts. It is always good to know more about people you are about to spend two or three days with.... Then, check out the Program to see which session in each time-slot you want to participate in. Go to individual session pages right now and join in the discussions, or ask questions. Start shaping the discussion online before…

New Species: Asphinctopone pilosa

Asphinctopone pilosa Hawkes 2010 The discovery of new insect species continues apace. Today, the online journal Zootaxa presents this pretty little ponerine from Tanzania, described by Peter Hawkes. Asphinctopone is a rather poorly-known genus previously collected only in the tropical forests of West Africa. Asphinctopone pilosa is larger than the other described species and the first record from East Africa, extending the range of the lineage thousands of kilometers to the east. source: Hawkes, P.G. 2010. A new species of Asphinctopone (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Ponerinae) from Tanzania.…