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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…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

Continuing with the series (I get more and more feedback that people love this) introducing, a few at a time, the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Anil Dash is a pioneer blogger (and of course twitterer) and one of the founders of Six Apart, the company that built blogging platforms including MoveableType (which is used by Scienceblogs.com) and Typepad. Just yesterday, he made an official announcement that he will be leading Expert Labs (also on Twitter) which is a new project (largely run/funded by AAAS) to…

Social Networks, danah boyd, and Class, Redux

Apophenia, danah boyd's blog is one of the first blogs I ever read and have been reading more-or-less continuously over the past 3-4 years (since she took a class on framing with George Lakoff and blogged about it). She is probably the most thoughtful analyst of online behavior. There are thousands who can write about technology and "killer apps", but she understand better than anyone the users' point of view: what works and what not and why. Her ethnographic/sociological/anthropological/psychological approach to the study of the Web is, to me, much more insightful than any technology…

Science Online 2011: some initial reactions

Trying to describe the experience of Science Online to someone who has never been is like trying to explain the taste of a pineapple. You can get vague details across - tangy, sweet, juicy - but the full experience can never be imparted verbally. I'm not even going to try to explain what it was like to be at this year's conference, but I do have some thoughts that have arisen out of four days of fantastic dialogue with new and old friends and, of course, excessive sleep deprivation. I found there was a fascinating negative correlation between the amount of time the moderators spent talking…

Comments of the Week #94: from nuclear bombs to the changing culture of astronomy

“Observing quasars is like observing the exhaust fumes of a car from a great distance and then trying to figure out what is going on under the hood.” -Carole Mundell Enjoying what we're putting out at Starts With A Bang? There was a whole lot that we saw this past week, including a few tour-de-force pieces on some breaking news, including: How can we know if North Korea is testing nuclear bombs? (for Ask Ethan), The early Universe's most massive galaxy cluster revealed (for Mostly Mute Monday), Should you play Powerball? Science solves the mystery, The Universe’s Dark Ages May Hold The…

Mercola---still lying after all these years

It's no secret that I have no respect for Joe Mercola. Every time I read one of his promotional emails or make a visit to his website, I see more fantastic claims. Usually, I don't see blatant lies...until now... This guy likes to claim that he's in the woo-peddling business to help people...it's not about profit. This is clearly untrue. But other than his dissembling about his motives, I've never really checked his site for lies in particular...just silly, illogical falsehoods. Today I got an email from Joe: Why I Believe You Should Take Action NOW to Help Remove Potential Toxins from…

Eat chicken? Oxfam presses Tyson, Pilgrim’s, others to improve conditions for poultry workers

The anti-poverty group Oxfam America wants consumers to help poultry workers. Oxfam is calling on consumers to use their purchasing power to demand better working conditions for the 250,000 individuals who work in US poultry processing plants. The target of their demands? The four firms that control about 60 percent of the poultry market: Tyson, Pilgrim’s, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms. “Consumers do have power,” explains Minor Sinclair, Director of Oxfam America’s US Program. Consumers have “…pushed through changes in antibiotic policies within the poultry industry. They’ve pushed through…

If Smallpox could talk - not really.

A little late on this one, but the scienceblog question of the week (of last week), reads: "Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?..." If you take the question at face falue - that is in an empirical sense - then the answer is of course not. You could, I suppose, say it would be nice to at least give everything a fighting chance, especially so far as how our own human ecological footprint comes into play. But the fact of the matter is that even if we embarked on a "preservation of all kick," the reality would be that it would be done under a human…

Making my voice heard and getting the funds I need

I've blogged before about my difficulties in getting adequate and unrestricted start-up funds from my university. Where we left the story, I'd been awarded about 2/3 the start-up funds I needed, with an oral promise that I would be "first in line" for money when I arrived. I also had to spend every cent of my start-up funds before I ever arrived on campus, leaving me literally penniless as I tried to get my lab set-up. The net result of all this is that I bought a big fancy piece of equipment (BFPE) and didn't have enough to buy the doojab to actually make the equipment run. As soon as I…

Impeachment Update

The Blogosphere has had a bit of a twitter over the issue of the impeachment of President Bush.  The most assertive progressive href="http://alterx.blogspot.com/2006/11/nancy-its-your-duty-to-impeach-bush.html"> are upset that the issue is " href="http://www.democrats.com/Why-Conyers-Changed-Tune-On-Impeachment">off the table," in the words of Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers.  Conservatives are href="http://slagblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/yes-mama-sheehan-back-in-saddle.html">skeptical, imagining that the Democratic leadership is just as vicious as the Republicans leadership.  …

How much does a USB stick cost these days?

And what can you really do with them? I am not an expert on consumer technology. I stay a few miles behind the cutting edge where I can pick up the orts at a discount, and most stuff works. Last time I checked, newer (faster, bigger, whatever-er) versions of technology cost more per unit (of speed, size, whatever) than would be predicted by examination of price/unit relationships for lower (and thus older) values. Some have incorrectly claimed this to be a logarithmic relationship, but clearly it is more often a linear relationship between cost and amount up to some point, then the prices…

A Stunning Success for Faith-Based Anti-Nuclear Proliferation Efforts

Buckling under to conservative pressure to find the non-existent evidence that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, been building weapons of mass destruction, about a year ago, the Bush Administration placed online documents from the Saddam Hussein era that provided technical information on building various nuclear devices. Quoth the Grey Lady: The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public…

Around the Web: University of Virginia controversy

This collection of posts is only the tip of the iceberg of reaction to the ongoing controversy at the University of Virginia. For more, see the first item in the list for a digital archive. I consider this particular crisis a very interesting one to follow, one with implications for all universities and similar in scope and importance as the McMaster and Harvard Libraries controversies were for libraries. I guess I'll have to come up with one of these posts for the Harvard reorganization too. The current crisis at the Library and Archives Canada seems to have larger implications as well,…

Citizen Science projects on-line

Next Saturday afternoon, at ScienceOnline2010, the science goddess, the chemspider, and I will be presenting a workshop on getting students involved in citizen science. In preparation, I'm compiling a set of links to projects that involve students in citizen science. If you know of any good citizen science efforts, please share them in the comments. Here we go! Before I start listing links, I am limiting this list to projects that allow both students and citizen scientists to participate. I know of plenty of student projects, where students can isolate phage and annotate their genomes or…

Know Privacy Report: Google Web Bugs on 88% of Websites

I'm very proud of the Know Privacy team, a group of three students who performed a broad analysis of online privacy issues for their master's project at UC Berkeley's School of Information. The study is featured today on the New York Times Bits blog. Several findings are notable: They found: "From our analysis, it is apparent that Google is the dominant player in the tracking market. Among the top 100 websites this project focused on, Google Analytics appeared on 81 of them. When combined with the other trackers it operates, such as DoubleClick, Google can track 92 of the top 100 websites.…

Best Science Books 2009: The Globe 100

One of the most interesting lists every year is The Globe and Mail's Globe 100, and this year is no exception. There's relevant stuff all over the spectrum, from biography to history to graphic novels to popular science to the environment. In the print version, the categories are pretty basic: Canadian fiction, international fiction, poetry, non-fiction, graphica. Online, the categories are, well, a little more granular, and we'll get to that train wreck after the list. Here goes: Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna Tar…

The Fine Art of Reblogitation and Going Ape for Miss USA

Reblogitation (pronounced with a "j" sound for the "g", of course): the blogospheric phenomenon of reposting, and re-reposting, and re-re-reposting the information from the "apparent first" or "most snarky" report (or blog post) about a news item. Mother-post: the "apparent first" or "most snarky" report of an item, that then provides "the facts" for most of the other stories about that item online (even those that don't reference or link to the mother-post). The flurry of recent news about the question "Should evolution be taught in public schools?" that was asked of the recent crop of MIss…

"Second Life" becomes more like the first one

If you haven't heard of the internet phenomenon Second Life, you probably will soon. It's an online world where players create virtual representations of themselves, or rather, themselves as they'd like to be. Then they go about "life" in the way they would if the tedious flaws of everyday life -- gravity, jobs, cellulite, and so on -- didn't exist. It's not that people don't work in the world of Second Life. In fact, people have made thousands of real-world dollars by selling items they created in Second Life. Now Second Life is about to get an upgrade. Currently, to "talk" to others in the…