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Get SCIENCE's Influenza Issue - FREE!

Today's issue of the top-tier journal, Science, has a special online portal to its current issue about influenza, including several excellent articles about avian influenza. This issue is free to the public if you register with them. This issue includes; A complete guide and free access to the 21 April 2006 special issue, including articles on antivirals and vaccines, flu transmission, flu biology, and flu preparation -- along with an accompanying podcast. A collection of recent Science News, Review, Perspective, and Research articles on influenza, the potential for a new pandemic, and the…

Clas Tollin on 12th Century Land Ownership

The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639. My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is StorgÃ¥rdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-TÃ¥kernomrÃ¥det under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-TÃ¥kern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the…

Three Good Albums

Three good albums, listened to in the car when driving to & fro the Djurhamn dig. Silverbullit, Arclight (2004). This is dark and Gothamesque rock, sort of the Cure + the Stooges + Kraftwerk. The band searched high and low until they found a drummer who could and would play like a drum machine. One of the best Swedish records of the decade. Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage (1999). The Pet Sounds era Beach Boys discover musique concrète just as the water supply becomes heavily contaminated with mescaline. Completely otherworldly yet drenched in the sweetest vocal harmony. Skip Regan…

Sorted Newsfeed in Swedish

Printed newspaper are crap. The news in them is old, you still get entire multipage sections that you don't want, they use up trees and gasoline, they crowd your mailbox and you have to dispose of them after reading them. And they cost money! News should be read on-line, preferably with an RSS reader. (I use Google's). Now, here's something for my Swedish readers. The country's main newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, currently don't offer a finely sorted selection of thematic RSS feeds. If I want the main international news headings from them, then I have to put up with a load…

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Clashing Culture. Archaeology and anthropology, and all from the perspective of mashpi'im! Mashpia (Hebrew: ×שפ××¢â) lit. "person of influence," pl. Mashpi'im (Hebrew: ×שפ××¢××â) is the title of a rabbi or rebbetzin who serves as a spiritual mentor in Tomchei Temimim (the Chabad yeshiva), in a girls' seminary belonging to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, or in a Chabad community. Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me, not to the old submissions address. The next open hosting slot is on 19 November. All…

ScienceBlogs Showcase

The forthcoming issue of Seed will include a big spread on ScienceBlogs, and the online version is already up. They got pictures of all the bloggers (with stand-ins for the pseudonymous), and turned a caricature artist loose on us, leading to the motley mob scene at the top of that page. The cartoon will be in the magazine, along with excerpts from some particularly interesting blog posts, which are listed at the lower right of that page. I haven't seen the print magazine yet, so I don't know exactly what form it will take, but I'm happy to see that one of my posts made the list. Given that…

Uncertain Dots 22

After a long absence due to travel (some of which is discussed), Uncertain dots returns! Rhett and I talk about recent travels, how people going into internet-based physics outreach these days would probably do better to make videos than blog, physics in science fiction, celestial navigation, and as always, our current courses. Some links: -- Our Eratosthenes measurement from 2012. -- Divided by Infinity, the best Many-Worlds story ever. -- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" isn't legitimately available online, but there's a spoilery Wikipedia page about it. -- An old post where I talk about…

New Ant Maps!

Benoit Guenard has been hard at work the past couple years compiling broad-scale distribution data for all the world's ants, and his efforts are now online.  Here they are- global range maps for all the ant genera: http://www.antmacroecology.org/ant_genera/index.html These maps will be a very useful resource, especially if the myrmecological community participates to add new records and vet the occasional error. One thought, though, is that large umbrella strategies such as this will eventually be redundant with antweb.org.   Antweb's distributions are built from accumulated individual…

Tune in to the evolution of music & sociability

Yesterday's Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3 was program about the evolution of music, by Ivan Hewitt. It isn't available online yet, but should be uploaded onto the Sunday Feature page soon, and will remain there for a week. The progam features linguist Steven Pinker of Harvard University, who argues that music is a kind of evolutionary by-product, and anthropologist and cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen from the University of Reading in the UK, who believes it was fundamental to human evolution. And on NPR, there's an interview with husband-and-wife primatologists Dorothy Cheney and…

AGU Epilogue 3: Presentations now online

Four of the five presentations from last week's American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting panel discussion, "Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science: New Challenges for the 21st Century," are now online. Peter Gleick President, Pacific Institute (presiding); “The Integrity of Science: Identifying Logical Fallacies, Deceitful Tactics, and Abuse of the Public Trust” (PDF) Judith Curry Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology “Falling out of the Ivory Tower: a Case Study of Mixing Hurricane Science, Politics, and the…

I Don't Like My Philips Shaver

After about twelve years of regular use my Braun 5515 sounded like a chainsaw, so I decided to buy a new electric shaver. Mind you, I had repeatedly replaced all the bits I could: the mesh, often; the knife, several times; once even the accumulator pack. But I figured that having someone replace the worn-out bearings (Sw. lager) of the motor would be more expensive than getting a new shaver. I poked around on the net, looked at reviews and ordered a mid-price Philips HQ7360/17. The two shavers look pretty different. The Braun is designed to move only to and fro along one axis, preferably…

Friday Sprog Blogging: scare-owls.

Elder offspring: Owls in zoos are kind of weird. Dr. Free-Ride: How do you mean? Elder offspring: Well, owls are nocturnal, but zoos are usually just open during the day. Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm, so either the owls are sleeping, or they're awake but they're not too happy about it? Elder offspring: Yeah. Dr. Free-Ride: I guess it's possible that they adjust to a diurnal schedule in the zoo so they don't miss their meals. And I bet a lot of the sleeping ones get woken up by people walking by their enclosures saying, "Whoo! Whoo!" Elder offspring: Who would say "Whoo! Whoo!" to a sleeping owl?…

Goodbye to false balance over vaccines and autism! May you stay gone!

I realize that Chris Mooney is a polarizing figure here on the ol' ScienceBlogs, but I have to give him props for doing a damned fine job handling questions about vaccines, autism, and Andrew Wakefield's utterly discredited 1998 Lancet study, which was retracted by the Lancet's editors last week: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy I wish I could say the same thing for Nancy Snyderman. Although she was mostly right, I cringed--big time--when she insisted that there are no studies that show a link between vaccines and autism. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!…

Laying the cluestick on DaveScot over dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer

I know, I know, I said last time that I probably wouldn't post on dichloroacetate and the hype some of the more credulous parts of the blogosphere are falling for over its being supposedly a "cancer cure" that big pharma is either willfully ignoring or actively suppressing. However, when DaveScot and the sycophants on Uncommon Descent join in with the "cure for cancer" hype and conspiracy-mongering (with apparently only one voice of reason trying to counter DaveScot's cluelessness), it's really, really hard for me to resist the urge to introduce the mutual admiration society over at UD to a…

Best job, worst job

By the time I leave work at the end of the day I feel like I've been run over. I don't do anything particularly stressful or demanding while sitting at my desk but by 3:00 I feel utterly drained. For the past several years my workspace has been a grey cubicle piled high with so many documents that I'm not entirely sure why most of them are important anymore, the constant hum of the computer and headache-induced fluorescent lights slowly wearing me down over the course of the day. Even if I swivel my chair around I can't even look out someone else's window; after 8 hours in my artificial…

Books I'd Like to Read

More for your reading and collection development pleasure. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (ISBN-13: 978-0307269935) As Wu's sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century--radio, telephone, television, and film--was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive…

The Domestic Apocalyptic Goddess of Doom Summer Reading List

Summer is just about here, and you need some summer reading. Light. Fuzzy. Delightful. Amusing. Perfect for the deck chair or the sand. Nevermind the fact that you are a low-energy, transitioning, cheap, homseteading type, and your deck chair is probably planted on your porch, and the sand is the local playground sandpit - hey, it is summer, you've got to kick back with a book. But what book? The contemporary equivalent of _The Devil Wears Prada_ isn't exactly the stuff of anti-consumerist legend. He may not be that into you, but since really you are both into your garden, who gives…

Glenn Beck: He's Not a Propagandist, He's Crazy

When rightwing CNN host Glenn Beck went Full Metal Godwin on Al Gore, I figured this was just garden-variety rightwing agitprop. But this post at Slacktivist about the "Left Behind" apocalyptic book series, by way of ScienceBlogling Josh, convinces me that Beck is just a flat out nutjob. From an interview between Beck and 'apocalyptic' writer Joel Rosenberg: It's clear throughout the interview that CNN host Glenn Beck is more than a casual observer of LaHaye's books. He's a true believer. Consider this odd rant about EZ-Pass -- it's not the work of a tourist or outsider, but of a PMD […

Oregon Court Reinstates Regulatory Takings Law

Those who are interested in eminent domain and takings law will be interested in this. The Oregon Supreme Court has reversed a lower court and upheld Measure 37, a law passed in that state by referendum that required the government to compensate property owners not only for the seizure of property but also for the reduced value of their property that might result from regulatory law. Last year, a state judge had struck down the measure in what was surely one of the strangest decisions I've ever read. Measure 37 said the following: (1) If a public entity enacts or enforces a new land use…

Summary of Best Science Writing of 2006 Book Signing

So I went to the book signing last night for the Best American Science Writing 2006, and it was really interesting so I want to plug this book. In attendance were Jesse Cohen, the series editor, as well as authors Paul Bloom, Dennis Overbye, and Johnathan Weiner. I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but Dennis Overbye wrote about a convention for time travelers at MIT. Johnathan Weiner wrote about a weird syndrome of combined neurodegenerative diseases that occurs in a cluster on Guam -- possibly because they like to eat bats. My favorite, however, was Paul Bloom -- a psychology…

Oh M'Gosh! Black Cohosh Squashed and That's No Bosh!

A new study of 351 women aged 45-55 and suffering from perimenopausal hot flashes found the taking the popular dietary supplement black cohosh (Popular? Well, now I wouldn't say that. Alcohol, cigarettes and anti-depressants are popular. I don't see anybody spending a billion or two on media ads for this stuff...) was no more effective than placebo in reducing the number of episodes per day. The yearlong study of 351 women suffering from hot flashes and night sweats found that those given black cohosh got about the same amount of relief as those who took a placebo. And those groups saw…

The Guilty Language of Offsets

In NewScientist today, there is a little article that describes the different types of carbon offsets you can purchase. It's not too informative and I much prefer articles with a little more of a critical eye, such as this 2007 piece in BusinessWeek or this piece from the NYTimes blog on confusing carbon labels. (By the way, be sure to check out the UK offset parody Cheat Neutral). Truth is, I have been bored by carbon offsets for ages (ever since I did my master's related to carbon trading--back in 2002, when they were still calling it 'carbon sequestration' and the concept had not yet…

The Seattle Times puts MRSA database on-line and gets results from the state

I'm sure everyone else thinks the big news today is the announcement by the Washington State Health department requiring hospitals to report MRSA cases to the state. I think the cool news is their on-line database. We'll get to that a bit later. What is MRSA? MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It's a serious pathogen that causes skin infections and greater damage if it enters the body. The Seattle Times report - a quick summary For the past three days the Seattle Times has been running a series on hospital-acquired cases of MRSA. According to the report, 6…

Links for 2010-12-03

Cocktail Party Physics: books, books, books galore! "A couple of weeks ago, an editor asked me to name my favorite science book from 2010 for a year-end round-up her magazine was putting together. My incredulous response: "You mean you want me to pick just one?" Because let's face it, 2010 has been a banner year for popular science books. [...] The steady stream of science books hasn't stopped, either, so I thought I'd highlight just a few of the new offerings (mostly math and physics related) that came out this fall -- just in case you're looking for the perfect gift for the science…

What is Open Access and How Should We Pay for It?

Bill Hooker has taken Nature editor Maxine Clark to task for her claims about the open access status of the online features offered by the Nature Publishing Group. Maxine points to the various free online services offered by Nature -- including Nature Precedings, Nature Reports, Nature Network, Scintilla, and the journal Molecular Systems Biology -- in claiming that Nature has "many open access projects and products". Bill disagrees. You should read his entire post, but the punchline is that Clark is redefining Open Access to fit Nature's model and to be used as a marketing device. A big…

The Zitteliana pterosaur special

Long-time readers will recall my few articles about the Peter Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting [see links below], held at the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie (Bavarian State Palaeontological Collection - BSPG) in Munich in 2007. The meeting, organised by Dr Dave Hone, was attended by most of the world's pterosaur workers, and was planned to be the first in a series of regular events (the next pterosaur meeting is due for 2010, and will be held in Beijing). The plan back in 2007 was to produce a special tribute volume of the BSPG's in-house technical journal (Zitteliana…

Sex or love: When your partner is unfaithful, what hurts the most?

Imagine you learned your romantic partner was unfaithful to you. Would you be more upset if he or she had sex with someone else, or if they had fallen in love with someone else? Several studies have found that the answer to that question depends on the your gender. Women say they would be more upset if their partner was in love with someone else, but men say they would be more upset if their partner was having sex with someone else. Why the difference? There are a couple explanations. One relies on natural selection: It's important to men to know their genes are being passed on, so sexual…

Grad School Fosters Depression; How to Fight It

The Feb. 20th Chronicle Review has a set of articles about grad school life. The statistics on how grad school cultivates and enhances depression and mental illness are, well, depressing. But if you are or ever have been a graduate student, you knew that already. Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide…

Watch Your Shoes! Interview with Suzanne Franks

Suzanne Franks, better known online as Zuska is a SciBling you do not want to make mad with mysogynist sentiments! At the second Science Blogging Conference in January she co-moderated a panel on Gender and Race in Science: online and offline. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real World job? Well, right now I have no Real World Job because chronic migraines make it impossible for me to hold down a job. My education includes a PhD in biomedical engineering and…

Around the Web: Cults of librarian personalities, Undergrads as first class citizens and more

Cults of Librarian Personalities Let's upgrade undergrads to first-class citizens Libraries and the informational future: some notes Librarians Respond to DPLA Launch Marketing Libraries Is like Marketing Mayonnaise The Sibyl of Cumae (OA/costs of schol comm) A matter of emphasis (librarians must read this post) Send Me the Check That You Would Have Sent to Consultants This Year Mash-Up This! Science Communication’s Image Problem Social Media for Science Outreach – A Case Study: The Incubator Blog at Rockefeller University Ebook anxieties increase as publishing revolution rolls on (2nd hand…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, August 9

If you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring seven recent ScienceBlogs posts with you, well, these would be the ones to choose. "Extra Special K?" This just in: treatment-refractive depressives respond reall well to...ketamine!? "Where's the threshold for action?" Kevin Vranes on why overwhelming scientific consensus alone isn't enough to spur action. "In the Beginning There Was .. The Big Bang" Artist and biologist John Kyrk has created flash animations of biological events great and small. "Cabinets of Curiosity" Because 'wunderkammer' is just about the best word there…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - a cop-out again, and 15 minutes late...

I was in the middle of writing a serious review of a paper meant for Friday Weird Sex Blogging, when reading this paralized me (hopefully only transiently and I will finish it by next week). So, when in trouble, I can always go back to Physics Of Sex and see if Buzz has someting new up. And he does. Is the Select Comfort air mattress good for sex? To answer that question, a good scientist performs an experiment. The Brownian motion of bar-hopping is something you need to know about if you are single and on the dating scene (thank FSM I am not, and hopefully never will have to be again). And…

The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor

Yesterday, at the American Public Health Association annual meeting, I picked up a copy of Les Leopoldâs new biography The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi. Tony is the towering figure in the US occupational safety and health movement. Until his death in 2002, Tony did more than anyone else in the country to shape the way unions and public health professionals work independently and together to prevent occupational injury and illness. The book is a great read. It kept me up late last night fascinated and exhilarated, inside the passage of the OSHAct,…

Summer reading

Who would have thought these words would ever be typed by me? I'm looking forward to Ann Coulter's new book. It's called Godless(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Apparently, Ann Coulter has written a book about me, although I suspect that she'll instead be pretending that people like me are representative of the Democratic Party as a whole. I wish. I'm sure it will be insightful, nuanced, and meticulously researched. Maybe Al Franken and I should get together in a summer book club to discuss it. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. Ann Coulter P.S.…

Poll time! Everyone take a poke at Florida

You've all seen the hideous Florida license plates, right? Well, the Orlando Sentinel has a poll to see whether people think it's reasonable for a secular state government to be punching out plates endorsing a weird sectarian faith. So far, the kind of people who read the Sentinel think it is. I wonder what the kind of people who read Pharyngula think… Should Florida lawmakers allow specialty state license plates with religious messages? Yes. Floridians who are religious should have the right to pay more to show it on their plates. (3592 responses) 58.3% Yes. Why is this any different than…

"And the sun came up this morning"

An ode to Princeton Professors: Don't try this at home... Rumour of War There are soldiers marching on the common today They were there again this evening They paced up and down like sea birds on the ground Before the storm clouds gathering I must buy whatever tinned food is left on the shelves They are testing the air raid sirens They've filled up the blood banks and emptied the beds At the hospital and the asylum I saw a man build a shelter in his garden today And we stood there idly chatting He said: "No, no I don't think war will come" Yet still he carried on digging Everything in my life…

Merry Christmas

tags: christmas tree, holidays, photography This is the Christmas tree located in my "watering hole", where I will be located this very evening, in fact, hanging out with friends. Unfortunately, I am not sure if I will have free wifi access on Christmas or New Year's days since the public libraries are closed on both holidays, but if I do find free wifi anywhere, it will be here! Image: GrrlScientist 2007 [really large view] I am having a great time, listening to christmas music in the pub and now, at this very moment, the bartender is playing some really fabulous music, Rumpelstiltskin,…

Looking for the Bacon Boson

I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?" I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?" "The superconducting wire. Where do we keep it?" "We don't have any superconducting wire. And you're a dog. What do you need superconducting wire for, anyway?" "I'm building a particle collider! I need superconducting wire for the beam-steering magnets." How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog goes on sale next Tuesday…

links for 2007-11-15

Freshman's 3-Pointer Helps Lift Syracuse - New York Times A typical beginning of the season (tags: basketball) Relativity passes new test of time - physicsworld.com Precision spectroscopy of lithium ions in a storage ring confirm time dilation. That's a relief. (tags: physics science experiment news relativity) Donate to the Jhereg Foundation Steven Brust needs money to pay medical bills. Also, you should buy his books. (tags: books medicine) Negative refraction 'could trap rainbows' - physicsworld.com A proposal of a scheme for "stopping" light inside a negative-index metamaterial…

COTS software are not off the shelf or turn-key

There's a nice rebuttal of the Sirsi Dynix anti-open source white paper done by Mark Leggott that just came out (I found it via Jason Griffey). More thoughtful than some. There are so many misconceptions on both sides of this. First, open source is not free. You do need people to install and maintain it and maybe customize it. Some open source projects have less documentation than others. On the other hand, what's worse is when you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large software product only to then have to pay more and more and more and more to buy additional modules,…

Roomba x Alarm Clock = Clocky

Clocky sounds like R2D2 and looks kind of like an ATV's single-axled, pastel cub. In other words, it's really, really cute. Which is why when Clocky wakes you with its piercing warbles, crashes to your floor and rolls under your bed, you won't want to smash its little display with your fist. At least, we hope not! Click through for more details. Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day. Clocky began as a class project. After graduating, Gauri Nanda turned Clocky…

iScream

Seems like everything is being made so you can attach an iPod.   Shown below is the href="http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=204553512&adid=17070&dcaid=17070">George Foreman iPod Grill.  With 10-watt speaker. How patriotic is that? And what are we to make of one of the reviews posted at Buy.com? I love George Foreman's products! I own all of the grills, and I use them when I have small get togethers. They are great, indoors and out. I usually only use one at a time, since my friends don't really come to my parties. I don't know what that is about. I used the George…

Something every surgeon should have: LifeStat

Here's something I've been meaning to post for a while that somehow got buried in my list of cool, weird, or interesting links. One of the things they teach surgeons and emergency medicine doctors about is how to use common materials at hand to do, MacGyver-like, a cricothyroidotomy to save the life of someone who has an airway obstruction and is choking. But that's just so inelegant. Why use such crude methods (and take the chance that the necessary materials, like a straw or a Bic pen whose plastic body you can use as a tube, aren't readily available)? Get a hold of LifeStat, the…

Nobel laureate not buying that nobel prize winners live longer.

I posted this story a week or so ago about Nobel prize winners living longer. Some people didn't seem to believe the study and now it seems that even some Nobel Prize winners are questioning the results. Winning the Nobel Prize can add almost a year and a half to a laureate's life, two British economists say. But though he's 81, Harvard physicist Roy J. Glauber, a 2005 Nobelist, isn't buying it. So why doesn't Roy buy it? But Glauber said the study might have been biased by the fact that many laureates aren't selected until they're quite old. Glauber won his Nobel 40 years after publishing…

Let's not just pick on the Nigerians

The oppression begins at home, and we can't just blame the men. I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. The mom says "You can't buy that." Girl: Why? Mom: Because it's too big. Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It's not very expensive. Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You're a girl. And girls shouldn't read…

Collaborative domain-expertise development?

Libraries do collaborative collection development, through consortia and increasingly via direct institution-to-institution arrangements. Reference and instruction are collaborative endeavors—look at any social-networking service with lots of librarians and you'll see on-the-spot crowdsourced reference responses. Perhaps this collaboration instinct will help libraries respond to the challenge of domain expertise for data curation. Do I need to know cheminformatics, or do I just need to buy a cheminformaticist conference potations until I secure her business card? Formalizing expertise-sharing…

Colbert

That was fun! */ The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Jonah Lehrer Colbert Report Full EpisodesPaul McCartney Appearance Funny Political VideosMore Funny Videos A few random notes: 1) I can't bring myself to watch the clip. Which reminds me of my brilliant idea for an fMRI experiment: show people videos of themselves in a scanner and see what brain areas turn on. Presto: you've found the neural correlates of self-loathing. I'm betting on the insula. 2) It was totally surreal being on the set of a show you watch every night. Like walking into your television or…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Fat or Fit Were Dinosaurs? Scientists Use Laser Imaging: Karl Bates and his colleagues in the palaeontology and biomechanics research group have reconstructed the bodies of five dinosaurs, two T. rex (Stan at the Manchester Museum and the Museum of the Rockies cast MOR555), an Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, a Strutiomimum sedens and an Edmontosaurus annectens. The team found that the smaller Museum of the Rockies T. rex could have weighed anywhere between 5.5 and 7 tonnes, while the larger specimen (Stan) might have weighed as much as 8 tonnes. Genes Important To Sleep Discovered: For many…

The 140conf

As you probably know, The Bride of Coturnix and I went to NYC last week to attend the 140conference organized by Jeff Pulver who I finally had a pleasure to meet in person. The speaker line-up and the program schedule had to be slightly modified as a few people got stuck in Europe under the volcanic ash and could not come in time. But there were plenty of smart people in attendance who could readily jump in and join the panels in their place. There were a total of about 1000 people the first day and only slightly fewer on the second day. There were only a handful people there who I've met…

Cyberspeech and cybersilence: thoughts on the Kathy Sierra matter.

In case you somehow missed it: tech writer and blogger Kathy Sierra canceled public appearances after receiving death threats. In addition to the death threats, she called attention to some posts about her that were threatening in tone (though probably falling short of actual threats) and definitely mean on now-defunct sites set up by other A-list tech bloggers. Since blogging about this, SIerra has received more threats. A number of bloggers think Sierra has smeared the people who ran the now-defunct websites by not drawing a clear enough distinction between the death threats (which they…