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Thursday Sense of Obligation Blogging

A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about: 1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it leaves me cold. The stories of working people putting themselves through accelerated degree programs through self-study are inspiring, and all, but there's nothing really new here. There has never really been any question about whether hard-working and…

"This is the danger of what happens when writers have not enough to do"

PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer has just done a wonderful online story about how Science Debate 2008 originally came about, and how far it has come since those early days. Reporter Jenny Marder didn't miss a point that I myself have been making in talks like this one--namely that if it weren't for the Hollywood writers' strike, two of our central organizers, Matthew Chapman and Shawn Lawrence Otto, might've been a lot, er, busier, and consequently, we might have had a much tougher time getting off the ground. To that effect, Marder quotes Otto: "This is the danger of what happens when writers…

Why I still have no Internet access, or why I really, really hate Comcast right now

I hate you, Comcast. I really do. My hatred of Comcast also explains the paucity of activity on this blog over the last few days. You see, over the weekend, I moved to a larger house, and I've had no Internet access other than Panera's or Starbucks for the last three days. Before that, I had lined up a couple of brief posts over the weekend, as well as a rerun for this morning in anticipation of being back up and running this afternoon. Instead, here I am in Panera's having a tasty lunch but also posting a brief rant and explanation composed right after my encounter with Comcast. I went from…

Wake up and smell the coffee

I'm a coffee drinker. I'm not finicky about grind or bean or method of preparation, although I guess I have some preferences. There is one thing that coffee has to have for me, though, and that it's strong. Very, very strong. The spoon has to stand up in the cup by itself. My usual cup in the morning is from an ordinary drip pot with whatever coffee is around. We usually buy it already ground and it's either a mail order Green Mountain espresso or sumatra or a Starbucks Goldcoast blend or Trader Joe's Bay Blend. Mostly dark roast and extra bold. Nothing fancy. Just good, strong coffee. Wnich…

No wonder people misunderstand evolution

How women evolved blond hair to win cavemen's hearts Academic researchers have discovered that women in northern Europe evolved with light hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to stand out from the crowd and lure men away from the far more common brunette. First, I'll note that I've not read the paper this article is based on, nor is it my intent to critique it. It may be great, it may be terrible. They may have a point, they may not. [Edited to add: you can find a post here on the actual paper for those interested]. In this case, I'm concerned with the write-up, 'cause it's one…

NYC SciBlings MeetUp - Sunday and Monday

During our trip to NYC we stayed at the Millennium UN Plaza Hotel (see the reviews here and here): The hotel was built specifically to aid the business of the United Nations next door: The hotel was actually very nice - big room with a big comfy bed. Great location as well (on Friday we took a looooong walk from there all the way to the tip of the island; and it was just a few blocks away from the location of the Saturday night party) - an easy walk to Grand Central Station (and from there to the American Museum of Natural History - a subject for an entirely new post tomorrow), etc. -…

Waiting periods: licenses for marriage vs guns

Following last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, most county clerks here in Texas began issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples. But many of those happy couples couldn’t immediately tie-the-knot. Texas requires couples to wait 72-hours after obtaining their license before they can say “I do.”* About half the States have such waiting periods which range from 24 hours to six days. One source describes the wait time as providing: “a cooling-off period for the couple to determine if they truly wish to be married.” So if a cooling off period is a good idea for matrimony, I’m stumped why there’s…

Mark Steyn and Judith Curry

Two items related only because these two seem to like each other and there are coeval happenings. Mark Steyn and Dr. Michael Mann's book Michael mann wrote a great book called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. It really is a good book, I highly recommend it. Mark Steyn is a right wing talking head and shock jocky guy whose behavior is that of a seventh grader. Since Mann's book was published, numerous anti-science and anti-environment Internet trolls have posted bogus, harassing, one-star reviews on Amazon of Mann's book. Often, these reviews come in…

Interesting Parallel

There is an interesting parallel between the fight over rural electrification, in 1935, and the current health insurance debate. (HT href="http://dangerousmeta.com/site/comments/newwestnet_if_you_read_nothing_else_today/">dangerousmeta) href="http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/how_fdr_enacted_his_public_option/C37/L37/"> href="http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/how_fdr_enacted_his_public_option/C37/L37/">How FDR Enacted his "Public Option" By Bob Simmons, Crosscut.com, Guest Writer, 9-13-09 ...President Roosevelt had decreed a public option in 1935, putting the federal…

Animalcules 1.9 Is Now Up

Over at Aetiology, the carnival o'the wee beasties known as Animalcules is now online. Lotsa good stuff. My contribution can also be found here.

Evolution and Design class

Allen McNeill's Cornell course on Evolution and Design is now over and the student papers have been posted online. Dan comments on some of them.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The ninety-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fourteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology 2.0. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to take you through the night.

links for 2008-06-29

I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist | Mail Online Terrible, terrible headline for an excellent essay. (tags: books religion literature SF science)

New neuro blogs

Here are some more new members of the ever-growing online neuroscience community: The Brain and the Sky Illusion Sciences N-Cog-Neato! Neurophilia Neurotonics

Religion. It gives comfort.

... or, this: Watch Saving Africa's Witch Children in Activism & Non-Profit  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com Hat tip: Traumatized by Truth

What a Tangled Web They Weave

Tom Pennington/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Associated Press First, rock snot. Now, giant spider webs that cover acres. One more screwy thing, and I'm stocking up on canned goods. From the New York Times: Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors. Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town…

A new chapter

Here I am on ScienceBlogs, moved from the comfortable confines of my old blog, where I've been active since October 2002. The opportunity to come here was never anything I really expected or pursued, but now that I'm here I'm really excited to start this new chapter in my blogging existence. How did it happen, you ask? Well, it all started last week with a post I did about the "Are You a Librarian" survey that Seed was running on the site at the time. Basically, the survey was a marketing tool trying to encourage librarians to subscribe to Seed Magazine for their institutions. I was…

A Universe of Black Holes: III

"Massive black hole pairs" is the topic of today's session at the BHOLES13 workshop at KITP Talks are online here - note that slides of talks show up later as speakers get their act together and send in slides Monica Colpi (Milan) starts the session with Formantion of Binary Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei starts off with good summary of "last parsec" problem and why it is a bit of a red herring followed by discussion of role of gas at late stage of mergers and summary of sims new trendy things to do is to look at star formation in situ in outer accretion disks - something must happen, but it…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Kevin Emamy

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Kevin Emamy from CiteULike to answer a few questions. Hi, Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Tell us more about CiteULike - what is it, how does it work, where did you get the idea to develop it? CiteULike is a quick and simple way to save references where one finds them (online), a highly effective social filter of…

'....the potential future of an open, transparent peer review process. ...'

Garrett Lisi's Exceptional Approach to Everything: When Lisi published his physics paper, "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," to an online archive last year, it created a media buzz about his lifestyle and an onslaught of support and skepticism about his model. Although the verdict is still out on whether Lisi's theory will prove predicatively accurate, the means by which he released and vetted his research point to a larger trend in the scientific community. Barriers to data are falling, a cross-disciplinary community of commenters is replacing journal-selected peer reviewers,…

Victory for Open Access!

Yesterday, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764) which, among else, mandates the repository of all NIH-funded research into PubMedCentral within at most 12 months after publication. Until now, the placement of NIH-funded research papers into publicly accessible repositories was not mandated, but recommended. However, only about 5% of the authors actually did it, as the process was complex and not always clear. This number is growing, but far too slowly. From now on, authors will have clear guidelines and assistance in making sure that all the…

John Haught, Robert Rabel: Cowards

This post is going to be a touch of a stretch for ERV. I normally dont write about theology. Mostly, because I dont care. I think the cultural phenomena surrounding 'theology' or Harry Potter or Twilight is far more interesting than the ins-and-outs of the magical creatures at the center of the phenomena itself. But I do enjoy learning new things about anything, so I was *very* much looking forward to seeing the video of Jerry Coynes exchange with a Muggle Twihard 'Systematic theologian', John Haught. They 'debated' earlier this year, and video was taken under the understanding that it…

A Nation Obsessed With Jade Goody's Cervical Cancer But Not Mentioning Why She's Dying From It

London (and much of the U.S.) is currently obsessed with Jade Goody, who is dying of stage 4 cervical cancer at the age of 27 in a very public way: On television. One thing I find amazing is that, in the mountain of media coverage on this (including articles in the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, etc), I'm not seeing reporters mentioning one very important fact:  According to one story (no longer online, but quoted in this interesting post at TBTAM), Goody had multiple abnormal pap smears in her teens.  She went in for a few treatments to have the abnormal cells removed, then ignored…

Heaven is…

…the complete Calvin and Hobbes online. Hell is the fact that this looks like a violation of copyright and probably won't be up for long. (via unfogged)

#Scio10: S. Zvan, G. Laden, D. Schell, PZ Myers, Dr. Kiki and an engaged audience discuss ...

Trust and Critical Thinking at Science Online 2010. There is discussion going on here, and the six videos are here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

The Movement Conservatives Are Becoming Completely Unhinged

This isn't to say that they weren't well on their way there to begin with. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online's blog, The Corner, and an LA Times columnist (no, really, he is) gives Little Lord Pontchartrain some post-election advice: I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then…

Charleston Conference Presentation: Keeping Up with the Things That Matter

I was at The Charleston Conference last week, thanks to Mike Diaz of Proquest who invited me to be on a panel that he moderated, along with Karen Downing and Clifford Lynch. The topic of the panel was Keeping Up with the Things That Matter: Current Awareness Tools and Strategies for Academic Libraries. Karen, Cliff and I came up with different takes on the subject but overall the panel was quite well attended and I think useful and interesting for audience members. Not surprisingly, my take was a bit on the "stealthy librarian" side of things: I enjoyed being a bit provocative and think…

Early-Morning Culture Jam

Here's some jollity, just in time for Friday. Chevrolet has launched a promotion in which people visit a website and use online modules to create a 30-second advertising spot for the Chevy Tahoe SUV. The early entries might not have been what Chevy corporate was hoping for. More screenshots and links after the break. Early entrants of the Chevy Tahoe: The Apprentice contest vented their spleen about the Tahoe's contributions to global warming, the United States' continued reliance on foreign oil, and their perception of SUVs, and SUV drivers and manufacturers, as arrogant, selfish, and…

ScienceBlogs Welcomes the World's Top Scientific Institutions to Our Network

We here at ScienceBlogs are pleased to announce that beginning today, we will be helping to spark the next generation of research communications by introducing new blogs to our network from the world's top scientific institutions. The initial list includes: CERN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), SETI Institute, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. The SETI Institute, the Weizmann Institute of Science and Brookhaven National Laboratory blogs are live now - you can find them at: http://www.scienceblogs.com/SETI/ http://www.scienceblogs.com/weizmann/ http://…

Sexsomnia Revisited

The article I linked to in my previous post on the topic of having sex while asleep (or is it 'being sleep while having sex'?), e.g., the one I got pointed to by someone (e-mail?), is actually, quite terrible. So, instead, if you are interested in the topic, you should check out a much more serious website - Sleepsex.org, which focuses entirely on the phenomenon of sexsomnia. I need to thank Karmen for pointing out that site to me. The site has extensive links to other sources of information, including links to all of Dr. Shapiro's papers on the topic. For instance, this paper (pdf)…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Peter Binfield is the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE and the Publisher at PLoS (all titles except Biology and Medicine), so, in a way, he's my boss. And he tweets. At the conference, Pete will lead a session on Article-level metrics. Bonnie Monteleone is staff (in the Department of Biochemistry) and a MALS Student at UNC Wilmington. She blogs on The Plastic Ocean and…

More on Comments and Censorship

Hi Folks - I've gotten (rightly) a number of emailed complaints about the number of comments that are disappearing, and more questions about whether I am censoring comments, or moderating them. Other than a few occasions for egregious attacks on other posters or sucking up my time until I had no other choice, I don't censor comments. The reason your comments are disappearing and being marked as held for approval is because of Science Blogs - there are a number of technical problems with my blog that SB has basically not been able to fix (and some of them affect other blogs) - the idea is…

ADS functionality

The Astrophysical Data System, sponsored by NASA, is hideously useful. It is, essentially, a searchable database of all the astronomical literature, of all time, with links to current and past papers (some current papers are behind subscription walls for fixed or indefinite periods), and to the arXiv preprint archives, and to a lot of the online astronomical databases and catalogs, like searchable sky catalogs and object databases, at all wavelengths at that. Some articles are searchable, either in the abstract, or full text searching. Everything imaginable, almost, is cross-linked and…

game theory of congressional amendments

apparently the 2010 department of defense appropriations bill is moving in congress, and someone wants to amend it, there should be a vote, I think. Rep. Flake (R-Az) has offered 553 amendments to the bill #1 Would prohibit funding for Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration. ... #556 Would prohibit funding for the MacDill Air Force Base Online Technology Program. or, en bloc... 553. Flake, Jeff (AZ) #595 Would prohibit funding for various earmarked projects in the bill. (yeah, I noticed the numbers don't add up, maybe some in the #300s were withdraw...) Anyway, this is a serious…

Go Look At The Moon!

This is the coolest thing online I've seen in a long time. A team of amateur astronomers took over 1000 pictures of tiny areas of the Moon. 288 of them were chosen and mosaiced together. They describe the result far better than I do: The end result is a high resolution 87.4 megapixel image of the Moon, larger even then previous images taken by some of the world's largest observatories, allowing features as small as 1km to be clearly seen. This is the world's record for the largest mosaic of the Moon ever made, and it's available for you to view in full detail (!) at their site, Lunar World…

Action items

Here are some quick, simple things you can do right now. The Florida Senate Education committee is meeting this afternoon to consider their bogus "academic freedom" bill. Florida Citizens for Science has a link to a very good analysis of the bill; it basically declares the bill pointless, vague, and self-defeating. You might try calling your Florida representative — the link has a list — and urging them to recognize the Bill Analysis and Fiscal Impact Statement of the Professional Staff of the Education Pre-K-12 Committee, and kill SB 2692. The New Humanist has an online poll (yeah, we…

I'm Praised in Romanian, I Think

My on-line buddy Vladimir over at Diogenes's Bottle has blogged extensively and almost incomprehensibly about my humble personage. Just look at the possibly wonderful (or not) things he has to say about me! La început - e drept - ideea ma amuza, caci citeam constant blogul lui Martin, un prieten suedez arheolog, care s-a mutat apoi de la Blogger catre bloggeristii profi-, adica cei platiti sa blogareasca. Martin era si este un personaj interesant. L-am cunoscut live on the web prin 2003-2004, când lucram la primul meu articol despre Basarabi si, din lipsa de materiale bune pe spatiul…

Steady Job

If by a "steady job" you mean one that is contracted to last until retirement, then I have had only one in my life so far. In 2002, Roger Blidmo gave me a steady job with his contract archaeology unit Arkeologikonsult. I left it after only a few months as my dig was done and written up, as the unit had no further digs lined up at the time, and as I had received funding to study Vendel Period metal detector finds from UppÃ¥kra. Today I have signed up with the Royal Academy of Letters for the second steady job of my life. It's actually just a change in the formal circumstances around my work as…

The Physics of Fireworks (Synopsis)

“Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it.” -The Simpsons When gunpowder was first invented more than 1,000 years ago by mixing activated carbon (charcoal), sulfur and potassium nitrate together, its first major application was to the development of fireworks. By combining four simple elements – a launch, a fuse, a burst charge and ignitable stars – the most spectacular explosive shows could be produced. The anatomy of a firework. Image credit: PBS/NOVA Online, retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fireworks/anat_nf.html. Yet the design of each stage…

Learn. Japanese. Fast?

So, as previously mentioned in this space, Kate and I will be spending a few weeks in Japan in August/ September. Out of a combination of politeness and self-interest, it would be good if we knew at least a smattering of Japanese before going there. Back in '98, I did the book-and-tape thing, and learned at least phrasebook Japanese ("Eigo ga hanashimasu ka?"), but I remember very little of that, and Kate doesn't know any. We've heard good things about the Rosetta Stone software packages, but those are really expensive. The goal here isn't to be able to watch anime without subtitles, it's…

links for 2007-11-16

Environment plays key role in children's readiness for school "Genetic factors played a significant role in the children's core abilities underlying the four components of school readiness, but the environment shared by twins of the same family remained the most important factor overall." (tags: education science news) White children more positive toward blacks after learning about racism, study shows It's amazing how many education research results seem to come from the "Journal of Well, Duh!" (tags: education science news) phishhook.com :: View topic - Charts and graphs of rap song…

Day 1 - So far

SICB (pronounced 'sick-bee') is certainly a smorgasbord of science and it is somewhat difficult to decide which sessions and/or talks to attend. I had originally intended spending the day with the Linking Genes with Morphology in Vertebrates symposium, but a combination of factors had me instead hopping from talk to talk. For those interested, PZ has summarized the morning portion of the symposium. (I did manage to attend the first afternoon talk of the symposium - by Cohn on the evolution of cartilage and un-paired fins in vertebrates ... good stuff). I spent the day so far with topics as…

How we look for stuff online and what we do when we find it

Nicholas Carr has an insightful post that points to a fascinating study of online user behavior while they are looking for information and researching some subject, done by British Library (the research study, 35 pages PDF, well organized and well worth your time). ...In one sense, the process of information retrieval seems to have become more important than the information retrieved. We store lots of information, but like distracted squirrels we rarely go back to examine it in depth. We want more acorns. The authors note that this kind of behavior is not restricted to the young. It…

Curse of the Janjaweed

As soon as she saw the two darkly clad men riding towards her on camels, their heads and faces swathed in scarves, Nafisa Mohamed knew what she must do. "I told my son and my daughter to run as fast as they could." The men were the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who have been slaughtering Darfuri men and raping women, in a military offensive engineered by the Sudanese government. Jinn is Arabic for demon and jawad means horse. Darfuri people will tell you that the Janjaweed are indeed devils on horseback. Nafisa had been living for a year in Kalma camp, which houses about 120,000 Darfuri…

Another day, another creationist

My conversation with Perry Marshall about "evolution 2.0" is now online on the radio show Unbelievable. Marshall is sales and marketing guy who has written a book titled Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, in which he claims to have worked out a reconciliation between science and religion based on arguments he had with his missionary/theologian brother, that hints at the quality of the science you'll find in it. He has a superficial view of a few biological processes, like DNA error repair and transposition, and has shoehorned them into his religious belief that…

Are creationists rational?

My Synthese essay has finally been published [paywall], in which I argue that on the basis of the more realistic notion of rationality devised by Herbert Simon, called "bounded rationality", certain heuristics are liable to lead people to rationally choose to believe in creationism under the right conditions. It's a conceptual developmentalist perspective. Here's the abstract: Creationism is usually regarded as an irrational set of beliefs. In this paper I propose that the best way to understand why individual learners settle on any mature set of beliefs is to see that as the developmental…

It was all our fault…or was it?

You knew the religious folk were going to look at the disaster in Japan and start pointing fingers. This time, though, it wasn't the fault of gays and lesbians, nor was it the sight of jiggling breasts…no, this time, it was the atheists' fault. Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world, has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis "God's warnings." "I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people's atheism and materialism," an online Christian press…

New entry on Mach in Stanford Encyclopedia

Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a…

From Our Friends at the Discovery Institute

Man, I just arrived in Seattle and had scarcely gotten a nap in when I woke up to find this: SEATTLE -- In his book The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney declares war on intelligent design, calling it a "reactionary crusade" promoted by "[s]cience abusers." Discovery Institute now responds to Mooney's war on intelligent design (ID) by publishing a detailed report, "Whose War Is It, Anyway? Exposing Chris Mooney's Attack on Intelligent Design," documenting 14 major errors Mooney makes when writing about ID in his book. The report will be available online on Friday, Sept. 15. "Why do so…