blog
razib | June 16, 2008The post on soft drink terms has elicited a great deal of response (on my other blog as well). Many people want a little more granularity; well, it was brought to my attention that Google Maps based survey is up. You can vote and increase the N. I ask all American readers interested in the topic to participate (doesn't look like it takes Postal Codes, only Zips), as it will offer us even more detail. My "blog reader surveys" usually return around 400 responses so I hope I can increase the sample size multiplicatively....
(if you have a weblog, you might want to link too!)
razib | May 11, 2008...is live. Don't know what I'm talking about? Natural language search; people have been talking about this as the Next Big Thing for a while.... (though I will say, if people have been talking about something, it isn't likely to be the Next Big Thing)
esiegel | April 27, 2008Dear Reader(s):
This is Ethan, and I'm writing this to you to let you know that I owe you an apology. I have gotten so excited with the idea of bringing the story of the Universe to you -- to tell you how we got from the birth of the Universe to the present day, to tell you what the world, galaxy, and Universe is like and how it got to be that way -- that I've gotten carried away.
You deserve the story, because it's wonderful and beautiful. You deserve the story, because it's something specialized and complicated, and it's something that I happen to have studied, hard, for the last seven…
revere | April 27, 2008The Reveres caucused this weekend and finally decided that with summer coming on and the academic and flu seasons ending this would be a good time to lighten up on our twice a day posting. There may even be days with no posts at all.
In truth we have found the posting schedule wearing. This blog hasn't gone dark a single day since the end of 2004 and the strain is beginning to take a toll on us. We still have extremely active professional lives and many responsibilities in "meat space." The inartful nature of our blogging may not look like it, but this activity takes many hours daily and we…
esiegel | April 24, 2008Even creationists have said that if you find something that's alive now that's over 6000 years old, it would prove to them that the Earth is at least that old.
Previously, the oldest tree in the world was thought to be a Bristlecone Pine in California, known as the Methuselah tree, at 4,840 years old (as of 2008).
It's huge! But you can also date a tree not by its trunk, but by its root structure. And as The Log Blog reports, Swedish researchers have found a tree on Fulu Mountain that is over 9,000 years old! Although it looks puny because its trunk dies every few hundred years or so and it…