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laelaps | October 29, 2007Matt has put up the latest and greatest edition of The Boneyard, guiding visitors along a haunted fossil-picking tour of the best paleo-blogging from the past two weeks. Trust me, this one is not to be missed. I'm still looking for a host for the week after next (and into the foreseeable future), so if you're interested in bringing The Boneyard to your blog please contact me.
razib | October 18, 2007About a year ago Tim Lambert asked ScienceBloggers to check out a political quiz and collected the responses. 29 of us responded, and below the fold I've placed two graphs which display a smoothed out frequency distribution across the two axes generated by the survey. As noted by the author of the quiz the two axes were extrapolated from the empirical variation of responses (their the first two principle components of eigenvectors). They are Left/Right and pragmatism. A more positive value represent Right and and "atheist" or "utilitarian" tendencies on each axis respectively. Remember…
razib | October 18, 2007Every now and then I take political quizzes to see where I am. Below the fold are my results for three surveys....
Political Survey:
The World's Smallest Political Quiz:
Political Compass:
Politopia:
Enhanced Political Quiz:
laelaps | October 17, 2007
Hmmm...
I must admit that the attention this blog has been getting as of late has left me astonished (when I first started writing I wondered if anyone would ever read my posts), and Eric of The Primate Diaries has given my ego another boost by bestowing The Intellectual Blogger Award upon me (my only regret is that I can't give him the same award in return). Part of the joy of receiving such recognition is passing it on, however, and I've been thinking long and hard about which other bloggers really get my mental wheels turning when I read their work. Envelope, please...
The Anterior…
revere | October 17, 2007There are over sixty blogs under the Scienceblogs umbrella. There is an impression we are all "progressives" (aka left-leaning) and must agree on matters social and political. While we probably are more to the left than the average (we are reality-based and rational, after all) there is a wide spectrum of views amongst ourselves. While I have no hesitation declaring myself a Person of the Left (whatever that means), I am also a scientist and put a premium on critical thinking and rationality, values I share with other Sciencebloggers. This tends to reduce differences between us. But there…
razib | October 17, 2007OK GNXP readers...Donors Choose update. Been quiet about this. First, the good news. ScienceBlogs has raised A LOT of money. And Seed is throwing in matching funds (and possible prizes). The "bad" news is that my challenge is really not going too well :-) Page down on the leader-board, will you? So I've added many new causes (some of them were fully funded already). Check 'em out. If you feel inclined on giving, give. I'm generally trying to focus on biology & math since I think those are pretty "value added" in terms of how far one's money will go.
laelaps | October 17, 2007Normally I try to write something substantial for this blog every day, even if it can't be a thoroughly-researched mega post like some of my more notorious writings. Yesterday was no exception, especially in light of the fact that a Rutgers philosophy professor, Jerry Fodor, has recently published a rather incoherent piece that's critical of the role of natural selection in evolution (you can read "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings" at the LRB website, although it may induce migraines). In fact, I actually wrote up a lengthy response to Fodor's piece, but when I was finished I didn't feel quite right…
laelaps | October 15, 2007Welcome to the 10th edition of Oekologie, the best of what the blogosphere has to offer when it comes to the eponymous area of natural science. This edition is particularly special, however, in that it falls on Blog Action Day, so be sure to visit the event's main page to peruse the best of today's environmentally-focused posts.
Agriculture
Diversity is not only important to natural ecosystems, but it can be invaluable to agriculture as well. Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog fills us in on why it's better to encourage variety when you're growing rice.
If you're interested in organic growing…
razib | October 14, 2007If you haven't seen it, this is a hilarious story: Vatican Official Insists He's Not Gay:
A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.
In an interview published Sunday, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico told La Repubblica daily he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."
razib | October 14, 2007Sheril tagged me with a meme of the form:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in…
laelaps | October 14, 2007Neil has got the latest edition of The Boneyard up at microecos, complete with some fantastic artwork by Dan McCarthy. The next edition will be up in two weeks at the HMNH.
razib | October 12, 2007Everyone at ScienceBlogs is talking about Al Gore. Well, all I have to say is that boy have things changed. Just look what Gore was up to a few years ago....
revere | October 8, 2007Once again it's the 2007 Blogging Scholarship contest. It's been just short of a year since we offered everyone reading the opportunity to Send a Blogger to College. Now you get another chance. Of course the blogger in question, the now well-known Shelley Batts, maestra of Retrospectacle and my SciBling here at ScienceBlogs, is long out of college and close to being done with doctoral studies in the neurosciences at the University of Michigan. Last year she very nearly took the prize (with magnificent help from readers of Effect Measure). She's a finalist once again and this year the prize is…
razib | October 8, 2007Shelley needs help to win a blogging scholarship. If you're so inclined vote for Shelley. General information on the scholarship.