Blogging
awild | November 27, 2009Myrmecos Blog appeared online two years ago today.  While I'm obviously the guy writing most of the posts, the reason we're still on the air isn't me and my bloviating. It is all of you guys- the readers, the guest bloggers, the commentators. Without the life provided to the site by the many participants, I'd long since have lost the incentive to keep at it. So, a heartfelt thank you.
If I had to finger any one difference between blogging in 2007 and blogging in 2009, it is this. In 2007 blogs had already risen to mainstream acceptability, especially in the political, commercial, and…
emjohnson | November 26, 2009Huxley Laden has just entered the world at a whopping 7 lbs. 11 oz. Please head over to Greg Laden's blog and offer your congratulations.
As regular readers will know, my partner and I had our own primate in June (8 lbs. 6 oz.). Hopefully Sagan and Huxley will have the chance to play together in the virtual playground as they grow up.
laelaps | November 25, 2009I'm pleased to announced that paleontologist Scott Sampson, author of the new book Dinosaur Odyssey and host of the children's tv show Dinosaur Train, has just launched a blog. It is called The Whirlpool of Life. Go check it out!
clock | November 21, 2009
The second annual National Day of Listening - celebrated on Friday, November 27, 2009 - is just around the corner! With your help, we hope to make the National Day of Listening an ongoing holiday tradition, when all Americans set aside time on the day after Thanksgiving to honor a friend, loved one, or member of their community by interviewing them about their lives and preserving that interview for generations to come.
We'd like to ask you to take part in this year's National Day of Listening by conducting an interview with someone you know and blogging about the experience. Here are some…
emjohnson | November 19, 2009You just crossed the 400 mark at The Primate Diaries facebook fan page. If you're on facebook and follow this blog you should stop in and say hello. Comments here are always appreciated but if you would like to share a certain piece the facebook platform makes it very easy.
jdupuis | November 18, 2009Or, Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing, Part 2.
A month or so ago, I poked a little gentle fun at social media extremists, basically exploring the idea that engaging online is the be-all and end-all of the library profession versus the idea that much of what we do online is peripheral to the main thrust of what librarianship is all about. To a certain degree, I guess I was setting up a couple of straw people just for the purpose of knocking them down but at the time it seemed like contrasting those extremes was a useful way of looking at the issue.
Of course, I don't believe either…
awild | November 17, 2009Andy Deans of NCSU rightly rakes ASU over the coals for their Ugly Bugs contest:
Denigrating insect species, broadly labeled here as bugs does a disservice to those of us who fight daily to convince a skeptical public...
emjohnson | November 17, 2009On November 24, 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Then, as now, many people were made uncomfortable to think that human beings could be related to the "lower" animals and this discomfort was regularly represented in popular depictions of Darwin during the 19th century. An excellent study on this was written by Darwin scholar Janet Brown in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Interestingly enough, it was believed that the most cutting insult to Darwin (or perhaps just the funniest) was to compare him to a primate. Primates have often made people…
awild | November 14, 2009Over at IB401, the entomology students are blogging faster than a swarm of locusts in a candy shop*:
Caterpillars I have known
Beetle's Threat to Baseball
Ants on Stilts
Pink Mantids!
Keeping a Praying Mantis
Fig Wasp Beats Deforestation
Hungry Crickets
Drop by and leave them some comments!
*or, whatever.
laelaps | November 11, 2009
The "Dinosauroid", the human-like product of a thought experiment about what the descendants of the dinosaur Troodon would look like today if the theropod had survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, is back. This time it has been invoked as an "I'm just sayin'..." defense by Richard Dawkins in a discussion about what life might be like on other planets. The article itself is here, but be sure to check out Darren's excellent take-down.
My own thoughts on the Dinosauroid will be featured in the conclusion of my forthcoming book Written in Stone.
emjohnson | November 9, 2009Confessions of a Closet Atheist is hosting the latest edition of the Humanist Symposium and invites you to a mind feed of the best of the brights:
Fellow humans:
Thank you for tuning your Feeds to tonight's presentation. As mandated by law, we are required to remind you not to engage in full-mind activities while driving, operating machinery, or performing any other task that may require the majority of your mental capacity to perform correctly. Remember, nourishing your mind can be dangerous if done without regard for your surroundings. Feed Safelyâ¢.
emjohnson | November 6, 2009If you're interested in anthropology on the net (or you write on the topic yourself) you're not going to want to miss this monthly carnival. Go check out this months edition at Anthropology.net. Consider submitting a post to next months carnival by clicking here. Please thank the blog hosts for a terrific edition and feel free to discuss your favorite posts in the comments section there, here, or at The Primate Diaries fan page on Facebook.
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2009The seventy-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology.net. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Colleen at Middle Savagery. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than four weeks, on 2 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
clock | November 5, 2009Having difficulties following the flood of blogging here on scienceblogs.com? Well, it just became much easier. Go to this page and find the widgets with all sorts of feeds: the Select feed, the Channels feeds and all the individual blog feeds. So, if you want my feed, you click on the Blogs (A-C) tab, find my blog, click on 'Share', click on the 'Install outside Netvibes' tab, then choose where you want to download it. Then pick the way you want it to look (there is a pull-down menu with several choices, as well as several colors to choose from), copy the widget code and paste it into your…
awild | November 4, 2009Sorry. I've been really, really busy with projects around the house and in the lab. And for the next few days I'll be away at the Global Ant Project meeting in Chicago.
Blogging will resume after I return. With any luck there will be plenty of myrmecological gossip and photos to share of the meeting.
In the meantime, check out the new ant articles at Myrmecological News. And don't miss Roberto Keller's discussion of ant eyes.
skookumchick | November 2, 2009Folks, I don't know what to tell you. It's like I don't even remember how to blog anymore. I think I've posted 2 real posts in 2 months. I have ideas stacked up in my head for posts - a post from FIE 2009, a post from SWE including the cool "Father Knows Best" episode where Betty decides to be an engineer, a post about talking to my students about sustainability, my favourite holiday Halloween, how I quit my therapist (because I did - and your comments really helped me do so) and so on - but I have absolutely no energy to write them. No motivation. No interest. Just.... overwhelmingness…
clock | November 2, 2009Go say Hello to Andrew Gelman at Applied Statistics.
You can check out the archives of his old blog here.
sciencewoman | November 1, 2009WOOT! In the month of October, 33 Sciencewomen readers, with a little help from HP, donated $3612 to deserving public school students around the country. We funded projects in California, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, Virginia and Utah.
As rewards for all your generosity, we've got several t-shirts from Yellow Ibis to give away, but before we do, here's a couple pieces of logistics.
HP provided $200,000(!) in matching funds for contributions to the social media challenge. Each…
awild | October 28, 2009I'm busy today with lab work. But if you need an ant blog fix, let me point you in the direction of "Historias de Hormigas" ("Stories of Ants"). It's a Spanish blog by José MarÃa Gómez Durán, and the current entry is an amazing series of action shots documenting an ant-hunting Crabronid wasp.