Blogging
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2009The seventy-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Neuroanthropology. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2009The 72nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Neuroanthropology tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Greg. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
jdupuis | July 13, 2009Between the fact that I'm still not completely recovered from my epically awful day last Friday and the blogging lethargy that always comes as my summer blogging break approaches, all the blogging-related brain cells I have left are completely fried.
Fortunately, Chad comes to the rescue with a great idea!
I'll run this more or less the same way he's doing it:
Ask me any relatively straight forward question here in the comments and I'll answer it either in the comments or in it's own post.
Think questions that I could answer in a paragraph or so.
No topic restrictions -- library stuff, pop…
emjohnson | July 10, 2009Many of you on ScienceBlogs will probably already know the fabulous blog Living the Scientific Life, but did you know she could soon be your Antarctica blogger? Wouldn't you love it if she were? If so she really needs your help RIGHT NOW. Click on this link and vote. Then, contact all of your friends and tell them to vote. THEN, tell your friends to tell their friends.
A Primate of Modern Aspect combines two of my favorite things in his blogging: excellent analytical skills and blog posts filled with primates. Make sure to add him to your RSS feed. To get a sampling of his work,…
awild | July 10, 2009No, I haven't forgotten you all. We're still busy moving to the new house. Blogging will remain slow until we get the internet connected, and given the way that AT&T has managed to botch just about everything else so far I don't know if that will happen any time soon. (There's really nothing like the sluggish, incompetent service that AT&T provides. But, at least it's overpriced.)
If you need an ant fix, click on this for a slide show of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants.
Click me.
laelaps | July 9, 2009I have tried to avoid too much navel gazing here during the past few months, but a new paper published in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach by Adam Goldstein has raised the question "Of what use are evolution blogs?"
Before we can answer this question, of course, we have to ask "What is an evolution blog?" There is not a simple answer. Goldstein considers an evolution blog to be a science blog that is intended "to provide information [about evolution], steering away from the controversies over creationism and intelligent design." The extent to which a blog must "steer away" from…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2009Lurker:
"In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively."
From this follows that a de-lurk is an opportunity for shy regular readers to make their presence known. Please tell us something about yourself, and about what you'd like to read more of here! Even if you're not shy at all.
Extra kudos to people who de-lurked already at the first Aard de-lurk or even at the Salto Sobrius regulars roundup of March '06.
clock | July 8, 2009I asked last year. And several other SciBlings also asked last year.
And now the fashion is starting again, I see. It started with Ed, and was picked up by DM and Sci. So, let me ask again:
Identify yourself in the comments. Even if you've never commented before, speak up. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? Are you interesting lay-person, practicing scientist, journalist, sentient virus, or something else? Are you a close friend, colleague, acquaintance or stranger?
emjohnson | July 6, 2009Scientia Pro Publica #7 is now up at Greg Laden's Blog. This is the crème brûlée of science carnivals and includes the best writing from the past two months. Greg was kind enough to include my recent post The Struggle for Coexistence. There are some excellent posts in this edition, so click on over and check them out. Some of the ones I found particularly interesting in this edition include:
A Primate of Modern Aspect looks at the evolution of a malaria resistance gene in wild primates, a paper co-authored by my former professor Susan Alberts:
This is an important step forward in the…
emjohnson | July 5, 2009I've been blogging for a few years now, first at Blogger and recently at Nature Network, and in that time I've accumulated a fair amount of material. Rather than ask people to scan through my archives I thought I would repost some of my earlier pieces as a way for new readers to get an idea of where I'm coming from and what they can expect on these pages in the future. In some cases I will modify these "classic" posts in order to make them more topical (or to edit what in hindsight was simply poor writing). Each will bear the above icon and interested readers can click on it to read the…
emjohnson | July 3, 2009Or, Why I Love ScienceBlogs Reason #372:
Mo at Neurophilosophy has a fascinating article on the evolutionary origins of the nervous system:
THE HUMAN BRAIN is a true marvel of nature. This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought. How did this remarkable and extraordinarily complex structure evolve? This question poses a huge challenge to researchers; brain evolution surely involved thousands of discrete, incremental steps, which…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2009The seventieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
emjohnson | July 1, 2009Four Stone Hearth #70, the migrating anthropology blog carnival, has been posted today at the new site of Afarensis. I hosted the carnival earlier at the original home of The Primate Diaries, and I hope to again soon.
There's a lot of great posts in this edition and I encourage everyone to check them out. My picks include:
Anthropology.net has a terrific review of the new paper on Eem Neanderthals:
The suggestion that Neanderthals made their own fitted clothes and kept food in storage rather than eating as much as they could on the spot, before heading off in search of the next meal,…
awild | June 30, 2009For reasons that aren't clear to me, but are possibly related to the onset of summer bug season, traffic here at myrmecos blog has surged over the past few weeks. We're now getting more daily visitors than do my galleries at myrmecos.net.
I'd like nothing more than to entertain all the new readers with thoughtful essays and astounding photographs. But that's not going to happen. Just the opposite, I'm afraid. The timing of this surge is terrible.
You see, we've just bought a house across town and are in the messy process of packing, paperwork, and moving. The internet will be off for…
sciencewoman | June 30, 2009I'm going to share a few wonderful links to ease my transition back into the on-line world.
First, there's a new photoblogger on the Scienceblogs' Photo Synthesis blog. BJ Bollender is the training coordinator for disability awareness and assistive technology in Arizona. She always travel with camera in hand, and she's got an eye for natural wonders, including rocks and minerals (yay!). Check out her gorgeous first post.
There's another new blogger 'round these parts: Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries. I know that Eric is a Sciencewomen reader, because he won a Recycled Ideas gifty…
clock | June 29, 2009Eric Michael Johnson has moved his blog Primate Diaries from blogspot to NN and today to http://scienceblogs.com/photosynthesis/2009/06/rocks_that_rock.php. w00t!
Photo Synthesis, the Sb photoblog gets a new contributor every month or so. B Jefferson Bolender started today.
jdupuis | June 29, 2009One fall to the finish, no count-outs, no disqualifications, for the World Heavyweight Guru Championship of the World. Two gurus locked inside a steel cage.
Malcolm "Outlier" Gladwell reviews Chris "Long Tail" Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in the New Yorker.
There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009Afarensis left to go solo, but starting today we can instead enjoy the evolutionary anthro goodness of The Primate Diaries right here on Sb! Pop on over and give Eric some of that bonobo group-cohesion-reinforcing lovin'.
jdupuis | June 29, 2009Simon Owens interviews Scott Rosenberg over at Bloggasm.
Lately, there has been no shortage of journalists that have announced- usually as a form of link bait -- the "death of blogging" as social news and microblogging continue to grow in market share, but Rosenberg's book is a tribute to the medium's still-immense power as we approach the end of the decade. He noted that long before Twitter existed there were bloggers that were writing Twitter-like posts, so the launch of the microblogging site merely carved out a niche for those kinds of bloggers, leaving the traditional blogging platform…