Blogging
laelaps | May 18, 2009Over at the Inverse Square blog author Tom Levenson has just started a multi-part blog series on the evolution of his forthcoming title Newton and the Counterfeiter. It is an extension of a session on writing a pop-sci book he lead with Dave Munger at ScienceOnline'09 last January, and the posts provide an excellent opportunity to see how a book goes from an idea to a volume sitting on the "New Arrivals" display at B&N. So far he has posted parts 0.0 and 1.0.
I can't match Tom's experience as an author, but I will be contributing my own perspective on writing a pop-sci book based upon…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2009The 67th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Get your submissions to Sam before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes! And hey, hey, hey -- have you considered wearing a bone through your nose?
laelaps | May 15, 2009
Paraceratherium greets you as you enter the new Extreme Mammals Exhibit.
My laptop is running a little slow, but here I am at the American Museum of Natural History's new "Extreme Mammals" exhibit. The selected casts, sculptures, and interactive displays live up to the exhibition's name. To my right is a life-sized cast of Puijila darwini, the transitional pinniped just announced a few weeks ago, and to my left is a reconstruction of the Arctic during the Eocene, complete with a Coryphodon munching on swamp plants.
The exhibit strikes a good balance between living mammals and bizarre…
awild | May 13, 2009...well, not really. But an exchange I had at Photo Synthesis with Andrew Bleiman of Zooillogix got me thinking about all the different insects that have charmingly envenomated me at one time or another.
Myrmecia piliventris, Australia
So I'm starting a meme called Things That Have Stung Me. The rules are simple:
List all the things that have stung you.
Bites don't count.
Pass the meme to 3 or more other bloggers you suspect have also been well-zinged.
Here are mine.
Things that have stung me:
Ants:
Pachycondyla verenae
Pachycondyla harpax
Pachycondyla villosa
Pachycondyla…
clock | May 13, 2009You may have heard about a recent Wikipedia hoax:
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.
It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers
Yup. Journalists check their sources carefully. Especially the despised untrustworthy Wikipedia, only a…
laelaps | May 13, 2009This coming Saturday the American Museum of Natural History is going to lift the veil on their new temporary exhibition Extreme Mammals, and I was fortunate enough to get an invitation to the blogger preview being held the day before. This coming Friday from about 4 to 5:30 PM I'll be wandering around the new exhibit, taking photos and (hopefully) blogging about it right from the scene. Expect lots of pictures of Ambulocetus, Uintatherium, and other fossil beasts that evening.
If you can't make it to NYC during the run of the exhibit, though, you can check out a lot of the materials being…
laelaps | May 12, 2009Over at loveart there is a great interview with Sb's own Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera. There's plenty there about science, journalism, art, blogging, and how they all intersect, so I definitely recommend that you give it a look!
sjurvetson | May 11, 2009As the sun sets on a wonderful set of insect photos from the Wild...
I thought I should start with a transition photo, on a photosynthetic bug bed, to a new photo theme - rockets:
Many insects have served as brave cosmonauts - flying as a somewhat unwilling payload in Estes rockets. The National Association of Rocketry has rules against living payloads, but they make an exception for invertebrates. (I think the intent of the rule was to prevent kids from flying their sister's pet, but to allow for some curious exploration.)
The Quark is the smallest rocket I have built, with rear-swept…
awild | May 10, 2009...and it was fun. Here are some highlights from the past week:
Why do only some ants sting?
Competing for space on a fake walnut
The case of the Malagasy mystery ants
Here's one bit of information that might be useful for anyone thinking about starting a blog. The ScienceBlogs network- which hosts Photo Synthesis- is driven by Moveable Type software. The Myrmecos Blog uses Wordpress. Having spent time now in both platforms, I've decided that I much prefer Wordpress- it's more intuitive, more flexible, and it handles images more smoothly.
This isn't to say that blogging for ScienceBlogs…
sb admin | May 10, 2009Well. A month has flown by, the lease is up, and the SB landlord is banging on the door to get the keys back. Something about an explosive new tenant needing the place. Supposed to be a blast.
So here it is. My final Photo Synthesis post, fitting in one last ant before the blog really takes off. Can I stop with the rocket humor already? No. I can't. There's simply too much fuel to change trajectory. (Help! Make it stop!)
In any case, it's been a pleasure participating in the ScienceBlogs community. I thank you all for reading, commenting, lurking, and sending all the emails and…
sb admin | May 6, 2009Here's some exciting news. Starting Monday, our Photo Synthesis host will be the multi-talented Steve Jurvetson. Steve will tell you that his main thing is rockets, but a bit of snooping about reveals that he's also a closet myrmecophile. But really. Who isn't?
I'll continue posting through this weekend, after which the bugs return to Myrmecos. But I hope you'll join me in sticking around for a fast month of rocket-blogging.
laelaps | May 6, 2009I was planning on writing about G.G. Simpson's influence on paleoanthropology today (and more generally why paleoanthropology seems isolated from vertebrate paleontology), but the papers I need are beyond my reach. If someone has the proper access could they please send me;
Simpson, G.G. 1950. Some Principles of Historical Biology Bearing on Human Origins. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Bio, 15, 55-66
doi:10.1101/SQB.1950.015.01.008
and
Laporte, L.F. 1991. George Gaylord Simpson as mentor and apologist for paleoanthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 84, 1-16
doi:10.1002/ajpa.…
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2009
It's been more than two years since the last time I hosted the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. Now it's my turn again with number 66!
Our first submission is a piece from Anne of the Spittoon blog about a recently published ginormous study of the population genetics of modern Africans. Africa is the part of the globe where people are most diverse since we started out there and have had time to diversify. Can you imagine those hundreds of thousands of years when all the planet's Homo sapiens lived in Africa and hadn't started to explore the rest of the world?
Razib at Gene Expression offers…
sb admin | May 5, 2009A few days ago I noticed the search term "Malagasy Mystery Ant" showing up in the stats for my other blog. This puzzled me, as it wasn't a phrase I was familiar with. So I googled it.
All mentions of the term trace back to a caption in the New York Times slide show from last week. Goodness. I- your humble blogger- had coined it myself, in a haze of deadline fever while submitting images for the slide show. And then, apparently, I forgot all about it.
Mystrium oberthueri
Am I going senile already? I hope not.
The problem with insects is their sheer number. There are millions of…
clock | May 5, 2009
Discussion with David Cohn, Mathew Ingram, Amber MacArthur, Sarah Milstein and Jay Rosen.
A good conversation for those interested in Twitter and the current journalistic revolution, calm-headed and smart.
Steve Paikin, who did the interview, was sometimes a little hazy about what journalism is, mixing up breaking news with news analysis with investigative journalism - I wish he has read my little classification effort - but the others corrected him politely. Worth 38 minutes of your time.
jane | May 5, 2009Four years and four months ago, almost to the day, I started a humble little blog way over in a tiny corner of the blogosphere. Back in the day, there were few voices of women scientists in the blogosphere, and even fewer of women computer scientists. I had never had much luck keeping any semblance of a journal before, and I had no idea what I was going to say, really, because who really wants to hear the rantings musings of a lowly pseudonymous computer scientist? I'm not a betting woman, but I thought this little experiment would last one month, tops.
Boy, was I wrong.
People actually…
clock | May 4, 2009You know I went to the #TriangleTweetup last week at @Bronto, an Email Service Provider in Durham, NC, with an inflatable brontosaurus as its mascot:
Apart from searching Twitter for TriangleTweetup, you could also follow @triangletweetup for updates. At one point during the event, the hashtag was 'trending' but I don't know how high it got.
There were about 250 people there, mostly programers, web developers and PR folks. Reminds me of the old bloggercons. Will tweetups also evolve over the years to attract more people who are using it and less people who are designing it? A first Science…
clock | May 4, 2009...are three blogs written by the same person - Ross Horsley, a librarian with interesting creative juices.
Her first blog is My First Dictionary in which she uses pictures from an old 1950s kids' Dictionary and replaces the text with something....usually ominous!
Her second blog is Musty Moments with old clippings and ads, sometimes with her own text added:
And the third is Anchorwoman In Peril! where she reviews slash-pics:
Read the interview with Horsley at NO JUAN HERE
clock | May 4, 2009Just read it here, then bookmark it for the next time you write a blog post about a PLoS paper...
clock | May 3, 2009I am pretty much on record that I would not pay for anything online (to be precise, to pay for content - I certainly use the Web for shopping). But with some caveats. I have been known to hit a PayPal button of people who provide content and information I find valuable. And I would presumably pay, though not being happy about it, if the information behind the pay wall is a) unique (i.e., not found anywhere else by any other means) and b) indispensable for my work (i.e., I would feel handicapped without it).
But I am not subscribed to, or paying for, anything right now and haven't been in…