Blogging
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the local Walpurgis Night bonfire, met loads of neighbours old and new.
Played Abalone, Tigris & Euphrates and Qwirkle with Kai and other friends.
Went to a lovely dinner at the home of my friends Mattias & Lina.
Took a morning bike ride and walk in the woods to log a geocache that had appeared…
awild | May 1, 2009..over at Photo Synthesis:
How to attract an entomologist
Agrarian ants
Another way to humanize an insect photo
Ants in the New York Times
Photo technique: the white box
Humanizing the hordes: Anthropomorphism and science photography
clock | April 30, 2009There is a Triangle Tweetup tonight and I'll be there, along with about 250 people from the Triangle, as well as from Greensboro and Greenville. You can follow the proceedings on Twitter, of course - @triangletweetup. You will also be able to watch it live!
Looking at the list of attendees, I see several names that are familiar, including my SciBling Abel PharmBoy who has blogged about the event in much greater detail. Then, there will of course be people like Ginny Skalsky, Wayne Sutton, Lenore Ramm and the amazing Rachel of @DPAC. I am assuming that Bob Etheridge on the list is really the…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2009I'm trying out a new side-bar widget from PostRank. It's intended to grab browsing readers and send them on from wherever they enter the blog to other posts that have recently proved popular. Whaddayathink?
clock | April 27, 2009When I woke up this morning and went online while kids were getting up and ready for school, the first this I saw was this tweet by abelpharmboy:
Two articles on @BoraZ in today's Durham Herald-Sun. Will post links later. Herald-Sun has pain in the ass registration to access site.
So, I went out and got a hardcopy of the paper, and also looked at it online (feel free to use login: coturnixfan and password: boraborabora to see the articles, thanks Bill). The first article starts on the front page of Chapel Hill Herald (I think that if you buy the paper in Durham, Chapel Hill Herald is inside,…
awild | April 27, 2009My profound apologies for the lack of blogitude here while I'm over at Photo Synthesis. Fortunately, the internet has other things in it:
Myrmician shares an action series of Australian Podomyrma taking apart a much larger Myrmecia.
Brian Valentine finds some British Myrmica with a serious mite problem.
Steve Shattuck's Ants of Australia has been given an overhaul and a new URL.
Roberto Keller explains ant mouths.
Adrian Thysse has quite a nice photo blog, voyages about my camera.
***update*** There's also this bit in the New York Times. Who is that dashing young photographer?
clock | April 23, 2009Just a collection of links to my and other people's posts/articles I need to have collected all in one place (I will explain later):
1.a.Breaking News
Scientific American Editor, President to Step Down; 5 Percent of Staff Cut
'Scientific American' Editor Out in Reorg
1. b.Death of print: how are newspapers and magazines different?
Defining the Journalism vs. Blogging Debate, with a Science Reporting angle
Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News
Thinking the Unthinkable
2020 vision: What's next for news
Newspapers on the brink-where to next?
Could beautiful design save newspapers…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2009The sixty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Primate of Modern Aspect. 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 already on 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a babe. Like me.
sb admin | April 21, 2009
As you may know, Photo Synthesis is a rotating blog, featuring the work of a different photoblogger each month.
The powers that be here at ScienceBlogs tell me they are still considering candidates for the coming month and for following months. So. If you have a favorite science photographer who blogs, or blogger who photographs, send your suggestion to editorial@scienceblogs.com. Or, just post a comment below.
Don't be shy about recommending yourself, either, if you fit the high profile of a Photo Synthesis blogger. Generally, aside from the obvious bit about photography, we here at…
sb admin | April 20, 2009This clumsy photoshop job over at Pharyngula puts me in mind of one of my favorite blogs, Photoshop Disasters.
Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for the hours of time you will waste over there.
clock | April 19, 2009
I know it's been a couple of months now since the ScienceOnline'09 and I have reviewed only a couple of sessions I myself attended and did not do the others. I don't know if I will ever make it to reviewing them one by one, but other people's reviews on them are under the fold here. For my previous reviews of individual sessions, see this, this, this, this and this.
What I'd like to do today is pick up on a vibe I felt throughout the meeting. And that is the question of Power. The word has a number of dictionary meanings, but they are all related. I'll try to relate them here and hope you…
skookumchick | April 17, 2009 I don't have time to read blogs anymore. And yet, I still have over 211 RSS subscriptions in my Google Reader. To assuage my guilt at having many times the "1000+" posts I haven't read, I thought I would share some cool sites I've come across. Somehow it makes me feel better. Details below the fold, and apologies for not acknowledging where I came across these because I've forgotten. ;-)
Mapping the Marvellous: just the most marvelous collection of curiosities and interesting things, written by Marion Endt. She writes, "Books, articles, quotes, images, concepts, theories and thoughts…
skookumchick | April 17, 2009It was 3 years ago today that I started blogging. I started with a pseudonymous blog, at the edge of the internet, as a lonely graduate student, trying to navigate my dissertation, a long-distance relationship, and unsure future career prospects. My blog, with my pseudonym, is still out there because the prospect of cutting it off made me feel like I was lying, like I was ashamed of what I wrote. But I'm thinking, on this anniversary, maybe it is time to take it down. Retire it, and the url too. Because maybe I could then bring my pseudonym back out of the shadows, where it has been…
sb admin | April 16, 2009
An Amblyopone oregonensis huntress delivers a paralyzing dose of venom to a centipede. This lets the ant larvae consume it alive later, at their leisure. Ow. Ow, Ow. Yes, that is the stinger you see, sunk deep into the head.
A cricket is impaled on the mandibles of a Malagasy trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus coquereli. That's gotta hurt.
Mantids don't wait for their prey to expire before they tear them to pieces.
An aphid receives the egg of a braconid wasp (Aphidius ervi).
But that's probably better than getting your innards suddenly schlorped out by a syrphid fly larva.
clock | April 14, 2009I have received, from a friend, a draft of an intra-institutional guideline for employee blogging and online behavior. The employer has been anonymized. The document has been written by non-scientist non-bloggers at the institution and is making the rounds prior to formal review and approval.
We have talked about this at ScienceOnline'09 in the session Hey, You Can't Say That!. Here are some of the bloggy responses to that session to get you up to speed:
Deep Thoughts and Silliness: Semi-live Blogging Scienceonline09: Day 2
Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 2: generalised ramblings…
awild | April 13, 2009Here's a heat map showing the intensity of Myrmecos blog visitors over the last 24 hours:
As a reminder, I'm blogging this month over at Photo Synthesis. Posts in the past week have included bits on ant diversity, phorid flies, google earth, and whirligig beetles.
clock | April 13, 2009Ah, it takes me so long these days to actually blog about events I attend! This one was last Thursday! But here it is. I went to the Triangle Blogger Bash in Durham, organized by Ginny of 30THREADS (find them on Twitter as well) and hosted by the Durham Performing Arts Center.
I am bad at estimating crowds, but there were at least 50 local bloggers there, some new to me, some old friends like Lenore, Anton, Will, Sheril, Ayse, Wayne and Ginny. There was a nice spread of food and a cash bar. The hosts gave out nice prizes (I never ever win stuff like that). You can see some blog reports here…
clock | April 10, 2009This one is interesting - a blog with rotating hosts! The new blog, Photo Synthesis will rotate authors every month, each author using the blog to showcase some of their best science/nature photography.
The first one to go is Alex Wild, who you may also know from his Myrmecos Blog. So go say Hello and check out the pictures!