Blogs
cagapakis | January 25, 2010There's a funny article over at H+ magazine called "Get Naked: It's Good for Your Brain," telling us exactly that:
Clothing is crushing us! Trapped in tomb-like textiles, we exile our flesh from experiencing the environment. We atrophy the majority of our epidermis. If you put a plaster cast on a broken arm, the skin starves for Vitamin D; muscles weaken due to strangled range of motion; nerve synapses depress to a whimper of their former joy. Twenty-first century hominids shroud the entire skin palette, obliterating symbiosis with the planet except via face, neck and hands. (Burqa-clad…
drorzel | January 21, 2010Set the bloggy flags at half-mast, for Dave and Greta are shutting down Cognitive Daily. OK, maybe three-quarter-mast, because they're doing it of their own free will, but still, they'll be missed.
And now I need to find a new example of an extremely successful blog that is always and unfailingly about science, with no excursions into politics or media criticism. Suggestions welcome in the comments.
razib | January 12, 2010Interesting new ScienceBlog, Oscillator. From the about page:
A collection of notes, thoughts, and news about synthetic biology and biologically inspired engineering in principle and in practice.
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
drorzel | January 10, 2010Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"
This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the whole thing is presented using Brockman's mad circa-1997 web design skills (at least, I hope he's doing it himself. If he's paying someone to put this together, he's being ripped off). On my large-ish desktop monitor, I have to hit "Page Down" five times to get from the top of the page to…
drorzel | January 3, 2010Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish has a very nice post on Fourier series, following on an earlier post on Fourier transforms in the Transformers movie. She gives a nice definition of the process in the earlier post:
A Fourier Transform takes a signal and looks at the waves and then shows us the frequencies of all the waves. If we only have a single sine wave, like above, we will have a frequency that is zero everywhere except for the frequency of that sine wave. More complicated signals will be made up of several of these different frequencies and thus will have several peaks. The idea is that…
drorzel | January 3, 2010It's a new year, so that means it's time to take a look back at the previous year. In graphical form, it looks like this:
Clears it all up, doesn't it? That's the past year in blog traffic, showing pageviews per day. Integrate it all up, and it comes to 717,254 pageviews. That's kind of mind-boggling, really. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that there have been 2,465,829 pageviews here since the move to ScienceBlogs in January 2006.
So, what drew eyeballs this year? There were a total of 14 posts that drew more than 2,000 pageviews according to Google Analytics. In order, they were:
29,…
drorzel | December 1, 2009Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show.
So, I put together a puppet show. It took a little while, because I couldn't find any Niels Bohr puppets (maybe in Denmark?). I found an acceptable alternative, though, and put together a video of the Bohr-Einstein debates, using puppets. Here's the whole thing…
drorzel | December 1, 2009Rhett Allain's Dot Physics has joined ScienceBlogs. Sweet.
Update your RSS readers accordingly. That is all.
drorzel | November 27, 2009Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be more profitable for authors to self-publish on the Kindle than to go through a traditional publisher. I'm a little dubious about this, but it's at least an attempt at a quantitative foundation, rather than the usual boundless techno-optimism.
The first comment to the…
drorzel | November 27, 2009A few other people got the same email I did, promoting a list of the 50 Best Physics Blogs put together by Accredited Online Colleges Dot Org. It's a fine list, with one glaring problem: They didn't include Matt Springer's Built On Facts. As you can probably tell from its frequent tagging for the daily links dump, I'm a big fan, and think Matt's got one of the best physics blogs going.
I could probably come up with a blog or two that I'd drop off the existing list, but that would be impolitic. So let's just add him as the 51st blog, leaving us one blog shy of a pack of cards. The comments of…
drorzel | November 24, 2009During this year's DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised books as prizes to people who contributed to my challenge. Now that the finished books are ready, it's time to congratulate the winners.
Lauren Uroff wins one copy for giving the largest individual donation of the people who forwarded me receipts (the largest overall contribution was from Hewlett Packard, but we're not giving books away to faceless corporations). The person who posts as tcmJOE was the winner of the random drawing (the person has a real name, but I'm not sure it's public. He also used an email address that may be a spam…
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
drorzel | October 30, 2009Last week, I promised to do a puppet show if my DonorsChoose challenge entry claimed more than 1% of the $200,000 that Hewlett-Packard is donating to this year's Social Media Challenge. If you're quick with arithmetic, you'll see that the puppet-show threshold was $2,000.
The actual contribution was $4,064.70, more than double the threshold amount. Clearly, I needed to aim higher...
So, you'll be getting a puppet show in the near-ish future. It'll probably be a couple of weeks-- I'm buried in work at the moment-- but I have some ideas for what to do. It'll be a little while before I have the…
drorzel | October 29, 2009Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:
What is good writing?
Ask an English teacher, and they'll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They'll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they're really honest, they'll admit it has a scholarly tone -- prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could've been written by Willie…
razib | October 23, 2009If you haven't been following the goings-on via Twitter, Luke Jostins has been posting some tidbits on his blog, Genetic Inference. If you get interested in something, remember you can search abstracts.
drorzel | October 23, 2009I'm heading to the airport right after my second class today (I'm doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event-- I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop last fall, and they've got a great program lined up for the festival.
I'm most likely going to attend tonight's tv broadcast, and tomorrow's "Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes" lecture (I have a professional interest in seeing how the competition does things), but I'm making the trip in order to appear…
drorzel | October 23, 2009You sometimes hear people say that it's good to make a splash when embarking on a new media project. David Sloan Wilson has apparently taken this to heart, and tucks himself into a tight ball as he leaps off the high board into the ScienceBlogs pool:
Thinking of science as a religion that worships truth as it god enables me to praise its virtues and criticize its shortcomings at the same time. In my previous blogs, I have played the role of scientific reformer for two major issues. The first is the "new atheism" movement spearheaded by the so-called four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Daniel…
drorzel | October 22, 2009This year's DonorsChoose challenge is doing pretty well, with the total standing at a bit over $2,200. Thanks to all who have donated thus far.
There's a new development in this year's challenge, which is that Hewlett-Packard is going to donate $200,000 to DonorsChoose, which will be divided among Social Media Challenge blogs in proportion to each blog's share of the total Challnge proceeds.
Currently, the Social Media Challenge as a whole has raised $250,000. Which means that the Uncertain Principles challenge is in line to get just under 1% of HP's donation, or not quite $2,000. That's…