Blogs
razib | October 21, 2009Pamela Ronald of Tommorow's Table, author of Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. Additionally, David Sloan Wilson, has moved his blog to ScienceBlogs. It's called Evolution for Everyone, after the book of the same name. You can read my review of his book here.
razib | October 20, 2009Eric Michael Johnson is doing some serious science blogging. Worth checking out.
drorzel | October 16, 2009This year's DonorsChoose challenge has brought in a respectable $1,929 thus far, helping reach almost 1000 school kids. Thanks to all those who have donated thus far.
We've been stuck at that level for a little while now, though, so it doesn't look like we're going to match last year's total of more than $6,000. Of course, last year's gaudy number came about in large part because I agreed to dance like a monkey if the Challenge total broke $6,000. So, I suppose I really ought to sweeten the pot-- a chance at winning books isn't going to put us over the top.
I asked for suggestions a while…
drorzel | October 12, 2009The Digital Cuttlefish looks at the Archie comics, and waxes poetic:
Two paths play out in a comic book,
When Archie walks down memory lane
"The road not taken" is the hook;
So now, the writers take a look
And re-write Archie's life again,
This time with Betty as his bride;
Veronica the woman spurned,
Who once upon a time, with pride,
Was wed to Archie. Thus allied,
They lived while many seasons turned.
Why am I commenting on this, given that what little I know about Archie I learned from The Comics Curmudgeon and Chasing Amy? Because he goes on to talk about the Many-Worlds Interpretation…
drorzel | October 7, 2009I have a Dorky Poll idea for later in the day, but let's get this out of the way first:
Choose only one:(opinion)
Don't say I never gave you these options.
drorzel | October 2, 2009We're currently in the early stages of the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser, helping to raise money for educational projects. This is especially important in the current economic climate-- even before things went south, many schools and classrooms were strapped for cash, but now it's even worse.
But I can understand if that's not a noble enough cause for you. Helping poor people isn't enough for everyone. So here's something to sweeten the deal: PETA doesn't like DonorsChoose because some of the science classes seeking funds are looking for dissection equipment for biology classes. Janet gives…
drorzel | October 1, 2009As you may have seen on some other ScienceBlogs blogs, it's time again for the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser:
If you haven't been here in past years, DonorsChoose is a charity dedicated to education. They take specific proposals from school teachers looking for items to help their classes-- anything from pens and paper to classroom furniture, to smart boards and computer projectors-- and allow donors to choose specific classroom projects that appeal to them. We've run a fundraiser for them every year since ScienceBlogs was started.
This year, they've expanded beyond blogs, to a more general…
drorzel | September 29, 2009SteelyKid has a bit of flu, so we're all a little discombobulated in Chateau Steelypips. I'm going to be trying to get a full day's worth of work before noon, which won't leave room for much blogging.
But here's something for you to think about/ comment on: the day after tomorrow is October 1, which means another year's DonorsChoose blogger challenge. Last year, I famously got $6,000 in contributions by offering to dance like a monkey, but I'm not sure what would follow that. So,
What should I offer to do if I manage to reach the overall challenge goal of several thousand dollars in total…
drorzel | September 29, 2009I've grown thoroughly disgusted with most of the science-vs-religion stuff in blogdom, mostly because my views on the matter are kind of moderate, and don't fit well with the rather extreme positions taken by most of the bloggers and commenters who focus on this issue. This dooms me to either being ignored, or called names as some sort of collaborator, and I have better ways to spend my time, so I've pretty much given up on being an active part of those... discussions.
I do occasionally feel guilty, though, as if I'm letting down my side (well, my part of the squishy middle) by not speaking…
drorzel | September 19, 2009Josh Rosenau is thinking from California about the role of analogy and metaphor in arguments. This follows from a series of posts arguing with Jerry Coyne et al. about the usual science vs. religion stuff. The analogy thing comes in because in the first post, he made reference to Slacktivist's excellent post about vampires and crosses, saying:
Vampires don't exist, and slacktivist makes it absolutely clear that he knows this. But telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren't truths that science can independently verify, but…
drorzel | September 17, 2009Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author's opponents.
razib | September 16, 2009The Big Money has a profile of Felix Salmon up. Here is why I reckon that Salmon has some rank, every few weeks he shows up as a guest on Marketplace. And he consistently pronounces Kai Ryssdal's first name as if it is really the female name "Kay."
drorzel | September 2, 2009I sort of feel like I ought to have something to say about the recent controversy over creationists on bloggingheads.tv, which has caused Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer to renounce the whole site. If you're too lazy to click through those links, the basic problem is that bloggingheads has twice invited creationists-- sorry, cdesign proponentists-- to appear on their "Science Saturday" segments in recent weeks. Sean and Carl feel that giving people from the Discovery Institute this sort of platform amounts gives them more credibility than they deserve, especially since neither of them was…
drorzel | August 29, 2009The Corporate Masters are considering some steps to take ScienceBlogs more in a community/ social network/ Web 3.14/ whatever direction, and have asked us our opinions of various potential features. I have opinions on the subject, but they're ultimately less important than the opinions of you, the readers. So here's an attempt to generate some reasonably concise feedback (all of the proposed features would be totally optional-- they're not talking about mandatory registration, and I will fight it tooth and nail if they do):
Which of the following community features would improve the…
drorzel | August 24, 2009I'm suffering through a wretched cold at the moment, which will limit my blogging activity. If you're looking for something to do, though, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds blog set up by the Corporate Masters. This is basically a short-form online version of a feature from Seed, in which they ask smart people to discuss Big Questions-- a more limited version of those Edge questions that John Brockman does every year.
The current question is:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social…
drorzel | August 21, 2009So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there.
I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either),…
sciencewoman | August 11, 2009While I'm working on my course design stuff, please help some of my lovely bloggy friends conduct some research on how women geoscientists use blogs.
Over the past several years, the geoscience blogosphere has blossomed so much that this fall, the Geological Society of America (GSA) will be convening a Pardee Keynote Symposium called "Google Earth to Geoblogs: Digital Innovations in the Geosciences." Kim Hannula started wondering how blogs serve women geoscientists. Kim recruited the rest of us and we decided to approach this problem as scientists - by collecting data and analyzing the…
drorzel | August 4, 2009The Worldcon program has been posted, but only as a giant, confusing PDF. I was getting cross-eyed trying to figure things out, so I ended up creating my own blank grid sheets, and making notes on those.
The following is a by-no-means comprehensive list of things I think look interesting enough to attend. There are only a handful of thing that I'll definitely be at (I'll mark those in bold), but I'll probably choose many of the rest from this list:
Thursday
15:30: Re-reading
Graham Sleight, Jo Walton, Kate
Nepveu, Larry Niven
There is a school of thought that re-reading
is a juvenile habit,…
drorzel | July 15, 2009I've sometimes seen it said that in order to have a productive discussion, people on both sides need to be willing to change their minds. I think that's probably slightly overdetermined-- you can find examples of cases in which neither side was going to change, but they managed to sustain a mutually beneficial dialogue all the same. The physics example that comes to mind is Bohr and Einstein, who spent decades arguing with each other over the philosophical basis of quantum theory, but were nonetheless good friends. They pushed each other, forcing each of them to refine their arguments and…
razib | July 13, 2009
Conor Clarke and Conor Friedersdorf are guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan's. They also did a Bloggingheads.tv recently. Names matter, that's for sure. I also think that Clarke looked somewhat like the "Gigolo Joe" character from A.I. in the diavlog.