Blogs
drorzel | July 13, 2009As noted earlier, I'm not at my sharpest, thanks to this past weekend's festivities. Which means I don't have any deep-thinking blog posts in the queue, and the hundreds of posts piled up in Google Reader since later Thursday were just marked read without more than a cursory glance.
Since I'm at a loss for material, here's your chance to program the blog:
Leave a comment asking me a question, and I will answer it either in comments or in a post.
The one important qualifier here is that the questions should be easy. I'm too tired for hard questions, today. There are no topic restrictions--…
drorzel | July 10, 2009I'm headed out of own for the weekend to play golf and re-live the past with some friends from college. If all goes well, I should be in Chicago by the time this posts.
I wouldn't want to leave you starved for entertainment, though, so I'll follow many of the other ScienceBlogs folks (as usual, Bora has links) and ask:
Who are you people?
Today, it's all about you, so post something in the comments about yourself. Who are you, how did you get here, what keeps you reading the blog?
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
drorzel | July 6, 2009There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs.
As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…
drorzel | July 1, 2009The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group.
I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…
drorzel | June 26, 2009Chris Mooney has an explanation of the "accommodationist" position that deserves better than to be buried in a Links Dump:
I don't see a need to pry into how each individual is dealing with these complicated and personal matters of constructing a coherent worldview. Rather, from a political and public perspective, I want them all to integrate modern science into that worldview. And, from a civil libertarian perspective, I don't want their religion telling me what to do. (Especially interfering with my access to alcohol on Sundays!)
Insofar as I'm an accommodationist, then, it's not because I…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Over at Skulls in the Stars, gg has a very good response to the polemic about the dullness of modern science that I talked about a few days ago. He takes issue with the claim that modern science is "dull" compared to some past Golden Age, and does a good job of it-- go read it.
I think he makes some very good points, but my own main problem with the piece is a different sort of thing. Fundamentally, the article strikes me as a "Fans are slans" argument dressed up ina lot of science-y jargon. And "fans are slans" arguments drive me nuts.
The basic argument is laid out in a comment by Bruce…
drorzel | June 25, 2009I've been reading a bunch of posts at Infinite summer lately, where they're planning to spend the summer (re)reading David Foster Wallaces most magnum of opuses, Infinite Jest. In a development that surely nobody could see coming, I've decided to spend some of my infinite (hah) free time re-reading it myself.
If you're not familiar with the book, this is not a trivial undertaking. The main text is some thing like 1000 pages, with an additional hundred-odd endnotes. Many of those endnotes are just names of drugs (this makes sense within the book), but a fair number of them contain information…
drorzel | June 24, 2009I'm thinking of paring my RSS feeds down again, as I'm feeling a little overextended at the moment, and could stand to spend less time reading stuff on the Internet. This brings up the obvious question of which blogs to keep, and which blogs to jettison, and that, in turn, lends itself to a reader poll type post.
The concept of "Desert Island Books/Albums" is well known in pop culture-- what are the books/ records/ whatever that you would want for entertainment purposes if you were stranded on a desert island. Of course, the idea of "Desert Island Blogs" makes much less sense-- "What sites on…
drorzel | June 24, 2009There's an interview with me, plus bonus comments from Emmy, over at Paw Talk:
Words of advice for fellow pet owners?
If you're looking to get a dog, I'd recommend visiting your local animal shelter, as you can find lots of great dogs there. And take walks with your dog-- every now and then, I see people who just leave their dogs penned up in the yard, and that's just sad. Get out, see the neighborhood, and get a bit of exercise. Yeah, it's a drag sometimes, especially when it rains, but it's better for both of you.
Emmy: Treats. Lots and lots of treats. Also, don't trust the squirrels. They'…
drorzel | June 23, 2009Chris Mooney has found new digs, and, revitalized by the more congenial atmosphere, has been taking up the science vs. religion fight again. Yesterday, he had a post asking what can be done to get moderate scientists more involved in the argument over whether science and religion can coexist:
At the same time, though, let's face it-in the science blogosphere, we don't hear a lot from the "silent majority." Rather, and admittedly with some important exceptions, we hear from the New Atheists.
Yet I am arguing on behalf of the silent majority, and that is what keeps me going. So my question is…
drorzel | June 17, 2009There have been a half-dozen stories in the past few weeks that looked interesting, but didn't even make it into the Links Dump for the day. Why not? Because the stories or studies were only available as PDF files.
I have no idea if this is actually getting worse, but I'm finding this more irritating than ever. It's particularly annoying as there's usually no good reason for presenting the information in question in PDF form-- you could perfectly well present it as an easily linkable and quotable HTML page. Take, for example, this NEA report on the arts-- the one-paragraph note on Inside…
drorzel | June 16, 2009The recurrent timeout problem in the comments has been dragging on and on, but I'm not sure how much of a problem it is for you, the end user, as opposed to me, the guy who has to endure six timeouts while clearing out Turkish dating service spam. Of course, I can't very well ask people to leave comments about how messed-up the comments are, so I've been forced to resort to something higher-tech:
The commenting problems at ScienceBlogs are:(polls)
I'm torn as to whether to use this for Dorky Polls in the future-- the ease of clicking might make people more likely to respond, but half the…
drorzel | June 16, 2009Female Science Professor is revisiting an old topic, namely, the academic novel:
I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them?
This seems like a good opportunity to both have a discussion and do some science. There are three steps to the experiment:
Leave a comment here saying what your favorite academic novel…
drorzel | June 12, 2009Dave Ng has recently upgraded the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique site, which provides a variety of achievement badges for members to claim and post. I'm not a big one for extra graphics on the blog (they delay the loading of the cute baby pictures), but if you're into goofy stuff, they've got some fun options.
For the record, the badges I can claim include:
I Blog About Science (duh)
Has Frozen Stuff Just to See What Happens (Level III) (liquid nitrogen is cool)
Worship Me, I've Published in Nature or Science
Experienced with Electrical Shock (…
drorzel | June 8, 2009Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level:
1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures.
2) There's a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning questions of how the principles of economics play out in superhero comics. This is both more and less silly than that description makes it sound. If you'd like a participatory entry to parallel Sheril's kissing survey, they're asking readers who's the richest character in comics.
drorzel | June 8, 2009Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven't even tried.
That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of "Publius", kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won't be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds.
It's worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to…
drorzel | June 3, 2009For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:
On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and genuine Antarctic challenge with underfoot conditions comprising snow and ice throughout, an average windchill temperature of -20C, and the possibility of strong Katabatic winds to contend with. Furthermore, the event takes place at an altitude of 3,000 feet.
That's one of the…
drorzel | June 1, 2009Two noteworthy things in the meta-blog category:
1) The 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize nominations are up, and it's a great list of sciencey bloggy goodness. If you're looking for a way to procrastinate, you could kill several days reading all 171 entries.
Once you're done reading them, go vote for your favorite. The top 20 vote-getters will be the shortlist given to Steven Pinker to choose the winners from.
2) Not on the list yet, but sure to provide some quality entries next year is the brand new X-Change Files blog from the Science and Entertainment Exchange. They're providing…