Blogs
drorzel | March 6, 2009The much-promoted science blogging anthology is now complete, and available in paper or electronic format from Lulu. If you're dying to have dead-tree copies of the best science blog posts of last year, here's your chance.
drorzel | February 28, 2009One of last year's physics majors is spending the year in rural Uganda working at a clinic/ school there. He's keeping a blog, which is intermittently updated by western standards, but remarkably up-to-date given where he is.
This week, he blogged about putting his physics education to use:
I have been doing a lot of electrical work the last two days. I connected a laboratory and rewired the whole system so that some safety switches would be in place and so that I would be the sole person with the knowledge and ability to decide who will have light. Actually, it is to break it up so that we…
drorzel | February 26, 2009ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question:
You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?"
It's a good topic that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it re-pose it without that frame:
What is one thing in your professional life that you do…
drorzel | February 23, 2009Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…
drorzel | February 22, 2009This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation.
I'm not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line-- newspapers are too slow…
drorzel | February 19, 2009A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora's enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was "Oh, God, not again..." but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by Peter Woit's latest (no doubt a kerfuffle-in-the-making).
Bee quotes Bora urging bloggers to keep twirling, twirling, twirling toward the better day when scientists communicate to the general public, without all the hype and exaggeration:
Perhaps if we remove those middle-men and have scientists and…
drorzel | February 11, 2009Back in the fall, I got all caught up in the election, like everybody else, and I added a bunch of blogs to my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I'm thinking that I might need to cut back to pre-election levels, if not lower, though. Following too many political blogs is giving me whiplash.
This has really been brought home to me as the progress of the stimulus bill has coincided with a busy patch, meaning that I've been sitting down in the evening to 60-80 posts worth of stimulus bill commentary. Going through a whole day's worth of blog posts about the stimulus reads something like:
The bill's in…
drorzel | February 8, 2009I only started using FriendFeed a few months ago because other people at the Science in the 21st Century workshop were documenting the conference on it. I quickly became a fan of the service, which not only added an extra dimension to the meeting, but has also been a continuing source of interesting material from the feeds of others.
If you're not familiar with it, FriendFeed is a service that aggregates online content from other sources, and puts out a feed of all your online activity. my feed, for example, includes blog posts, del.icio.us links, YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, and…
drorzel | February 8, 2009Williams has long held a dominant position in a number of categories of blogging: Dan Drezner on economics and politics, Marc Lynch on the Middle East, Ethan Zuckerman on the developing world and really cool conferences, Derek Catsam on history and Red Sox fandom, yours truly on canine physics. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several people.
The number of blogging fields with prominent Eph contributions has increased this week, with the entire Williams math department making the jump into blogging. It's a bold move, but math blogging has always been more respectable than other types.
At this…
drorzel | January 25, 2009In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science.
Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said with regard to the economic crisis, this is no time for timid measures. It's a time for big thoughts and bold action. With that in mind, here's my take on the question of science's rightful place, which, in the end, boils down to defining what science…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday's bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility of life on Mars, Sanjay Gupta, and the future of science in the media. It's like a Sunday-morning talk show, only with smart people.
drorzel | January 13, 2009Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking "What is Science?". He offers a simple one-sentence definition:
Science is the testing of ideas.
That's all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create fair and objective tests, try not to fool yourself or anyone else, don't be wedded to your hypothesis, basic things like that. Be dishonest and I doubt there's a definition in the world that some sufficiently clever pseudoscientist can't wriggle out of. Test your ideas and be honest about it. That's…
drorzel | January 6, 2009I'm feeling kind of uninspired, blog-wise. I've got a few ResearchBlogging type posts in the mental queue, but they're not going to get written before the weekend, and the other obvious topics are things that I've written about N times before, and I'm not fired up for iteration N+1. So, we'll repeat last year's uncomfortable questions experiment, which worked pretty well:
Everyone has things they blog about.
Everyone has things they don't blog about.
Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it.…
drorzel | January 4, 2009The posts selected for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting the best writing on science blogs for the year, have been announced. My We Are Science post made the list, which is nice.
Amusingly, this showed up in my inbox at the same time that the ScienceBlogs front page is featuring this Bloggingheads episode featuring George Johnson and John Horgan. Johnson, you might recall, riled everybody up a couple of weeks ago with a bit of a dyspeptic rant about science bloggers compared to science journalists. They spend a good fifteen or twenty minutes on the topic again this week, and…
drorzel | January 2, 2009Because there's no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs:
That's how you know it's Science!
Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.
The first half of the year pretty much fit in with a steady upward trend since the move to ScienceBlogs (see below). In early June, though, it all got to be a bit too much, and I cut way back on posting (less than half as many posts in June as in the previous few months), leading to a major drop in…
drorzel | December 28, 2008Bora has a post taking issue with the claim made in Slate's blogging guide article that blog posts should be short. At least, I think that was his point-- the post was much too long, and I didn't read it all.
I'm constantly amazed by how evergreen the "how to blog" topic is. It's just not that complicated-- pick a blogging system, find a host, and start typing. There is literally no wrong way to do it-- for every rule put out there that you absolutely must follow, there are probably ten blogs that violate it, and are brilliant.
Individuality is the point of the whole enterprise. The world…
drorzel | December 23, 2008What with one thing and another, I didn't watch this week's Bloggingheads Science Saturday-- Kate's parents were visiting, and then there was the Snowpocalypse, and I have book edits to finish, and I don't enjoy the John Horgan/ George Johnson pairing all that much. Apparently, I really missed out, because three-quarters of the way through, Johnson uncorks a rant about a past episode featuring Ed Yong and Abbie Smith, where they said something about science journalism that he took the wrong way. This has, predictably enough, turned into yet another blogospheric kerfuffle. I believe Brian's…
drorzel | December 1, 2008The Yorkshire Ranter points out the similarities between last week's horrific attacks in Mumbai and Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War, and dubs it the "world's deadliest novel." Steinn picks up on this, and wonders if it's accurate:
The plot of Dog's of War is a coup in an African country, and it seems likely the book has been used as a "how to" manual several times, possibly most recently in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
But, is it really the world's deadliest novel? And if not, what is?
I'm tempted to nominate Atlas Shrugged, but it's way too early to assess the impact of the current…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 13, 2008Bora's beating the drum for submissions to this year's science blogging anthology. He doesn't seem to be suffering from a lack of submissions, but if you've got something you would like to see re-printed in dead tree form, submit it before December 1. I'm not clear whether this will be going through Lulu again this year, or if they have a regular publisher interested.
It's earlier than I would normally do this sort of thing, but Bora's post got me wondering about what I consider my best posts of the year. This isn't by any means a comprehensive list, just what I came up with in a few minutes…