Blogs
drorzel | October 22, 2007As mentioned in the previous post, Cut to the Chase offers two lists of skills to look at: The Popular Mechanics list of "25 Skills Every Man Should Know" and a new list of "20 Practical Skills Every Self-Sufficient Adult Should Have."
This seems ripe for an Internet "meme" thing, so here's a the proposed game:
Go through both lists, and determine how many of the listed skills you can claim. Compare the fractions to see if you're more of a ManlyMan or a Self-Sufficient Adult.
A quick pass at the lists gives me 14/25 from the Popular Mechanics list, and 17/20 from Chase's list. That makes me…
drorzel | October 22, 2007A little while back, Popular Mechanics published a list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. Seven of the 25 are car-related, another four have to do with construction, and an additional six are outdoorsy things. Of course, they also threw in "extend your wireless network," for the nerds out there, but it does tend toward the parodically ManlyMan side of things.
In response, Cut to the Chase posted a list of 20 "practical skills every self-sufficient adult should have", which probably errs in the other direction, with entries that are far too humorlessly sensible. (Though I notice that "Know…
drorzel | October 20, 2007As noted a little while ago, ScienceBlogs has recently redesigned the channel pages on the front page, and they now include images supplied by the bloggers. For example, the doomsday weapon photo that currently graces the Physical Science page is a picture of my lab.
Now, any idiot can take pictures of cute fuzzy animals, but physics pictures are a little harder to come by. So, the corporate masters are soliciting pictures from you, the readers of this blog:
It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. Readers should send their photos to photos@scienceblogs.com. They…
drorzel | October 16, 2007ScienceBlogs has just redesigned the main site. Sort of. The change is subtle enough that you might not notice it-- the only real difference on the front page is that the "channel" list has been reorganized-- it's now slightly shorter, and some old channels have been combined into new ones.
There are two practical advantages to this: on the back end of things, this allows the individual bloggers to put a post in two channels at the same time, which is great for things that straddle the boundary between two areas. Also, the new channel pages feature pictures, with the Physical Science page…
drorzel | October 14, 2007I'm cleaning out some old saved items from my RSS feeds, to prepare for some changes at ScienceBlogs, and one of the items I had marked but never done anything with was an announcement of the launch of Correlations, a group blog from Wired Science and PBS. It suffers a bit from the Wired aesthetic of posterizing photographs so as to make them unrecognizable, but at least it's black text on a white background, so PBS has had some moderating influence.
They've got a good collection of science bloggers, including Clifford Johnson of Asymptotia and ScienceBlogs' own Tara Smith and Sheril…
drorzel | October 10, 2007Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle is a nominee for a $10,000 blogging scholarship (that is, a scholarship given to someone who blogs, not a scholarship for studying blogging). The winner will be determined by popular vote.
Of course, the responsible thing to do here would be to go read the blogs of all the nominees, and then vote for the one you like the best. Or you could mindlessly go punch the radio button for Shelley, just because she has the support of ScienceBlogs. Or, I suppose, some linear combination of those two. Up to you.
drorzel | October 4, 2007I got a rather odd email yesterday, with the Subject: header Help me identify a youtube video and solve my grandfather's mysterious death. That's eye-catching, to say the least, and the text of the message was also interesting:
There's a youtube video involved in my grandfather's odd circumstances of death. Please take a look at the attached picture and pass it along.
This frame belongs to the video I'm looking for and it's the only evidence that I have so far: it's a snapshot of the computer screen he was seeing when he died. If you ever saw the entire footage or recognize any detail of this…
drorzel | October 3, 2007So, in a fit of procrastinatory behavior, I've spent a bunch of time over the last few days playing with Facebook. I have to say, I can understand how this would get to be addictive-- I'm inordinately amused by the fact that I can go to a web page and get a little message telling me that a division chief at NIST has removed a commercial jingle from his list of favorite music. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that information, but it amuses me.
I'm still sort of wondering whether there's a point to this stuff beyond more efficient procrastination, though. I've got access to this...…
drorzel | September 20, 2007On September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving through rural New Hampshire, and had an odd experience that has become probably the most famous alien abduction story in the history of UFO folklore.
As it happens, they drove right past the town where SF author and Making Light blogger Jim Macdonald lives. Now, armed with a digital camera and a scientific mindset, Jim has set out to produce the definitive explanation of the Hill story, following published accounts step by step through the New Hampshire countryside.
It's a terrific piece of work, even in an incomplete state (he's still…
drorzel | September 19, 2007The Scientist is doing a survey about science blogs, and if you go look at the article, you'll notice a shocking omission.
That's right, there's not a single physicist on the list.
Of course, that shouldn't actually be a surprise, as they're actually doing a survey of life science blogs. But that doesn't stop all sorts of people from referring to it as a survey about science blogs in general.
And they complain about physicists being arrogant...
drorzel | September 16, 2007Ethan Zuckerman has the sort of life that every academic dreams of: He travels all over the world going to conferences where really smart people, some of them famous, talk about interesting things. And he doesn't even have to grade exam papers, or attend boring faculty meetings.
His latest jaunt was to the Idea Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, and he has blogged it extensively. Highlights range from Steve Wozniak talking about the birth of Apple to James McLurkin's swarms of robots to Dirk Brockmann using dollar bills for epidemiology (hey to Tara and Revere). Like all of his conference…
drorzel | September 14, 2007The particle physics community in the US has rolled out a new site promoting the Large Hadron Collider, because, you know, there was a danger that we might forget that it's there. As part of the site, they're featuring four new physics blogs, by Monica Dunford, Pam Klabbers, Steve Nahn, and blogosphere veteran Peter Steinberg.
They really need to work on getting a blog interface that doesn't suck, or at least an RSS feed, but this has the potential to be an interesting site. It's also the second time that the particle physics community has organized a blogging effort (the first was 2005's…
drorzel | August 15, 2007The thirteenth edition of the physics-themed blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at Cocktail Party Physics. There's a whole bunch of good stuff there, and also some links to the recent silliness about the term "God Particle."
If you're looking for good physics-related reading on the Internet, it's your one-stop shopping source.
drorzel | July 22, 2007There's been some discussion recently in places I can't link to about the Purpose of Blogging, and whether it's really appropriate to be using the medium to exchange silly pictures of cats. Ethan Zuckerman made an important point about the utility of banality (that link 404's at the moment, but I assume Ethan will eventually fix it. Hint, hint. The post is still on the front page, though):
So while Flickr should be used for displaying pictures of cute cats, it’s also proved an effective tool for avoiding keyword filtering. Activists in China are using Flickr to disseminate images that…
drorzel | July 16, 2007Kate and I went out to Michigan this past weekend, to unwind a bit at the summer home of some friends from college. It was an Internet-less weekend for me-- there was Internet access at the house, but I fought through the incipient datastarve, and resisted the temptation to log in. (This means that a handful of comments to posts from last week were trapped in moderation for a few days, and I apologize for that... I've shaken them all loose now.)
Anyway, I came back to close to 1000 new posts in my Bloglines feeds, and dealt with them in the usual manner: I hit "Mark All Read," and started…
drorzel | June 25, 2007Scott Eric Kaufman must have a dissertation deadline coming up, because his procrastination is getting intense. He's just set up a text adventure game on his blog:
You are standing near the Moral High Ground. To your South are Theists (or Theorists). To your North are Atheists (or Anti-Theorists). To your East and West are scorched earth, battered egos and hurt feelings.
> e
The land has been salted with the blood of Deleuze. There is nothing for you here.
> w then
You can play by leaving instructions in the comments. Go help Scott avoid work.
drorzel | June 22, 2007Via Jennifer Ouellette, I find that there's a site where you can get a movie-style rating for your blog. And the answer is:
by Mingle2
Well, fuck.
drorzel | June 12, 2007The current tempest in the teapot of the academic blogosphere is the stalking of Scott Eric Kaufman. John Holbo has a decent summary, with links to most of the relevant original posts. The short form is this: Scott commented negatively on the "Jesus' General" blog about what he thought was an overreaction to a post by a Nashville blogger. As a result, he offended a commenter there, who responded by sending a bunch of letters to the administration of Scott's university accusing him of being a white supremacist. Things went downhill from there.
This whole episode is yet another sad example of…
drorzel | May 18, 2007Dave at the World's Fair is asking ScienceBloggers to show off their coffee mugs. I don't usually have a camera at work, but my signature mug was bought via the Internet, so I snagged the image from the CafePress Store.
It's a "Still Not King" mug, a reference to the famous Very Secret Diary of Aragorn. To the best of my recollection, nobody has recognized this reference and asked about it.
Of course, it's been over a year since I drank tea, thanks to my stomach problems, and I never liked coffee, so at the moment, the mug is holding a couple of pens and a thermometer. But if I were to start…
drorzel | May 15, 2007As you may or may not have noticed, last week's silly dog post got picked up by, well, just about everyone. I think it probably started with a sidelight link at Making Light, then it showed up on Boing Boing, and Digg, and MetaFilter, and something like half the LiveJournals in the world, it seems. The site got just shy of 50,000 pageviews on Friday, and Saturday and Sunday would've been in the top five days, traffic-wise, had they happened a month ago.
So, I've achieved Nerd Fame, of a sort. I have to say, it's a kick, and I'm fighting the temptation to sit down and try to crank out a whole…