Blogs
drorzel | May 14, 2007Stuart Coleman of Daily Irreverence is going to be hosting the next edition of the physics blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis in the near future, and he's looking for posts.
So, if you've got physics blog material you'd like to see receive more attention, go over there, and send it to Stuart.
drorzel | May 2, 2007Via a pseudonymous LiveJournal, an online study that combines the fun of clicking radio buttons with the thrill of doing SCIENCE!
* The study URL is: http://www.homeport.org/~kcat/study3/
* It takes about 15 minutes. You listen to 8 short clips and answer questions about how the people sound. It is easily as fun as a quiz.
* For participating, instead of finding out what muppet tarot card you are, you can choose between being entered into a drawing with a 1 in 10 chance at a $30 iTunes gift certificate, or having $5 donated to Doctors without Borders.
Go help advance the sum of human…
drorzel | April 29, 2007 Over at Mixing Memory, Chris is annoyed with Larry Moran and PZ Myers for comparing themselves to suffragists:
It's difficult, at this point, to say anything other than, "Are you kidding me?" Watching white, middle-class, mostly ex-Protestant males (the dominant new atheist demographic) compare themselves to feminists, labor movements, gay and civil rights activists, or the members of any other persecuted group fighting for their social, political, and economic lives is just plain surreal. Or worse, as Trinifar notes, it's just plain manipulative.
The ensuing discussion and the follow-up…
drorzel | April 26, 2007Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle got a nasty letter from a publisher over a blog post in which she reproduced a part of a figure and one data table from a paper. It's more than a little surprising to me that the publisher thinks this is a good use of their time, but who knows? Maybe they're overrun with "Editorial Assistants" and have them trolling through blogs in order to keep them out of the editors' hair.
Anyway, like most of the rest of the ScienceBlogs crowd, I think this is kind of ridiculous. One graph and one table certainly seems like it ought to fall under the "fair use" exception…
drorzel | April 23, 2007SFWA, your source for train-wrecky goodness on the Internet has indirectly caused International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day:
On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.
Here's the central index of free stuff, which doesn't include everything-- for example, Kate has posted her law review article-- but does include more than enough free professional-…
drorzel | April 7, 2007I do it for the toys:
OK, it's not like they gave me a robot vacuum cleaner because of the blog, but I spent some of the money I got paid for blogging on this. It helped that there was a talk by Colin Angle of iRobot on campus a while back, talking about the history of the company, as part of the dedication of a new robotics lab in the CS department. He was an excellent speaker and a fairly charming guy, and more importantly, he handed out a bunch of 20% off coupons to people after the talk...
There are a bunch of justifications for buying this: Kate and I both hate doing housework, I have…
drorzel | March 31, 2007Just a quick note that everybody's favorite physics-oriented blog carnival is now up: Philosophia Naturalis #8.
Once again, I forgot to submit anything, but Sujit was kind enough to include one of the things I wrote anyway. There's a lot of good stuff there, so go check it out.
drorzel | March 19, 2007Well, ok, he hasn't posted anything yet, but Michael Bérubé will be joining Crooked Timber. This is good news indeed for the academic blogging community. I didn't read his blog as regularly as it deserved the first time around, but he was one of the sharper writers out there, and it's good to see him returning to blogging.
drorzel | March 8, 2007I'll post a March Meeting update later, but if you like your conferences a little more wide-ranging, Ethan Zuckerman provides extensive reporting from the TED Conference. The speakers range from Steven Pinker and Murray Gell-Mann to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so there's a little something for everyone.
drorzel | February 22, 2007Two exciting new developments in the Seed-o-sphere:
1) Rob Knop's Galactic Interactions has joined ScienceBlogs. It's nice to have another physical science type around here, along with all these damn biologists. If you're so inclined, go say "hi."
2) The Powers That Be have also unveiled a new RSS feed option: Scienceblogs Select, through Feedburner. This is a feed containing posts chosen by the individual bloggers as our best stuff. If you find the full combined feed too intimidating, this is a way to get a look at the very best things that are being posted, all across the site.
We've had…
drorzel | February 13, 2007The guys over at the World's Fair have created an Order of Science Scouts, for those who find themselves longing for merit badges to display on their blogs. Such as, for example, this one:
The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (LEVEL III)
In which the recipient has frozen something in liquid nitrogen for the sake of scientific curiosity.
They're a bit too bio-focussed-- too much gooey stuff, not enough big explosions-- but some of them are pretty entertaining. If you're looking for some graphics to brighten up your web page, go have a look...
(As for the title, the Treasure…
drorzel | February 11, 2007I don't have a lot to add to this link, I just wanted to quote Ethan Zuckerman on virtual journalism, from a post about being interviewed for Pitchfork magazine:
The most interesting aspect of the discussion to me was the idea that Chris brought to the table - that we might pay more attention to imagined worlds than to the real one. First, this helped me understand precisely why I find the Second Life hype so disconcerting - I find it deeply odd that journalism is expanding into these illusory spaces (link to Reuters) while it's shrinking in the real world. I think the answer may be that…
drorzel | February 5, 2007Today is the official beginning of the week of Just Science. The many blogs who signed up have pledged to post only about science for the week, and particularly not to post about "anti-science"-- no "religious people are stupid," no "alternative medicine is crap," no "global warming denialists are a bunch of cranks."
I didn't sign up for three reasons: one, that I'm lazy and didn't get around to it; two, that I don't want to give up posting about academia and pop culture for the week; and three, that it would be sort of redundant, since I don't really do much "anti-science" posting in the…
drorzel | February 2, 2007I'm really bad about remembering these things-- I ought to start putting them on my calendar-- but the physics blogging carnival Philosophia Naturalis is now up, collecting many excellent posts about physics. If you've been away from the computer for the last month, or would just like a quick recap, go check it out.
drorzel | January 22, 2007A little while ago, John Lynch asked what really draws readers to ScienceBlogs, and listed his top twenty posts. In a similar vein, here are the top twelve Uncertain Principles posts of the past year, ranked by number of pageviews:
SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids
Local Realism, Loopholes, and The God Delusion
SAT Challenge: They Sound Like... Bloggers
Bugs Aren't Features
How to Score Well Without Really Writing
SAT Challenge: My Entry
All That I Want
How to Tell a True Lab Story
Top Eleven: Time to Vote
How to Do a Good PowerPoint Lecture
Dawkins and Theology
Deep…
drorzel | January 18, 2007A couple of bloggers have issued a challenge: a week of blogging about Just Science. I like RPM's description better than what's on the official site:
It boils down to this:
One week of science blogging and only science blogging.
At least one post a day of pure science content.
No blogging about anti-science -- no creationism, no anti-vaccination, no global warming denialists.
Just Science from February 5 through February 11.
I have two problems with this:
The first problem is that I don't know if I could go a whole week without blogging about academic issues, pop culture, or just general…
drorzel | January 16, 2007Over at Good Math, Bad Math, Mark offers two entries for the Basic Concepts series:
Mean, Median, and Mode
Normal Distributions
Between those two, he tells you almost everything you need to know to lie with statistics. Or how to spot when somebody else is trying to lie to you with statistics, which is probably more useful.
Either way, they're well worth reading.
drorzel | January 16, 2007As part of the upcoming science blogging conference, Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock has put together an anthology of the best science-related blog posts of last year. He's titled it The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006, and it's now available for purchase at Lulu, should you be interested in a dead-tree version (or even a formatted PDF) of your favorite blog posts.
Fortunately, I have almost a full year before I have to decide whether to list it as a publication on my annual merit activities sheet...
drorzel | January 12, 2007In a back-channel discussion among ScienceBloggers, John Wilkins suggested that it might be interesting to do occasional posts on really basic concepts in our fields-- the sort of jargon terms that become so ingrained that we toss them around without realizing it, and end up confusing people. A lot of these terms often have a technical meaning that is subtly (or not-so-subtly) different from the use of the word in everyday language, which provides a further complication.
The original example given was "vector," which turns up a lot in mathematical discussions, and loses a lot of people (it's…
drorzel | January 11, 2007I get a fair number of emails from people who have blogs or other web stuff that they would like to advertise. I do look at most of the links I get sent, but I end up posting very few of them. Not because I dislike what I see, but because I just don't have the time or energy to thoroughly research the links. I don't want to inadvertently endorse any kooks or cranks by linking to them (and I get a good number of those, too), and I tend to err very much on the side of caution.
Which means that a fair number of worthy or interesting sites go un-linked. To give you an example of the sorts of…