Blogs
drorzel | April 26, 2006The people (well, person) who brought you the physics blog aggregator Mixed States have now rolled out a new biology-themed blog aggregator: Recombinants.
At the moment, it only has about six feeds going into it, and the content is about 70% PZ Myers, so head over there and suggest some biology feeds to be added to the mix.
drorzel | April 26, 2006Teresa Nielsen Hayden, writing about the phenomenon of fan fiction:
Personally, I'm convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.
One of the most peevesome things about the hectic period I'm in at my day job is that I no longer have time to follow Making Light comment threads-- I saw that post go up yesterday, but by the time I got around to looking at the comments this morning, there were already 245 comments. I can either read those, or prep for my morning classes, but not both...
My personal feelings on the fraught subject of fan fiction, below the fold:
I'm…
drorzel | April 14, 2006The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow's crack about Richard Dawkins:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
I don't quite understand the problem, here. I mean, he's right-- stamp collectors, the lot of 'em...
Consider this a sort of poor man's Casual Friday psych experiment-- I'm curious as to whether…
drorzel | April 12, 2006Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I'm not sure this will still work, but here's a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I thought of when I was writing about science books:
What topic or phenomenon that's generally in your area do you really wish people would stop asking you about?
I don't mean a major political controversy that you have a strong opinion about, but might be tired of (so no "creationism"…
drorzel | April 10, 2006Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, and an excellente planne for a worke of grete literarye merit, including:
The dog-maysteres Tale: the dog-mayster (talle, curtel of greene), his dogge, and his companiounes do fynde an olde wool-quaye that semeth to be havnted by a foule spectre - one of them has those fancie new eye-lenses, the which she doth frequentli misplace - eventuallie they fynde that yt is John Gowere who maketh the appearaunce and similitude of a hauntynge in ordre to kepe the quaye closid, for he disliketh the noyse of woole shipmentes when he writeth hys lame poemes. They do…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Over at the new Seed blog, here on ScienceBlogs, Katherine Sharpe asks about the best science books ever (a topic that was also discussed at Cosmic Variance some time back.
I've been sort of swamped this week, but that's only part of the reason why I haven't responded. The main reason is a shameful secret:
(Below the fold... Isn't this suspenseful?)
The fact is, I don't read many pop-science books, and I never really have. I'm not sure why that was in the past, but these days, it just seems too much like work. Not "work" in the sense of being difficult, but "work" in the sense of "this is how…
drorzel | April 6, 2006Via Peg Kerr's LiveJournal, an ABC News story that says we're living in a Jorge Luis Borges story:
So what is in the Gospel of Judas? It is a dialogue that claims to be a conversation between Jesus and Judas in which Jesus asks Judas to betray him.
(And of course, you just know it has a webpage...)
Uqbar, here we come...
drorzel | March 29, 2006If you've ever read and been confused by computing theory books, you might appreciate the discussion of Turing machines at Good Math, Bad Math. Or, if you're already happy with the whole Turing machine thing, you might just like that post for the link to a Turing machine simulator applet. Either way, it's all good.
drorzel | March 23, 2006I feel a little guilty for catering to the whims of Internet perverts in the previous entry, so here are a couple of new science-y blogs worth taking a look at:
First, via Derek Lowe, is the blog of chemistry grad student Dylan Stiles. There's lots of highly geeky material, with lots of little diagrams showing various stages of synthesis, but there's some fun stuff as well, including a recurring feature on sketchy things found in the stockroom. It's a good blog if you're nostalgic for the carefree days of grad school.
(If the Powers What Is want to find some more physical-science types for…
drorzel | March 9, 2006It's apparently PZ Myers's birthday, which has triggered an orgy of "happy birthday" posts on ScienceBlogs. It's so, so... LiveJournal. Still, everybody else is doing it, so, hey, man, happy birthday. Celebrate with some spicy baked cuttledfish:
("Mr. Squid" image from this page of weird Asian snacks.)
drorzel | March 9, 2006I'm generally sort of hesitant to take part in the various "meme" things that float around the Internet, because I'm just contrarian enough that it feels wrong to link to something just because everybody else is. Orac's got a good one, though, for a worthy cause.
Recently, somebody tried to burn down the Holocaust History Project, an organization dedicated to fighting Holocaust denial on the Internet. This is a typically craven attempt to suppress facts through violence, by people who don't like the truth, and would prefer that nobody else know it, either. Happily, the attempt failed.
At Orac…
drorzel | March 4, 2006About my take on the critically important science question sweeping ScienceBlogs, the answer is Cowboy Bebop.
I'm cool with that. I get better theme music than any of the others.
(Totally scientific quiz here.)
drorzel | February 22, 2006Theory 1: "The Internet exists to make me look smart." --John Scalzi
A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I'm editing, but when I post they become weird strings of nonsense characters in the middle of the text.
How do I stop that from happening, other than going through and replacing every suspect character by hand? I generally edit posts on Firefox, but I might be cutting and pasting from other…
drorzel | February 11, 2006Miscellaneous quick things that I've noticed this week that don't quite rate a full post of their own:
First, a couple of links from : LiveScience offer a list of "Science Myths", with correct explanations. It gets scare quotes because "science" is pretty broadly defined, but there's some interesting stuff there.
Also from Scalzi, there's a bubble chamber simulator, for anyone who ever wanted to be a particle physicist. It generates particle track pictures as a sort of art form. Don't worry, you don't need to determine the charge and momentum of any of those aprticles. Unless you want to. You…
drorzel | February 7, 2006There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn't mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things.
In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after the cut):
If you were wondering when to expect your pony, Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats has an exhaustive analysis of the budget requests of various science agencies (start with that link, and work your way up through the more recent posts). Verdict: no pony for you!
Former…
drorzel | January 21, 2006I probably ought to say something about the New York Times piece on ScienceBlogs yesterday, except, well, there's not much to say. It's about two paragraphs in a media column, focussed entirely on the fact that they're going to try to sell ads on these sites (presumably, the big Seed ad on the right will become an ad for SigmaPlot, or something...). It doesn't really mention the content of the sites, except in passing.
(The article does continue the fine tradition of the New York Times writing articles about organizations I'm associated with without mentioning my name...)
I do want to…
drorzel | January 20, 2006Over at Gene Expression, Razib spins an interesting question off my call for blog posts: why are there so many biology bloggers?
As I said in comments over there, I think there are two main reasons why you find more bio-bloggers than physics bloggers. The first is that there are simply more biologists than physicists-- we're expecting an unprecedented 13 senior physics majors next year, which is forcing some frantic re-organization to handle the load, but a class that small would be a major crisis for the Biology department. The second reason is that biology is really the main front of the "…