Chatter
tfk | September 16, 2010Rhadagast is blogging again! He was one of the big sciencebloggers when I started (that was August of 2004, so happy 6th blogiversary, TfKers), but took a 2 year hiatus. The proliferation of new sciencebloggers and new scienceblogging networks got me looking for people who I was reading back when it all started.
Anyway, my month-and-a-half hiatus seems to be over. Between my wedding, and a general sense of ennui about blogging, I didn't feel compelled to write. But now I do, so let's kick off the seventh year of TfK in style.
tfk | August 27, 2010The Times takes on current debates in linguistics, and asks:
But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us.
All I can think is: "Never! The House of Mogh is dishonored for seven generations!" Then I remembered that Duras ultimately did get the rightful blame for the Khitomer massacre, and I felt better about it.
tfk | August 8, 2010
And that somebody's me! If this post goes up when I scheduled it to, the ceremony will have just started.
It's been a crazy year of planning, but everything seems ready to go as planned. Tomorrow we go on a honeymoon and I'm obliged to leave my computer behind, so no blogging until late August.
Debbie and I are both particularly grateful to Judge Vaughan Walker for the early wedding present he gave us this week. His decision striking down the hateful Proposition 8 is filled with powerful reminders of the importance of marriage in society at large, and its importance to married couples…
tfk | July 26, 2010Convention centers and convention center hotels should offer free internet access. There's no excuse not to do so.
And no, Louisville Convention Center, it does not cost $100/day to provide access in your exhibit hall. Hell will freeze over before I or any sane person would pay anything like that. Frankly, hotel-near-the-Louisville-Convention-Center, $12.95 is too much to spend per day. Charge a dollar a day if it makes you feel better.
tfk | July 20, 2010Yesterday, Bora Zivkovic announced he was leaving ScienceBlogs. This is kinda huge. Bora is as close to a scienceblogging god as any scienceblogger will admit to believing in. He gives every evidence of omnipresence and omniscience about the interplay of science and the internet. He's created many of the ideas that keep the scienceblogging community together, not least the Science Online conferences.
And his Sb farewell shows why he's so beloved. He seems to have taken the two weeks since Pepsiblog was announced and decided to go out with a bang. He analyzes what Scienceblogs did well,…
tfk | July 8, 2010So Pepsiblog has finally died. Seed will be having a conference call with us bloggers about how to mend the damage. Leave questions or comments to pass along in the comments. This was the only move they could make at this point, but it may have come to slowly to fix the reputation of ScienceBlogs. It can't have been an easy choice, as the Pepsi money could pay for a couple months' salary for the people who take care of us.
For a sense of the damage done, one need only look to one of the newest Scibling, an institutional blog from Brookhaven National Laboratory. They, along with the…
tfk | July 7, 2010Scibling Superbug has a good summary of what's wrong:
Summing up: By including this corporate-written blog in its stable of otherwise independent blogs, and especially by presenting it in the same format as the independent blogs, with insufficient labeling and transparency, Sb has imperiled the credibility of all of its bloggers. The ethical shadow is particularly acute for the bloggers who write about obesity and food culture, but the question of conflict of interest, and influence over content, could now be asked of any of us. There may have been a way to do this better: open the concept…
tfk | July 6, 2010The ScienceBloggers have been whooping it up on Twitter, pissed as can be that PepsiCo has bought a blog on Scienceblogs to talk about nutrition and public health issues. This is very silly, and the tweeters have been working hard to come up with hypothetical examples that might match the absurdity of this situation.
Bear in mind that PepsiCo doesn't just produce Pepsi and other tooth-destroying, obesity-producing fizzy waters seasoned with high fructose corn syrup. It produces a wide array of fast foods and snack products that have been credibly cited as instrumental in causing the obesity…
tfk | July 1, 2010Ever since I edited my high school poetry magazine, I've been a fan of W. S. Merwin, both as a poet and as a translator of poetry. In honor of his selection as US Poet Laureate, here is one of my favorites â Separation by W. S. Merwin:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
j7uy5 | June 28, 2010Sharron Angle
has said some pretty obtuse things before, but for the most part, I've
resisted the temptation to comment. But
href="http://bigthink.com/ideas/20647">this one is a gem:
The 16-page flier, available
href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/sharron-angles-independent-american-party-anti-gay-flier.php">at
TPMM, accuses gay people (aka "sodomites", "perverts") of
everything from child molestation, to serial murder, to debasing
rodeos, to contaminating the water supply by exuding HIV. Blood libel,
or urine libel, as the case may be.
I don't care about the water…
tfk | June 21, 2010Contrary to the expectations of my correspondent Miss.Alberta.Smith, invitations to international symposia generally do not have one exclamation point â let alone 15 â in the Subject line.
j7uy5 | June 12, 2010This one is useful for very few persons. The story is this: I wanted to get one of those mats that goes under a treadmill, to protect the floor. So I went to Sears, where I got the treadmill, because I had seen an ad for the mat. Thirty dollars is what they wanted. Seemed overpriced. But that is what they want. Being a tad compulsive, I measured the treadmill's footprint before I left. The mat would have to be 40 inches wide and 72 inches long.
At the store, the mats -- all with the same brand name as the treadmill -- were all 36 inches wide. Would not do. So I get one off the shelf…
tfk | April 13, 2010
According to this meaningless thing, the handful of people following me on Twitter (@JoshRosenau) is smarter than the horde of people following PZ Mahers on Twitter (@pzmyers). Clearly more stupid people need to start following me, or more of the smart people following me need to start saying stupid things about me.
I think the site's algorithm needs fixing:
goodmath | April 7, 2010(Unfortunately, this post has been linked to by a white supremacist site. Instead of providing a forum for their foulness, I'm shutting down comments on this post.)
Unfortunately, I lost the link that inspired this. But I recently saw a post by a conservative about "reclaiming" the word racist. It went on to list a collection of reasons why he was a racist. The gist of it was that all of us dirty liberals were the real racists - because there's no possible reason for us to support things like affirmative action, welfare, etc., unless we really, deep down, believe that minorities -…
tfk | April 1, 2010In an exciting move that should revolutionize scientific publishing, Nature and Science have merged, creating a new, combined publication that can withstand the difficult financial environment for science journalism.
The journal's editor refers to its business model as "Web 3.0," but some experts still question its relevance to the modern media environment. In an interview conducted from PLoS's orbital headquarters as it transited the Pacific, Bora Zivkovic announced that he's already developed Webs Ï, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0. "The distinction between scientists and science writers ceased to…
j7uy5 | March 23, 2010I've
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/08/it_wont_be_the_bhut_of_many_jo.php">written
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/08/bhut_jolokia_update.php">before
about the world's hotter chle pepper: the bhut jolokia, rated at over 1
million scoville units. (
href="http://www.chilepepperinstitute.org/holy_jolokia.php">Sauce
available here.) Now, India has a new use for the infernal
things: combatting terrorism.
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/india-chilli-bhut-jolokia-terrorism">India
deploys world's hottest chilli to fight…
tfk | March 14, 2010Let it be said, before explaining the lore of Pi Day, that we're planning to have pie, not cake, at my wedding in August. I adore pie in its many forms. I like eating it and I like baking it.
Every year, I get to celebrate pie at least twice. First on March 14, ideally just before 2 o'clock. That'd be 3/14 1:59. The second celebration, favored more by European pie fanciers (fans of tortes and so forth), is July 22, or 22/7. In the states, or at least at NCSE's offices, we celebrate that as Pi Approximation Day, while 3/14 is pie day, a day hallowed by tradition and transcendental…