General
loom | January 17, 2006My apologies for the comment freeze over the past couple days. I've been away and have been distracted with catching up with other business. It should get resolved soon. You can always reach me directly at blog at carlzimmer dot com.
loom | January 12, 2006I've just been rejiggering my RSS to pick up all the blogs that have come together at Science Blogs. Many of my favorites, like Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, plus ones new to me. As if I didn't have enough ways to burn up my time...
loom | January 3, 2006...to this gem I just received about my post on the Dover creationism case:
Carl,
It doesn't bother you that the judge went beyond any human capacity to attack the board members, not for their actions, not for their efforts to remove science fiction from the science classroom (that would be a realistic description of Darwinian evolution as it is fictional and not factual), but rather because he stated they were trying to introduce religion into the classroom. The fact is that he could not possibly challenge the facts of the case, the facts of Intelligent Design - yes the SCIENTIFIC FACTS are…
loom | January 3, 2006Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 pm EST I'll be a guest on Science and Society, an online radio show. You can listen live or visit the site later for a podcast. I'll do my best to be interesting on all things evolutionary, but fortunately I'm sandwiched between two scientists who should be definitely worth a listen: Steven Salzberg, who has sequenced the genomes of humans and flu viruses and just about everything in between, and Zach Hall, the president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which was set up to make California the world's envy in stem cell research.
loom | December 29, 2005Wandering around Amazon.com a couple weeks ago, I discovered that they are letting authors blog. It didn't take long for me to set one up here. But once I had set it up, it occurred to me I wasn't sure what exactly I should write for it. I then belatedly discovered this article and some blog discussion of the whole venture.
I've never understood how some people manage to keep a bunch of blogs going at once, although I admire the dedication to the form. For now the Amazon blog feels like a good place to post book news and maybe respond to book-related emails (unfortunately, it doesn't seem to…
loom | November 28, 2005Getting back home from a Thanksgiving journey full of turkey and queasy toddlers on airplanes, I just noticed that my visit-counter has rolled past the 500,000 mark. I never would have dreamed of such figures when I started this blog, and I just want to take a second to thank everyone who has ever clicked their way to the Loom.
loom | October 23, 2005I'm back from Pittsburgh, where the blogging-meet-science writing workshop went very well. Science writers are definitely curious, although you could hear some moans about the end of dead-tree publishing (a bit premature, in my opinion). Amy Gahran, my fellow panelist, is going to post a podcast on her blog, Contentious. I will update the post with a link when it is available.
UPDATE: PODCAST AVAILABLE HERE
I will be getting back to blogging about new research this week once I've settled back in at home. In the meantime, I'm trying to clean up the comments, which continue to be a bit buggy.…
loom | October 17, 2005I'm going to be part of two workshops in the space of a couple weeks that will deal with the intersection of blogging and science writing. The first will be this Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Pittsburgh, and the second will be hosted Tuesday November 1 by the Science Writers of New York at the New York Academy of Sciences. (There's no link yet to the New York event, but Link here.) The panel will include Sarah Tomlin from Nature and Sreenath Sreenivasan, Columbia's resident tech journalism guru.
I'm glad that more science writers are…
loom | October 8, 2005I've got a stack of new books that I want to get to this fall, although it's not going to be easy. If your interests run in the same currents, you may be interested in some of them...
Us and Them, by David Berreby. Berreby takes a look at how we put ourselves in groups, and put others outside them. I read it when Berreby asked me to give it a blurb, but I would like to return to it to really delve into all the rich material he's brought together, from history, neuroscience, and a range of other disciplines.
The Pterosaurs: From Deep Time. I've always thought these flying reptiles have gotten…
loom | October 3, 2005Thanks to Scientific American for awarding one of its Science & Technology Web Awards to the Loom as one of their 25 favorite sites on the web, for "enchanting readers with every post."
Congrats also to three other sites that are on my RSS: Panda's Thumb, Real Climate, and Chris Mooney's The Intersection.
loom | September 29, 2005Just a technical note: Corante has been upgrading to a new version of Movable Type, and they're still working out a few glitches. Some readers have already reported trouble posting comments. You can vent any other sort of frustration in my direction, and I'll let the powers that be know. I assume everything will be sorted out shortly.
loom | September 22, 2005The National Academy of Sciences just announced its 2005 Communications Awards. Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prizewinner from the Boston Globe, won the Newspaper/Magazine/Internet category for his must-read series of articles on stem cells. I was named one of two finalists, for a group of pieces about evolution that appeared during 2005 in Discover, The New York Times, and right here. I knew I might be taking a risk by including some posts from The Loom, but I was very proud of them. It's nice to see that blogs are taking seriously by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.
loom | August 18, 2005Those interested in my upcoming talks may want to visit my main web site. I've started to post information about the talks, as well as bringing the archive of my articles up to date. Nothing more depressing than a stale web site.
loom | April 30, 2005Thanks to the various readers who have noticed the creationist Google ads that pop up on some of the Loom's pages. Such are the hazards of letting robots handle ads. I will talk with the good people at Corante about this.
loom | April 25, 2005In the new issue of Smithsonian, I've got an article about life on Mars. I'm not writing about anything NASA has actually found, but instead about the difficulty of just recognizing life, even if the evidence is in your hand (or in your rover's spectrometer). While the chances of life existing today on the surface of Mars aren't fantastic, a lot of researchers are pretty optimistic that there are fossils to be found. But it turns out that fossils of microbes are even more difficult to identify. You just need to consider some of the fierce debates over some of the oldest fossils on Earth--a…
loom | January 21, 2005My thanks to Nova for becoming my first blog sponsor. I've always been leery of the random scattershoot of ads you see on many blogs, and so I was relieved that I wound up with a better fit. (Full disclosure: I wrote the companion book to the big series on evolution that the Nova/WGBH team put together a couple years back.) I checked out their ScienceNow link, and they've got some cool items over there, including some clips of their show.
If anyone else is interested in sponsorship, and thereby reaching an incredibly desirable demographic (my dear readers), let me or the good people at…
loom | January 14, 2005Unscrewing the Inscrutable has been updating progress of the Huygens probe as it screeches towards the surface of Titan. So far (8:20 am) it still seems to be going well. The first real data will come later this morning. Of course, the really exciting stuff for us bio-freaks will come in a few months.
Correction: 9:52 am: Unscrewing--not Screwing. Insert your foul joke here.
loom | December 13, 2004The folks at Real Climate have hit the ground running. They carefully demonstrate how misleading Michael Crichton's new book State of Fear is on global warming. Let's hope they can keep this quality up.
loom | December 10, 2004I just heard about Real Climate, a blog authored by some of the best climatologists in the business. The blogosphere has been flooded by awful gibberish about climate change that tries to make the most out of flimsy bits of research while making the least of the overwhelming scientific consensus. So I'll definitely be putting this one on my daily reading list.
loom | November 22, 2004In tomorrow's issue of the New York Times, I have an essay that grew out of a meeting I went to earlier this month on natural history illustrations through the ages. The essay is accompanied by some of the cooler images I saw there, some of which are also included in the web version. Here's one that wasn't--one of the first illustrations of the legendary Victoria Regia water lily, so big that a single leaf could support a grown man. I explain in the essay why this picture was the 1854 equivalent of a high-resolution digital scan.