Misc
tqa | March 16, 2009
As one of the smaller, lower-traffic bloggers here, I don't have PZ's fame and fortune. But I also don't have his problems. Today, I'd settle for one of the problems. In classic lemonade from lemons fashion, PZ just found a solution to dealing with annoying commenters that makes me almost wish I had enough loons to try it out for myself.
Sadly, there just aren't enough irritating commenters who regularly appear here.
tqa | March 15, 2009
I'm the top three results for this Google search. It looks like they've definitely managed to pin down just how credible I really am.
stoat | March 13, 2009I claim to have originated the label "septic" for the malodourous end of the skeptic range, and I have the evidence (in fact I can go back further) for the context-less jonny-come-latelies.
I also claim "going emeritus" [1], but admit I got that from Jack Vance (the Languages of Pao, possibly the only (sci-fi?) book about societal control by choice of language, err, except for 1984 of course).
stoat | March 12, 2009
The Corpus Clock is at base a gratuitous display of wealth and pretentiousness; but grousing aside the main problem with it is that there is always such a crowd watching it that I haven't been able to get a decent picture of it. It has been around for a little while, but I've only just noticed. The doorway it is in used to be that of the Gnatwest bank, which used to be useful. Now Corpus have taken it back to be a library so the public doorway was redundant.
The wiki article will point you at the right links if you care (and it seems as though they too can't get a decent picture). I like the…
amillikan | March 7, 2009
In this week's episode of Science Saturday, John Horgan and George Johnson discuss a recent debate about the identity of humanity's closest living relatives, an anthropological case study in the link between technology and violence, and the dizzying complexity of the mathematics of the financial crisis. And just in case you'd forgotten that John and George aren't fanatics about the Internet Age, they made sure to squeeze in a bit of curmudgeonly ranting against Twitter.
apalazzo | March 6, 2009Monday, our son Xander was born. Since then I've been getting to know who this new human being is. I've been taking care of most of his, and my wife's, needs. We've shared many moments and lived a life without distractions. Like Zen Buddhist monks our only concerns are food, sleep and poop. The first few days I shunned my laptop, but now that my parents are in town we've been able to request and obtain the high technology items that permeate every action performed within the 21st century. Now as my wife, and son sleep I am quickly typing this post. Soon they will be awake and a new set of…
amillikan | March 5, 2009
Sunday March 1, Seed employees and friends of Seed ventured up to the NY City College campus to help judge the annual New York City Science Fair. The event was sponsored by Seed, as science fairs are an important part of the learning and scientific development process for young minds. Additionally, Seed's founder and CEO Adam Bly won the "Best in Category" Grand Prize in biochemistry at the 1998 Intel International Science Fair, so the enthusiasm for science fairs runs deep throughout the company.
To start off the day, five of science's most intriguing figures took part in a panel on…
amillikan | March 3, 2009Day in and day out, scientists devote their time to exploring the unknowns of the physical world. Here on ScienceBlogs, our many contributors do the same so that they may provide enlightenment about the questions that plague us. Questions such as: Why does black ice form? What's up with that serotonin stuff anyway? And the one question you probably find yourself wondering the most frequently throughout your daily life—why in the world do beetles have such monstrous phalluses? Today, ScienceBlogs salutes the inquisitive nature of scientists, for without them, we would be liable to just make…
tqa | March 2, 2009
Today seems like a really good day to try and start a conversation about the complex relationship between copyright and the internet. This morning, the New York Times website posted an article about concerns that for-profit publications have when it comes to other websites excerpting their writing. Late last week, Creative Commons officially launched their CC0 license, which is designed to make it easier for content creators to officially place their work in the public domain.
Brian Stelter's New York Times article notes that a number of traditional publishers are starting to worry about…
tqa | February 23, 2009
I've been trying to keep my weekday posting frequency fairly high, but that's difficult today. My internet (and cable and home phone) is nonfunctional at the moment, and has been for most of the day. Hopefully, Mediacom will have things sorted out by the morning (or earlier), but until they do the only place I have internet access in my house is one corner of my front porch.
tqa | February 19, 2009
This is one of those "good news/bad news" kind of stories. The good news is that a bird that many scientists thought was extinct was discovered alive in the Philippines recently. The bad news is that it was discovered in a poultry market, and has apparently since been sold and eaten.
Sadly, I'm not joking.
HT: Jonathan Turley
tqa | February 17, 2009
The latest edition of The Giants' Shoulders (the monthly history of science carnival) was posted over at Greg Laden's blog a couple of days ago. If you haven't seen it yet, you should go take a look.
tqa | February 12, 2009
There's a lot happening today.
200 x 2: Today marks the 200th birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. I know a lot more about biology than about history, so I'll be concentrating on Darwin. But I certainly don't want to dis Lincoln.
There will be a large number of posts on various science blogs marking the Darwin anniversary. Blog For Darwin is collecting the links for posts about Darwin written through the end of the weekend.
I'll have a post up later in the day highlighting six square feet of ground at Down House.
Google will undoubtedly be the target of a great deal…
tqa | February 10, 2009If you're following the ongoing discussion Tim Sandefur and I are having on whether or not the federal government should fund science at all, there's a new article you should really go read. Stanford Professor Steve Quake has a guest column up at Olivia Judson's blog that talks about the way we currently fund science and makes some suggestions about how things can be improved.
ejohnson | February 10, 2009
In this week's Science Saturday, George Johnson chats with Louisa Guilder, author of The Age of Entanglement, about the history and science of quantum entanglement and why we should care about conversations between great physicists decades ago. They also discuss the latest alarming twist on self-publishing and the recent news about experiments in quantum teleportation.
apalazzo | February 9, 2009Bloggers like to talk about how nasty the Main Stream Media is (I'm looking at you physioprof). And although I agree that there are MANY problems, I think that the fifth estate makes a real contribution to our public discourse.
Now unlike what others have written, I am not talking about science journalism, a branch of that discipline mostly filled with dilettantes who write trite articles about their misconceptions about the latest research, or the opinion of political pundits (Washington insiders who spin any and every bit of news into some pro-ideology narrative), but the real news…
amillikan | February 6, 2009While anacondas and pythons, the largest known snakes alive today, can reach over 30 feet long and swallow antelope whole, they are dwarfed in size by the newly discovered Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a serpent that lived during the Paleocene epoch whose bones were unearthed recenty in a Colombia coal mine. By analyzing the snake's vertebrae, paleontologists were able to determine that Titanoboa measured over 42 feet long and weighed more than 1.3 tons—nearly 30 times the mass of an anaconda.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Titanoboa - thirteen metres, one tonne, largest snake ever..
Titanoboa!…
tqa | February 5, 2009
...because it's been more than 10 days since their "hit man" sent me the warning.
I'd forgotten how amusing a good email scam can be, because the filter in my gmail account has gotten pretty good at figuring out what's spam and what's not. I was reminded a few minutes ago when I went in and looked at a dormant email account of mine that I hadn't opened for a few months:
fromjohnkiki014 Gazeta.pl <johnkiki014@gazeta.pl>
to
dateMon, Jun 23, 2008 at 7:54 AM
subjectSOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.
mailed-bygazeta.pl
I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is…
apalazzo | February 4, 2009I just listened to journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer discus what's to come in the not so distant future due to accelerated climate change.
The quick summary? The rate of climate change is very fast, the development of technology (good and bad) may be even faster, but the rate of cultural change needed to accommodate these developments is slow and the political will to enact needed reforms may be the slowest of all (although not as slow as evolution, the gradual change that rewires the genomes of most of the organic beings that must cope with our ever more rapidly changing world). What…