Science Blogs
sastyk | February 16, 2012Hi Folks - I've gotten (rightly) a number of emailed complaints about the number of comments that are disappearing, and more questions about whether I am censoring comments, or moderating them.
Other than a few occasions for egregious attacks on other posters or sucking up my time until I had no other choice, I don't censor comments. The reason your comments are disappearing and being marked as held for approval is because of Science Blogs - there are a number of technical problems with my blog that SB has basically not been able to fix (and some of them affect other blogs) - the idea is…
sastyk | November 28, 2011So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online.
So it was something of a shock to me to find in my comments thread a bunch of accusations that I'd been removing comments.due to my disagreement with them. This frankly pissed me off, since I absolutely do not censor or remove comments routinely - or generally at all. Despite a general tendency of…
sastyk | August 2, 2010It was a busy weekend here - figuring out whether we were moving, my sister was visting, other friends were visiting, we hit the local County Fair, worked in the garden, you know, life. So until just now, I hadn't paid any attention to the empty meanderings about science blogs in the Times Magazine. But I did have to read it eventually - Monday comes eventually to all of us - and lo and behold, I got me an awesome dig from the Times - Virginia Heffernan attacks all science bloggers for being part of the "religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd."
Now that's kind of funny, because I wasn't aware…
sastyk | July 23, 2010
Yesterday at 3pm EST, I was part of a critical stage of labor negotiations between SEED Media and Science Bloggers, and I'm happy to report that through the sole grace of my diplomatic skills, the strike was resolved. There were some other folks there too, but I cannot tell a lie - it was your Blogiste who saved the day, got Science Blogs back on track and came up with a critical strategy for making us better, faster, more relevant and bionic.
Or, I would have, really, if I hadn't had my hand up to my wrist in a goat's vagina. I was totally on the conference call - for the first 15 minutes…
sastyk | July 20, 2010Betcha giving head to a movie star betcha gotta llama riding in
Your car betcha u gotta tv built in your jet skis, betcha giving
Head to a movie star betcha gotta llama riding in your car
Betcha u gotta tv built in your jet skis.
Hidee high, lowdy low, get up and go to the show.
Ain't it funny how the money makes the honey taste like nothing
You can't have no more? Now we know. Ain't it funny how the
Money makes the honey taste like nothing you can't have no
More? Now we know. Ain't it funny how the money makes to
Honey taste just like nothing - people act like they have but
They're bluffing…
sastyk | July 20, 2010The first two pieces of this series were largely comic pieces. This one is more serious. I have said this before, but I'll repeat it - I came to science blogs for one reason, and one only - because there was no one else talking about facing up to our material limits on this kind of site, with this kind of audience. I didn't come for the money (you may or may not believe me on this one, but as I keep saying, it isn't that I probably don't have a price, it is just that it isn't a few hundred bucks a month) - I've donated everything I've ever earned here (well less than 1K, given that they…
dblum | July 19, 2010 She clasps the crag with crooked hands
Close to the sun in lonely lands
Writing is in someways a lonely land, or lonely may not be the precise word I'm looking for. There's a kind of necessary solitude, the need for a clear space. At my home office, this usually means me telling the kids, "Go yell at each other somewhere else so that I can think."
You take your quiet places where you find them. I'm currently in my hotel room in Amman, Jordan, where its just me, the laptop, and some really good coffee. But it's really an internal quiet some times. I write in noisy bars too…
dblum | July 9, 2010I started Speakeasy Science in late January on my author website. I'd finished my book on the invention of modern forensic toxicology in 1920s New York City - The Poisoner's Handbook - but I'd developed an addiction to writing about chemistry and culture.
It was my first heady experience of working solely for myself. I've been a staff journalist at five newspapers, a freelance writer for a list of newspapers, magazines and websites, and a book author. I've worked with brilliant editors and indifferent ones, publishers who were generous, publishers who were penny counters.
My blog, right down…
sastyk | July 8, 2010As a lot of you probably knew long before I did (we loaned our computer to our housemate who is frantically prepping for his orals ;-)), Scienceblogs took down the Pepsi blog. This actually exceeded my requests to management as parameters for me coming back. I had asked that Scienceblogs create a separate area for its advertorial content, mark it explicitly as such, and distinguish it visually from the other blogs. They removed it entirely. So I'm back.
There are other issues at scienceblogs as well, which you've probably all heard about now - I think my colleague Martin Rundkvist gets a…
sastyk | July 7, 2010Until Science Blogs decides whether it wants to be a platform for science writers or a platform for corporations to buy credibility, this blog is on hiatus. You can find my work at Ye Olde Blogge aka www.sharonastyk.com. Updates as events warrant - or rather, if events warrant. If you'd like to find out the secret evil backstory of my defection, you can read it here.
Sharon
sastyk | July 7, 2010I'd been planning to write this post for several days, and then late last night, got a nasty surprise that changed the focus of it for me. By now many of you will have heard that Pepsi bought a blog on science blogs and is using to to establish credibility by writing a blog focused ummm...on food and nutrition. Note long pause for your comments...feel free not to censor.
Let me be clear - my fellow science bloggers and I were blindsided on this - there was no advance notice, and let's just say that a lot of us are pretty pissed. All of us suffer credibility hits here, but for me and the…
rallain | May 12, 2010ScienceBlogs.com is running "Ask a Science Blogger". The basic idea is that you, the reader, get a chance to ask questions to us, the bloggers. You can either post a comment in the link above or send an email to .
I would like to go ahead and answer one of the questions already posted. nemski asks:
How big does the world appear to an insect?
I like this question because it can be answered at different levels. First, what do you mean by world? If you mean "the Earth", then the answer would be that the Earth essentially appears the same to an insect as it does to us humans (from a size…
awild | April 9, 2009
Myrmecos seems to have caught the eye of the editors at ScienceBlogs, and I've been contracted to inaugurate a new photography site for their network. Photo Synthesis will be a rotating showcase of science imagery:
The internet is home to a wealth of captivating science images, from the many microscopic components of a cell to the remote corners of the universe captured by Hubble. On Photo Synthesis, we aim to bring you the best of what's out there. Every month we will feature the work of a different photoblogger, exposing worlds both small and large, familiar and exotic. We will let the…
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
grrlscientist | September 25, 2008I thought I'd mention the upcoming Science Blog writing discussion that is scheduled for Tuesday, 1 October, at Manhattan's Apple Store in Soho. This isa panel that will discuss the value of a blog to communicating with the public about one's research. The panel will be moderated by Katherine Sharpe and, along with me, includes several of my SciBlings, Jake Young, Jessica Palmer, Steinn Sigurdsson, and Brian Switek.
What: Apple Pro Session panel with ScienceBloggers
Date: Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Time: 7 - 8pm ET
Location: 103 Prince Street [map].
You might also wish to refer to several…
grrlscientist | September 17, 2008I am writing a piece for the print media about scientists and science blogs, and I am running across some interesting numbers that I thought I'd share with you (with many thanks to my friend and colleague, Bob O'Hara, for his advice and help);
According to Technorati and Dave Sifry's reports, as of April 2008, 175,000 new blogs appeared in the blogosphere daily;
Image: Adam Thierer, based on Tachnorati data and data collected by Dave Sifry.
(I'll guess this rate of new blogs appearing has increased since then).
Here's an interesting counter; according to a running total, based on…
laelaps | November 5, 2007I'm a little late on this, but if you haven't already, head on over to Greg Laden's fancy new digs here at ScienceBlogs! Be sure to stop by the Sandwalk, too, as it's celebrating it's first blogiversary.
Update: Also, Chris is celebrating his 100th post with a brand new carnival about classification and systematics, Linnaeus' Legacy! Be sure to check out the taxonomic goodness.
Update the 2nd: Be sure to say "hi" to another brand new member of the ScienceBlogs community, The Quantum Pontiff, too.
grrlscientist | September 20, 2007tags: gender issues, gender disparity, blogosphere, science blogs, life science blogs
Image: Anemi
I have been thinking more about TheScientist's recent online article, "Vote for your favorite life science blogs", where they asked this same question of seven of the "top" life science bloggers -- all of whom just so happened to be men. It reminded me of Declan Butler's Nature article that was published approximately two years ago, where he listed the "top" science blogs using some rather ambiguous standards that were inconsistently applied for defining precisely what is a science blog ..…