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cwilcox | June 2, 2010Alright folks! Thank you to all of you who nominated my posts for the 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize! The final winners will be chosen by Richard Dawkins, but before he even glances at them, the public gets to narrow the focus down from the 80 entries that made the first cut. Which means, of course, that I need you to go vote for me!
Here is the full list of nominees. There are 3 from Observations of a Nerd on there:
Ancient Sex Scandals: Did We Get It On With Neanderthals?
Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur
To cast your vote go to this link,…
cortex | June 1, 2010This oil spill sure is getting depressing. We've become extremely talented at hiding away the ill effects of our consumption decisions. We don't see the inhumane chicken farms behind our chicken McNuggets, or the Chinese factories that produce our shoes, or the offshore oil rigs that extract our oil from the center of the earth. The end result is that, when we're finally forced to confront the ugliness that makes our civilized life possible, we're shocked and appalled. My cheap ground beef comes from that feedlot? My gas station depends on that infrastructure?
The danger of this lifestyle is…
gregladen | June 1, 2010discussion is happening at The Reef Tank:
Ocean Woes by Doreen
and
More on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a reprint from moi.
ddobbs | June 1, 2010A biological basis for acupuncture, or more evidence for a placebo effect? Ed Yong ponders acupuncture, placebos, and context. This I like, and there's a nice meta dimension here as well: placebos being all about context.
Abel Pharmboy reports on Marking the magnificient memory of Henrietta Lacks. A nice account of what sounds like a lovely ceremony. Among other things, testifies to the potential power of the book.
Much ado about links and where they best belong. Starting points: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification, which gets examined by ReadWriteWeb in The…
mspringer | June 1, 2010Grab a particle and put it in a box.
According to elementary quantum mechanics, that particle isn't described by the classical model in which it can have any value of energy as it bounces around. Instead, the possible energy levels of that particle are described by a discrete set. When you measure the energy of that particle in the box, it will always have one of those specific energy levels and nothing else. Exactly which level it will occupy depends on the details of how you put it into the box, but whatever you do you're constrained to having the particle in those levels or at least a…
gregladen | May 31, 2010One very important difference was brought to our attention by Digital Rabbit:
gregladen | May 31, 2010A black four door older model caddy in need of some body work and a new muffler turned into our street. The car drove quickly but furtively, the driver seeming to not quite know where she wanted to go, to the end of the faux cul-du-sac off of which each development's street radiated. A sharp left turn brought the vehicle next to a large storm sewer inlet, and out of the car flew a suspicious black thing with wires. The car roared off, too quickly to get the plate but not too quickly to be able to describe it and its occupants.
An electronic, repetitive, alarm-like noise emanated from the…
grrlscientist | May 31, 2010I was a (proud!) speaker at ScienceOnline London 2008 -- which would not have happened without my readers' kind and generous support! However, when I was in London, I was given a t-shirt as part of the goody bag that was, to put it politely, a tad small.
Okay, it was smaller than a "tad small": even though it was a "medium" size -- yes, I do wear medium and have lots of room left over, too -- this t-shirt was so small that my not-huge-at-all boobs emphasized certain portions of the "ScienceOnline London" phrase. It scared me so much that the t-shirt and I parted company before I relocated to…
grrlscientist | May 31, 2010You might not be aware of this, but there will be a Science Online London 2010! It is being scheduled as I write and will be held at the British Library on 3-4 September 2010, and YES! I will be there! (I am so excited!) As a blog reader, you are eagerly invited to suggestion session topics on the SciOnlineLondon wiki. Who knows? Maybe I'll be so lucky as to be asked to speak! (Yes, I would love that!)
Here's a topic that was suggested by my featherless slave: why SHOULD science blog writers be provided access to embargoed materials -- just like [OMG!!] FUR REALZ journalists! (Especially when…
gregladen | May 30, 2010The podcast version of Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong with me, and Bonobo Handshake with Vanessa Woods, all on Skeptically Speaking with Desiree Schell, is available on line here
For those of you waiting for the Berry Go Round carnival: It will be out on Monday some time. I sniffed the breeze and decided that not enough people were on the Internet for this important iteration of this important web carnival. But late Monday and through Tuesday they'll be chomping at the bit.
I've restarted my occasional weather-watcher blogging here. So far the weather's been uninteresting but…
gregladen | May 30, 2010The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.
Hat Tip: Ana
grrlscientist | May 30, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
eklemetti | May 29, 2010Hope no one minds my shameless plug here, but I get a lot of questions about books to read if you're interested in learning about volcanoes. There are an awful lot of good books out there and we can add one more to that list: Volcanoes: Global Perspectives" by Jack Lockwood and Rick Hazlett. I've been able to go through the book and it covers almost everything a volcanophile would want to know about volcanism on Earth and in the solar system - including some information I didn't know (which isn't a big surprise). It is written as a textbook for advanced undergraduates, but as along as you…