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gregladen | February 4, 2010The real conversion is the one that happens under your eyes...
Hat Tip Julia
gregladen | February 4, 2010 In a recent post, I earned the ire of many poorly informed denialist football fans when I noted an obvious fact: The strategy used by the New Orleans Saints to win the playoff game with the much more deserving Minnesota Vikings, which involved trying as hard as possible to knock the Quarterback out of the game, was unethical, unusual, and intentional. Despite the protestations of commenters on this blog post, numerous sports experts have joined me in this assertion.
For example, Joe Theisman: "Ive been out of the game some 25 years. So, if you take approximately 40 years of professional…
gregladen | February 4, 2010Somebody is making fun of everybody: Things I Have Learned From Blogging at Science Blogs, Part I
Bad news: Why the denial camp is winning (and we're all losing) the climate wars
But then again: Rush Limbaugh: How the existence of god disproves climate change
gregladen | February 4, 2010Ten American missionaries are charged in Haiti with child kidnapping and conspiracy. There are no accurate details of what happened, but it appears that the missionaries may have been trying to bring 30 or more kinds into some American based adoption system in a manner that was not in accord with Haitian law.
Until further details are available, you might as well read up on missionaries.
cortex | February 4, 2010Megan O'Rourke has a really eloquent and important article on the history of grieving in the New Yorker. She spends a lot of time on the life and death of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who invented the five stages theory of human grief. (It turns out the stages don't really exist.) But I was most interested in this paragraph on the death of public funeral rituals - we no longer grieve with others, unless we're grieving over Princess Diana or Michael Jackson - and how it was driven, at least in part, by the new sciences of the mind:
With the rise of psychoanalysis came a shift in attention from the…
gregladen | February 4, 2010
FROM OPEN FLAMES TO SOUS VIDE: The History Of Cooking in Five Courses
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - 7 p.m., doors open at 6 p.m.
Cost $50. Reservations required. Call 612-624-9050
Join Chef Chris Olson and local experts on an exploration of the evolution of cooking in five delicious courses. With the Bell Museum's wildlife dioramas as a backdrop, Olson, cook at St. Paul-based Meritage and co-creator of Paired, will take diners on a culinary journey through the ages, from the invention of fire to the scientific approach to food through molecular gastronomy. Biological anthropologist Greg Laden…
grrlscientist | February 3, 2010tags: meme, blogging, Why Blog?, navel gazing, lint picking
Steffi Suhr, who writes Science Behind the Scenes at Nature Network, is (re)asking this popular meme in the wake of the internecine explosion that ensued after a misunderstanding at the recent Science Online 2010 conference expanded to encompass the two best and biggest English-speaking science blog sites in the world: Nature Network and ScienceBlogs. The questions;
What made you start blogging?
Is a sense of community an important part of blogging for you, or do you prefer blogging 'solo'?
Are there blogs you never look at? If…
pharyngula | February 3, 2010Here's an interesting test: measure your Risk Quotient. It's a 50 question survey of a set of questions, some simple and some obscure, in which you estimate your confidence in providing an answer. You aren't scored on just getting the right answer, but on whether you accurately assess your likelihood of being right — if you answer wrongly but with great confidence and certainly you'll score poorly, but if you answer just as wrongly but with a more cautious appraisal of your certainty, you'll score better. If you've got a serious case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you might want to avoid the…
grrlscientist | February 3, 2010TheTimes Online had a poll on one of their blogs last month, asking their readers if science in their free time is a 'guy-thing'? Who is reading their blog? So I thought I'd also write a poll asking something similar. The poll (below the jump) was written quickly, but with the intention of gathering as much data as possible from answers to that one question (If you check their poll and mine, you'll find the data I am collecting is somewhat different from theirs). I am going to let the poll run for one month and will summarize the answers at the end. I admit that I am as curious as you are…
gregladen | February 3, 2010All human utterances are subject to question. All communications are subject to measurement against a standard that may not have been on the mind of the speaker. ... There is a place where combative communication is favored, revered, honed and practiced, and imposed by force of will and repetition on those who do not come to the table armed with snark and clothed in oppositional affect.
That place is known ... as ... the blogosphere.
Click Here to Read On.
~
gregladen | February 3, 2010I'm sure the iPad is going to be a very successful product. I predict most people who get one will be using it like people now use a Kindle, but with multi media.
But in the mean time, it is fun to make fun of it. And if you want to do that ....
....CLICK HERE....
gregladen | February 3, 2010A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book.
details
cortex | February 3, 2010Sharon Begley has an excellent Newsweek cover story on the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications, or how a class of drugs that were once hailed as medical miracles are now seen as barely better than placebos:
In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants--not the 75 percent he had calculated from…
grrlscientist | February 3, 2010Better late than never, the 20th Carnival of Evolution has been published at Skeptic Wonder. The author, Psi, has actually reconstructed a phylogenetic analysis using the URLs as protein sequences, converting the letters into amino acids. This then resulted in a cladogram that show that most blog-posts form monophyletic clades. Although, oddly, there is one instance of paraphyly .. hrm.
edyong | February 3, 2010Nominations for the Research Blogging Awards 2010 are now open. These awards are designed to recognise "the best of the best" when it comes to posts about peer-reviewed journal articles.
Any blog that discusses peer-reviewed research is eligible for nomination, and the winners will be determined by votes from their peers in the Research Blogging community. All finalists will be highlighted on ResearchBlogging.org, and winners will receive cash prizes totaling $2000. Anyone can nominate blogs to be considered for the awards and nominations close February 11, 2010. Click here to nominate your…
cortex | February 3, 2010Via Vaughan at MindHacks, comes this link to a preview of a documentary-in-progress on The Blue Brain, that epic attempt to create a conscious supercomputer.
I was fortunate enough to profile the Blue Brain in 2008:
In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only…
cwilcox | February 3, 2010Eureka has come out with a list of the 30 best science blogs, including greats like Not Exactly Rocket Science and Neurotopia. Congrats! Everyone should go check out the top 30!
While you're at it, though, be sure to tell Eureka YOUR favorites - they're looking for a top 100, and they want to know which ones they missed. Just send an e-mail to eureka [at] thetimes [dot] co [dot] uk with "Best Blogs" in the subject to submit observations of a nerd your picks for the best science blogs not on that list!
grrlscientist | February 2, 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) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The…