clock | February 15, 2009I know, I know, it's middle of February, but I was busy and neglected my duties. So, to catch up with the monthly feature, here is the best of January at A Blog Around The Clock:
Of course, the entire month was dominated by ScienceOnline'09, so the rest of posts were mostly quick links, cartoons and YouTube videos, which is, I hope, understandable. But I did write, post facto, some of my own coverage of the conference, e.g., ScienceOnline09 - Thursday, ScienceOnline'09 - Friday Morning Coffee Cupping, ScienceOnline'09 - Friday Lab Tour: the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, ScienceOnline'09 -…
clock | February 15, 2009You can find it on Greg Laden's blog. Lots of great history of science blogging for the long weekend.
clock | February 15, 2009Hamsters On Treadmills Provide Electricity Through Use Of Nanogenerators:
Could hamsters help solve the world's energy crisis? Probably not, but a hamster wearing a power-generating jacket is doing its own small part to provide a new and renewable source of electricity. And using the same nanotechnology, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have also generated electrical current from a tapping finger - moving the users of BlackBerry devices, cell phones and other handhelds one step closer to powering them with their own typing.
Cupid's Arrow May Cause More Than Just Sparks To Fly This…
clock | February 14, 2009Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
clock | February 14, 2009...the next edition of Praxis will be up on Mudphudder on February 15th 2009. This edition will be a thematic one - "I wish that I knew what I know now".
...the next edition of The Giant's Shoulders will be up on Greg Laden's blog, also on February 15th 2009.
...the first inaugural edition of Diversity in Science will be up on Urban Science Adventures! on February 24th, 2009, but the deadline is the 20th.
clock | February 14, 2009w00t! Miriam Goldstein had a piece published in Slate! The real references to that piece arehere.
clock | February 14, 2009
Nanny Goat Gruff and the Internet Trolls:
Once upon a time, there was a nanny goat who lived to wander from field to field, tasting the grass and bushes as she went. It was a simple life: wander, taste, chew, wander again. Sunshine and air and a million flavors were her world. The only problem was that the most complex, interesting flavors were to be found in isolated meadows, only accessible by bridge. And where there were bridges, there were trolls......
clock | February 14, 2009A sixth of a GCSE in 60 minutes?:
Later this year, pupils from Monkseaton high school will file into their new lozenge-shaped school and take their seats before a giant video wall in a multipurpose hall. Here, they will receive a unique lesson: an intense PowerPoint presentation, repeated three times, and interspersed with 10-minute breaks of juggling or spinning plates. After one hour of this study, the pupils will be primed for one sixth of a GCSE. In theory, following this "spaced learning" method, a teenager could sit a GCSE after just three days' work.
It is a vision of the future that…
clock | February 14, 2009If so, don't worry. GOP has a solution for all your problems. Just describe your problem to the GOPProblemSolver and you will get the straight answer how to solve it:
clock | February 14, 2009On Thursday, for Darwin's 200th birthday, I went down to Raleigh to the Museum of Natural Science to hear Carl Zimmer's talk. The room was packed - I got the last empty seat and there were people standing in the back. A very mixed audience, as Museum talks usually are - there were evolutionary biologists there from Nescent and the W.M.Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at NCSU, there were Museum staff, and then there were interested lay-people, museum-goers, with no formal background in science but interested and curious. It is not easy giving a talk to such a mixed audience - how to keep the…
clock | February 14, 2009John McKay has been blogging his research on the early days of mammoth discoveries in Asia and it is an amazing read! Who ever said that academic writing has to be dull!?
Fragments of my research - I:
Studying early knowledge of mammoths presents two problems. The first, is that the people who found mammoth remains were almost never literate and the people who wrote about mammoth remains were so far removed that they almost always got their information second or third hand or worse. The second problem is that, lacking a common name for mammoth remains, it is a huge task to sort out…
clock | February 14, 2009Linneaus Legacy #16 is up on Seeds Aside
Skeptics' Circle #105: The Shakespeare Edition, is up on It's the Thought that Counts
Friday Ark #230 is up on Modulator
clock | February 14, 2009Republicans: Spare Me Your Newfound 'Fiscal Responsibility':
At his press conference on Monday, President Barack Obama had to remind Mara Liasson of Fox News and NPR that it was the Republicans who doubled the national debt over the past eight years and it's a little strange to be hearing lectures from them now about how to be fiscally responsible. That interchange was my favorite part of the press conference. A savvy inside-the-Beltway reporter of Ms. Liasson's caliber shouldn't have to be reminded that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress were among the most fiscally reckless…
clock | February 14, 2009From TechDirt:
This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. Google doesn't devalue things it touches. It increases their value by making them easier to find and access. Google increases your audience as a content creator, which is the most important asset you have. It takes a special kind of cluelessness to claim that something that increases your biggest asset "devalues" your business. Thomson's mistake seems to be that he's confusing "price" and "value" which is a bit scary for the managing editor of a business publication. Yes, the widespread availability of news may…
clock | February 14, 2009Greensboro News & Record was one of the first and most innovative newspapers when it comes to the use of the Web, blogs, etc. Now Les Alexander takes a look at the experiment:
I'd love to say we made it all happen. We didn't. We did, however, learn some lessons. A lot of what we learned is specific to newspaper Web sites, but some of it could be valuable to people in other lines of work, particularly with respect to major projects that involve interacting with customers.
clock | February 14, 2009How religion generates social conservatism:
You could make a reasonable case that pencils have a purpose, but pencil shavings just exist. But what about elephants? Religious people and children are, of course, more likely than non-religious adults to say that animals exist for a purpose. But what about men and women? Black people and whites? Rich and poor? Arab and Jew? Do these exist for a purpose? And is it possible for one to become another? Gil Diesdendruck and Lital Haber of Bar-Ilan University in Israel decided to find out what children think.
clock | February 14, 2009I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday when David Brooks came on and started blathering in his usual vein, revealing with every word his love for the establishment in Washington and his disdain for the proles, and pushing Broderism with all his might. So I was very pleased to see Glenn Greenwald dissect him in great detail in his latest post - David Brooks reveals the mentality of the Beltway journalist:
Here we see the full expression of one of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist: because they are integral members of the Washington establishment,…
clock | February 14, 2009Well deserved:
The Carrboro Citizen won six awards including two first-place awards in the 2008 North Carolina Press Association's News, Editorial and Photojournalism contest. The awards were presented Thursday evening at the press association's banquet in Cary.
Also check their blog. And, they are also now on Twitter.
clock | February 14, 2009High-tech Tests Allow Anthropologists To Track Ancient Hominids Across The Landscape:
Dazzling new scientific techniques are allowing archaeologists to track the movements and menus of extinct hominids through the seasons and years as they ate their way across the African landscape, helping to illuminate the evolution of human diets.
Neural Mapping Paints Haphazard Picture Of Odor Receptors:
Despite the striking aromatic differences between coffee, peppermint, and pine, a new mapping of the nose's neural circuitry suggests a haphazard patchwork where the receptors for such disparate scents…