blog
razib | April 13, 2009Two highly recommended Bloggingheads.tv below the fold on religion. First, the cognitive science of religion in Why Are We Religious?, and second religion & conservatism in God and Man on the Right. My co-blogger at Secular Right, Heather Mac Donald, is getting into it with a future columnist for The New York Times.
razib | April 12, 2009Science Not Fiction has a review of Kröd Mandöon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire:
In Robin Hood fashion, the insecure hero, Kröd Mandöon (played by Sean Maguire), leads the struggle against the evil rule of Dongalor, a local king with big ambitions. Kröd is aided by a none-too-bright pig-man, an utterly ineffective wizard, the very gay Bruce, and his sexually liberated pagan warrior girlfriend. (A note on these last two characters--there's a very fine line between ironically parodying how women or homosexuals are portrayed in a genre, and simply exploiting stereotypes anew. Once…
razib | April 11, 2009
There are nearly 7 billion human beings in the world, so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that there are adult women who decide to jump into a polar bear exhibit during feeding time. Right? When I saw this on CNN's front page one word that described the photo would be "compelling." If polar bears could talk.... (you can see some video here) This really needs to make it into a South Park episode in the future.
revere | April 10, 2009When we started Effect Measure almost four and half years ago, there were few public health oriented blogs. One notable exception -- and an exceptional exception it was -- was blogger Jordan Barab's Confined Space. It wasn't just a health and safety blog. It was the health and safety blog. It was almost the only way most health and safety professionals could keep track of what was happening in their field politically. When we started this blog Jordan had been blogging daily for about 18 months, and we met for coffee. Neither of us expected my blog would outlast his, but a couple of years ago…
razib | April 9, 2009Just though readers might be interested to know that we have a a non-Icelandic astrophysicist at ScienceBlogs now. Also, ScienceBlogs now has a photolog manned by a rotating crew. If you're not on a Lynx browser it might be worth your time.
razib | April 1, 2009Peter Suderman asks, Is Robert Heinlein Our Best Pulp Novelist? I suppose this hinges on what you mean by "best," but it seems like Heinlein is probably at the front of any list. Form Isaac Asimov's memoir in regards to Heinlein:
...From the moment his first story appeared, an awed science fiction world accepted him as the best science fiction writer in existence, and he held that post throughout his life. Certainly, I was impressed. I was among the very first to write letters of praise for him to the magazines.
bioephemera | March 29, 2009Continuing the current discussion of the questionable quality of popular science journalism, British researcher Simon Baron-Cohen weighs in at the New Scientist with his personal experiences of misrepresented research. Baron-Cohen complains that earlier this year, several articles on his work linking prenatal testosterone levels to autistic traits, including coverage in the Guardian, were titled and subtitled misleadingly:
It has left me wondering: who are the headline writers? Articles and columns in newspapers are bylined so there is some accountability when they get things wrong. In this…
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…
razib | February 24, 2009Just a heads up, the old "AlphaPsy" weblog is now Cognition & Culture. One of the contributors is Dan Sperber, who I interviewed a few years ago.
razib | February 21, 2009It's been a while since I did a reader survey, so I posted 15 questions here. I'll put up a csv file with the results in a week.
razib | February 20, 2009I mentioned a few months ago that Socks was in end stage cancer. It ended today. R.I.P. Socks.
revere | February 3, 2009On Sunday DailyKos frontpager, DemFromCT (who is also a founder of the FluWiki and a pulmonary specialist) finished up his two part interview with us. It's cross-posted here below the fold. If anyone doubted we were academics, the display of watching us argue with ourselves would have but those doubts to rest. Scientists cherish the hope that we will make difficult things simple, but often we wind up making simple things difficult. We see complications in everything, even the simple question of what is public health infrastructure. Witness:
Q. Last week I asked you about public health…
razib | February 2, 2009I hear & read the term "anecdotal evidence" a great deal. But wouldn't it be better to say "anecdotal illustration"? After all, most of the time a few anecdotes do nothing to increase confidence in a hypothesis, rather, they illustrate possible instances assuming that the hypothesis is true.
razib | January 30, 2009Well, it isn't just the old media that's having issues. A few days ago Culture11 folded. Now it looks like Pajamas Media network is shutting down (they're going to go into vlogging fulltime?). I got a few links from PM back in 2005-2006, very little traffic. It didn't seem like the aggregation was adding any value to the constituent weblogs. Additionally, a lot of their stuff is 2001-2004 vintage Right-of-Center media commentary, the sell-by date has long passed. Something like The Next Right is what circa 2010 conservative weblogs are going to look like, at least the good ones. Look at…
revere | January 27, 2009On Sunday my friend and colleague from Fluwiki, DemFromCT, did me the honor of interviewing me on the front page of DailyKos. That's a pretty tall platform, being the most visited blog in the known universe (and beyond), so it's best to be absolutely clear when saying things there. I"m not sure I quite met that standard, but I'll let you judge for yourself, as I am cross-posting the interview below the fold. But this also gives me an opportunity to clarify one point that drew some justified comment. Here's something I said in the interview:
In the past I downplayed individual prepping for a…
revere | January 24, 2009Writing a pseudonymous blog day after day can be wearing, especially as you get no personal recognition for it. That's the point of a pseudonym, after all. But sometimes things happen that are even better than personal recognition. On January 6, 2009, Vintage Books published the trade paperback original of THE NATION GUIDE TO THE NATION, edited by Richard Lingeman and Scienceblogs.com is recognized in it and Effect Measure gets a special mention. Here's a promotional description:.
Part Whole Earth Catalog, part 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and part Zagat, THE NATION GUIDE TO THE NATION…