Blogs
drorzel | April 4, 2008In the comments to yesterday's post about framing, Damian offers a long comment that doesn't actually contradict anything I said, but re-frames it in terms more complimentary to the Dawkins/ Myers side of things. I may deal with some of what he says over there (probably not today, though, as I have a class to teach), but I wanted to single out one particular part of his comment for response:
Nisbet has claimed repeatedly, and without much evidence I might add, that PZ and Dawkins are poor advocates for science. For a start, neither PZ or Dawkins has ever claimed to be an advocate (at least,…
drorzel | April 4, 2008The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century":
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…
drorzel | April 3, 2008I really had intended for Tuesday's dog pictures to be my only comment on the recent framing debacle (well, Monday's expertise post was an oblique commentary on it, but nobody got that, which you can tell because the comments were civil and intelligent and interesting to read). But Chris Mooney is making a good-faith effort to clear things up with his current series, including an effort to define common ground, and he's getting absolutely pounded, for no good reason.
I think Chris and Matt Nisbet have made some tactical errors in making their case to ScienceBlogs, chief among them forgetting…
drorzel | April 1, 2008I've managed to avoid most of the recent fracas over Expelled and what Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney have said about it, mostly by unsubscribing from the RSS feeds for most of the participating blogs a few months back. Prescient of me, no?
I've kept my RSS subscription for Chris's blog, though, and I read his mea culpa post, and he's obviously quite sincerely bothered by what happened, and the way people on ScienceBlogs (both bloggers and commenters) have reacted to it. I can't say I really blame him.
Anyway, his post has motivated me to actually say something about the whole controversy. I'm…
drorzel | March 30, 2008(Now that I look at the title, that sounds like an incredibly tepid harness-team command. "On, Moderation! Forward, with prudent speed!" I could clear that up by adding "Comment" in the middle, but I kind of like the image...)
Over at Boing Boing, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long explanation of the comment moderation policy in Q&A format. As you might expect, if you're a reader of Making Light, it's very well done, and as clear a statement of what good community moderation is about as you'll find anywhere. As you might expect, if you're a reader of the Internet generally, the…
drorzel | March 20, 2008Over at Making Light, Abi has proposed a parlour game using books as Tarot cards. As always for Making Light, the resulting comment thread is full of dizzyingly erudite responses, and clever literary in-jokes.
But it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw in the game-- Abi's examples all involve selected works, chosen to be appropriate for the subject of the reading. For true divination, though, you need an element of randomness, whether it be yarrow stalks tossed in the air, or the iTunes randomizer. Fortunately, we have LibraryThing: if you look at our library, you'll see a "Random…
drorzel | March 17, 2008It hasn't been a roaring success, but LBMango on LiveJournal has a twist on the questions meme that I like:
Everyone has things they blog about.
Everyone has things they don't blog about.
Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it.
It may not work here, either, but what the hell. Let's shake things up a bit-- if nothing else, it'll give me the chance to practice glib and non-responsive answers to difficult questions, in case I ever lose my mind and run for office.
(I blog about a wide enough…
drorzel | March 16, 2008A little while back, there was some discussion of what science blogging should be, where the question of what draws the most traffic came up. A couple of people said they see more traffic from "real" science posts than from other trivia, in contrast to my claim that I see more traffic from other stuff.
It occurs to me that I have inadvertently run the experiment to test this over the past week: This week, I posted five hard-core physics posts, one each week day, and three of them were also tagged for ResearchBlogging.org. I also posted a bunch of frivolous things-- animal pictures, FutureBaby…
drorzel | March 15, 2008Paul Krugman is now a famour economist, but many years ago, he was "an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race." So, he did what any good academic would do in that situation: he wrote a silly paper to cheer himself up. In this case, a paper discussing the issues that arise in interstellar trade because of realtivistic effects.
It's a brilliant bit of silliness. It's hard to pick a favorite bit, but this is pretty good:
To conclude this section, we should say something about the assumption that the trading planets lie in the same inertial frame. This will turn out to…
drorzel | March 10, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a post highlighting some physics blogs that he's adding to the blogroll. Which reminds me that I've been remiss in updating my own links-- I've recently started reading Swans On Tea regularly, and he's got some great science content. Via Tom, I've also discovered Skulls in the Stars which mixes physics with pulp literature, and Physics and Physicists by ZapperZ, which is chock full of physics-y goodness.
All of this new-to-me bloggy activity drives home the fact that Mixed States, which I've relied on for most of my physics blog reading for a while now, is no…
drorzel | March 8, 2008ScienceBlogs is launching a new "Super Reader" program, where each blogger can nominate two readers as "Super Readers" who will be given the ability to tag three posts a week from all of ScienceBlogs for a special RSS feed (this will be done using del.icio.us). This is envisioned as a first step toward greater interactivity between bloggers and readers, but it's very much an experiment at this stage-- it might work, it might flop, it might mutate into something totally unexpected.
Anyway, I know who I won't be picking, but choosing readers to get special bloggy powers is a harder question. So…
drorzel | March 2, 2008The kerfuffle over the Bayblab incident has produced no end of discussion here and elsewhere. Hilariously, this included a lengthy discussion of why they see ScienceBlogs as cliquish, conducted entirely in the private back-channel forum that nobody else can read. Irony: it's like gold-y and bronze-y, but made of iron.
I realize that there's nothing you'd rather read than noodly explorations of the true essence of science blogging, except maybe copies of the Federal income tax code. But since I'm sitting here in the lab waiting for the turbo pump to spin down so I can break vacuum (because I…
drorzel | February 27, 2008We haven't had a good navel-gazing kerfuffle around here in a while, but not to worry-- Bayblab comes to the rescue with a broadside against the current state of science blogging, as epitomized by ScienceBlogs:
If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays. Seed Magazine and the bloggers themselves profit from the traffic. That's right, Seed…
drorzel | February 25, 2008There's been some discussion recently of ScienceBlog reader get-togethers, and the question was raised of what ScienceBlogs ought to do to facilitate this. Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that Facebook is useful for, and there is, in fact, a ScienceBlogs Facebook group. If you're a Facebook user, and interested in that sort of thing, join the group.
(I occasionally toy with the idea of making an Uncertain Principles group (or a Quantum Mechanics for Dogs group), but then, I don't really know what I would put on it at this point... The book is still a long way off, and it's not…
drorzel | February 25, 2008Over at evolgen, RPM is wondering about the disciplinary distribution of bloggers:
I have an intuition, backed up by absolutely no evidence, that my particular area of interest (evolutionary genetics) has more faculty blogging about stuff related to their research than other fields. This is most likely the result of my interest in those blogs, and, hence, my increased awareness of them compared to blogs of faculty in other research areas.
[... list of half-a-dozen blogs...]
That's not a lot of blogs, but it's also not a huge field. How does that compare with faculty who blog in your research…
drorzel | February 21, 2008Over at Terra Sigillata, Abel Pharmboy has live-blogged his own vasectomy.
Why did he do this? Your guess is as good as mine.
Why am I linking to it? Misery loves company. Until I figure out a way to scrub that knowledge out of my brain, the best I can do is make sure that the rest of you suffer, too...
drorzel | February 8, 2008Henry Farrell is doing some substantive political science blogging over at the Monkey Cage, looking at a paper by his co-blogger Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues. They did a really imprssive amount of work to look at the linking habits of liberal and conservative bloggers, and Henry zeroes in on one of the findings in particular:
Straw-man arguments account for 43% of the 42 links from conservative blogs to liberals in our sample, and 54% of the 63 links from liberal blogs to conservatives in our group of entries that include cross-ideological linkages. ...Posts that concretely address the…
drorzel | January 23, 2008Some time back, Dave Munger and someother folks put together a site called BPR3.org designed to aggregate posts that discuss peer-reviewed research papers in detail. A major weakness of this was that it's sort of difficult to remember what the acronym stands for (every time I try to figure it out, I come up one "R" short...).
They've fixed this problem by relaunching as the more intuitive researchblogging.org, with a spiffy new aggregator and a nice home page collecting the most recent articles in different categories. Dave explains the basics on Cognitive Daily, whose "Peer Reviewed Research…
drorzel | January 14, 2008Well, OK, not really. You can, however, hear what I sound like by listening to a couple of official Tor podcasts made from the panel I did at Worldcon with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Adam Rakunas, Paul Cornell and Yoshio Kobayashi.
The panel was back in September, but I haven't seen the files on Tor's web page until just now. You can access them directly, if they move off the index page, using these links:
Part 1/2
Part 2/2
It's a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and a couple of funny things get said. The sound quality is pretty good, especially given that it was recorded by a single Tor staffer…
drorzel | January 12, 2008Looking at the traffic stats for the week, we see the following pageview totals:
The Funding Issue: 688
Unions and Sour Grapes: 777
Teacher Compensation: 946
Sheep!: 1,261
So, to recap:
Ranty blogging about serious issues of science funding and public outreach = Nobody cares.
Ranty blogging about teachers and unions = Good for traffic.
Cartoon sheep = Pure blogging gold.
In the immortal words of David St. Hubbins, "Too much fucking perspective."