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I must follow the fashion here at Scienceblogs, so there is now a group for Deltoid readers on Facebook.
This is a visual amusement, courtesy of href="http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/" rel="tag">Websites as Graphs.  The top one is Corpus Callosum.  The bottom one is the ScienceBlogs main page.The key is as follows: What do the colors mean? blue: for links (the A tag) red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags) green: for the DIV tag violet: for images (the IMG tag) style="color: rgb(255, 255, 51); font-weight: bold;">yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags) style="color: rgb(255, 153, 51); font-weight: bold;">orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR…
Why are people, all over the country, all of a sudden, searching for "Asian flying carp video?"
Not posting much this week. I'll be taking down my computers for a few days, making it difficult to post at all.   Maybe I will finally find out where all those little wires behind my computers go.  If I can get them all plugged in to the right spots again, regular posting will resume next week.
Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith launched an interesting discussion by talking about why her heart doesn't automatically leap when a reporter wants to talk to her. That post was followed by a lot of scientists swearing up and down about the awful treatment they've experienced at the hands of reporters. Chris Mooney, a reporter, thinks the ranting is all misplaced, and wants us to understand that reporters who write about science are the best trained journalists of all. I thought I'd join the fray. I think, first off, that Chris is a bit off-base. He's not feeling the genuine pain being…
Whoosh. A year has passed since I got my passport stamped with a scienceblogs.com visa. Thanks to all who have come this way and shared your thoughts. May the next year bring more of life's surprises.
I am working on my next post, the one about amoxapine. But sssshhhh, I'm using Kubuntu. Heresy, I know, but what do you expect? It's Sunday.
The 9th Carnival of Mathematics is live at JD2718, in a cleverly alphabetical form.
In about a month I'm heading to Colorado for the "Science and Media Summit" at the Aspen Science Center. The name may conjure up an image in your mind of a long table with diplomats from Science on one side and Media on the other, tensely negotiationg an end to some sort of bloodshed. As I understand it, though, the meeting should be much more amicable and interesting. The subtitle for the meeting is "Getting It Right: Science and the Media in the Emerging Media Landscape." Our mission will be to come up with a blueprint for good reporting on science in the age of blogs, YouTube, and…
Here's what PsyBlog has to say about Omni Brain: Best humorous (but still scientific) psychology blog The danger with mixing science and humour is slipping into the 'geek trap' where clever people try to be too clever. Omni Brain easily avoids this. Funky finger pictures on this post about sexual orientation and finger length. Just to let you guys know... the only way we avoid being too clever is by not actually being very clever ;) haha... Thanks for the props! Check out the rest of their psychology blog reviews (which are great!) here. Oh, and the beanie baby Freud doesn't have anything…
We've been having some problem with popups showing up on scienceblogs. It's not deliberate: Seed does not accept popup ads. But it appears that one snuck in somehow, but no one is sure where it's coming from. If you see a popup on GM/BM, please do me a favor, and post a comment here telling me: Who the popup was for, What ads appeared on the page when the popup popped up. The sooner we figure out where the popup is coming from, the sooner we can get rid of it.
A few months ago I got in my car and drove north until I reached a remarkable building filled with several million mice. At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists are studying mice to understand many mysteries of genetics and medicine. But I was particularly curious about a project that they've only recently launched: an attempt to understand how many genes working together give rise to complex traits. When those complex traits go awry, the result may be a common disease such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The article I wrote about what I learned, "Mendel's Mouse,"…
Jennifer Jacquet at SB blog Shifting Baselines just returned from the Galapagos, where she got the feeling that blogging has not made much of an impact, even among the scientists at the research stations. It left her wondering if science blogging is mainly restricted to the so-called "First World"--i.e., affluent places such as the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan. If true, that would be a shame, since it is potentially such a powerful tool for getting scientific information, no matter where you are in the world. It's a fair question, but an answer really demands more data than one trip by…
Why don't I blog more? In part because I'm busy reading other blogs. I finally got around to adding some of my favorite science blogs outside the scienceblogs.com empire to the blogroll over on the left side. Allow me to take a moment to introduce you to them. The Anti-Toxo: A blog about every new paper or article on Toxoplasma, the resident parasite here at the Loom. If you want to understand our parasitic overlords, this is a must read. Center for Science Writings Blog. John Horgan, veteran science writer, now runs the Center for Science Writing at Stevens Institute of Technology. Lots of…
I just wanted to take a moment to reiterate my longstanding policy on comments. I reserve the right to delete comments that are slanderous, obscene, or glaringly off-topic. I also reserve the right to ban commenters who do not follow these rules even after being reminded of them. Anyone who accepts these simple rules is welcome to tell me why I am utterly wrong about the topic at hand, even if you think the world is six thousand years old. (And I am entitled to comment on why you are wrong, too.) But this is not the place for spam-like manifestos. Let the conversation resume.
Speaking of open-source software, I recall posting a while back when the percentage of visits to Corpus Callosum, by users of Internet Explorer, dropped below 50%. Now, it is 24%.  Roughly parallels President Bush's approval rating.  I wonder what those two stats would look like on a graph over time.
I took out the blogroll for now because it was taking forever to load.  I will put it back, somewhere, probably at the bottom of the page.  I hate to do that, but Blogrolling was just not responsive enough. UPDATE: The blogroll has been moved to its own page, accessible via a link under the "Blogroll" heading n the sidebar, or using the "Blogroll" gray tab under the banner." Note that it loads more quickly now.
Chris and Mark Hoofnagle's denialism blog has joined ScienceBlogs. Check out Mark's post on the Unified theory of the crank. Sound like anyone we know?
Our corporate masters at Seed have added a new blog to ScienceBlogs, and it looks like a real winner. It's called the Denialism Blog, and it's off to a roaring great start with "The Unified Theory of the Crank. Go check it out!
A kill file is a feature of most Usenet news readers that allowed to permanently discard all posts from a particular user without even having to look at them. A couple of my readers have asked about a kill file for comments here. Daniel Martin has a script that provides a kill file. You need Greasemonkey and Firefox to use it. I'm going to follow PZ Myers's example and list all the commenters that are banned or on moderation. For definitions of the terms, see PZ Myers. The list below is the current list -- changes since the original post are not indicated. Banned Commenter Why Comments…