What we're talking about 
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Happy Holidays!
Weekend Diversion: The Best Holiday Present
Starts With A Bang December 24, 2012
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.” -Milan Kundera It’s the holiday season, and for most of us, that means…
Best Science Books 2012: The New Scientist
Confessions of a Science Librarian December 21, 2012
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2012 lists…
Channel Surfing
Life Science
“When you’re a little kid you’re a bit of everything; scientist, philosopher, artist. Sometimes it seems like growing up is giving these things up one at a time.” -Kevin Arnold, The Wonder Years Like many who grew up around the same time I did, The Wonder Years was one of my favorite shows, putting on…
I am actually staying home for several weeks, and it feels so good and relaxing. So this is kind of a self-portrait, I think. (via)
Physical Science
The Pip’s ringing in the New Year… Well, OK, he’s actually asleep upstairs. Because when you have a one-year-old and a four-year-old, you don’t really get out to a lot of parties on New Year’s Eve. Anyway, to be honest, I won’t be all that sorry to see 2012′s taillights fade to black. There were…
“I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.” -Milton Berle Welcome to Messier Monday, where we pick…
“People hear the happy story, but the truth is they could all disappear in the blink of an eye. The threats just keep coming.” -Todd Steiner It’s taken generations of scientists, examining the night sky for millennia, to comprehend the full size and scope of what’s out there in the Universe. Out beyond the planets and…
Environment
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Anthropocene Antics Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years December 30, 2012 Chuckles, Seasonal, COP19+, Bromwich, Arctic Cyclone,…
January: Cold in Cambridge (but this is from early-Feb, since I don’t have anything terribly good from January. The best I can offer is smoke on the water).
Humanities
I saw something odd in Marrakech recently. Along the main avenues there was a considerable amount of construction going on. But also properties right next door that had clearly been vacated years ago without receiving new buildings. And newish buildings and shop space that were boarded up. Freshly painted fronts of closed restaurants that looked…
A colleague sent this to me, I’m passing it on to you. Looks important and interesting: Wildfire, increasing with climate change, deposits increasing amounts of light-absorbing black carbon [soot] on the cryosphere [snow and ice], multiplying the existing heat-driven ice-reflectivity feedback [a.k.a. albedo feedback]. The relative importance of increasing wildfire [and changing industrial soot pollution]…
And by “Prestigious” I mean …. well, see for yourself in this story from Media Matters for America (Reposted with permission): Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc Morano ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called “the Matt Drudge of climate denial,” the “king of the skeptics,” and “a central cell of the climate-denial machine,”…
Education
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: William A. Hinton – Physician and Bacteriologist
–Known for developing the first highly accurate standardized test for the sexually transmitted infection, syphilis –First black professor appointed at Harvard Medical School Academically talented, William Hinton from the start wanted to be recognized for his achievements instead of his race. As a high school senior in 1909, he was offered a scholarship reserved for…
I made a “page” on this blog, HERE, pointing to posts that teachers might find interesting or useful. So far most of the items linked to relate to Creationism and that sort of thing, but I’ll soon be adding subject area content posts as well. If you are a teacher, have fun. If you know…
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Julie Schablitsky – Archaeologist
–One of the nation’s leading historical archaeologists –Using forensics and other techniques, her digging excavations have shed light on a wide-range of historical events –from the life of Naval hero John Paul Jones to the Donner Party ( America’s classic story of cannibalism) From the time she went on her first archeological excavation at age…
Politics
Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Anthropocene Antics Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years December 30, 2012 Chuckles, Seasonal, COP19+, Bromwich, Arctic Cyclone,…
“When you’re a little kid you’re a bit of everything; scientist, philosopher, artist. Sometimes it seems like growing up is giving these things up one at a time.” -Kevin Arnold, The Wonder Years Like many who grew up around the same time I did, The Wonder Years was one of my favorite shows, putting on…
… Twice. The story is here. Basically, the sign was first spay painted, the burned. Run of the mill anti-atheist vandalism. But, if you are not already tapped out from the Happy Holiday Season of Buying Stuff, you might want to go to this web page and make a small donation to WASH, who originally…
Medicine
Homeopathy amuses me. Homeopaths amuse me as well, which is why I’m resurrecting this post. It was originally published elsewhere a few years ago and somehow never crossposted here. So if it seems a bit dated, fear not; Orac hasn’t fired up his Tarial cells and managed to go back in time. Now, I realize…
Regular readers have probably noticed that I’m taking it easy this week, at least compared to my usual ridiculous level of output. It is, after all, the holidays, and last night I even went to see my cousin’s son play basketball and then hung out at the local Knights of Columbus hall. (No, it didn’t…
Respectful Insolence
Andrew Wakefield wins an award just as he jumps on the anti-psychiatry bandwagon
I certainly don’t even try to keep secret my opinion of Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the measles back to the UK, thanks to his bad science, for which he was well-paid by trial lawyers and his falsification of data and scientific fraud. Since 1998, when Wakefield first…
Brain & Behavior
Dr. Alex Taylor from The University of Auckland has demonstrated that New Caledonian crows have the ability to perform causal reasoning, which is the ability to infer that something you cannot see may be the cause of something. According to the article, this is the first study to experimentally demonstrate this ability in a species…
Scientists have discovered just what makes Rudolph’s nose turn red:
denialism blog
Mike Adams couldn’t go 6 hours without promoting an insane conspiracy theory about this school shooting
As anyone who reads my blog or Orac’s knows, Mike Adams, the “health ranger”, is a deranged individual who denies HIV causes AIDS, promotes some of the most absurd quackery in the world, and also is such an all around crank you can rely on him to wax conspiratorial about almost any dramatic news story.…
Technology
From What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us:
The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 19 Table of Contents Chapter 21 Chapter 20 An Awkward Homecoming, November 17, 2055 Adelle was right. I did have difficulty getting back through Customs. The time stretched on. After five hours, an iris scan and multiple DNA tests, not to mention extensive questioning by airport security, Border…
These days it is hard to find an “aftermarket” computer book that does a better job than Google in providing information for messing with ever (and rapidly) evolving and changing software. Master Your Mac: Simple Ways to Tweak, Customize, and Secure OS X by Matt Cone, which is published in 2013, i.e., the future, actually…
Information Science
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2012 lists…
Confessions of a Science Librarian
Best Science Books 2012: Heather Mallick, iFanboy, Joe Klein and more
Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2012 lists…
Jobs
The Pump Handle
Construction workers in central Texas successfully tie living wages to big business tax breaks
Workers in Travis County, Texas, are celebrating what advocates are calling a landmark victory, after local leaders voted to ensure that economic incentive deals benefit both big business and workers.
The Pump Handle
First-of-its-kind survey compiles the experience of domestic workers, highlights the grim nature of an unregulated industry
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. But a new survey has pulled back the curtain on the conditions and experiences domestic workers face, documenting issues such as wage exploitation, preventable on-the-job injuries and the little — if any — power domestic workers have in improving their work environments.
Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky. But a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health used two analytic strategies to address such criticism.
