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grrlscientist | February 16, 2006
Hey everyone, I and the Bird, issue #17, is hosted by Wild Bird on the Fly. In honor of this issue of the I and the Bird carnival, Amy presents the first annual bird festival, an online celebration of good food and wild birds, including a wonderful poster designed by Amy especially for this occasion (above). The carnival links to 25 or so essays, including one written by me.
If you love birds, please consider writing and publishing an essay about them on your blog and sending the link to the next I and the Bird host, Rob, before 28 February. The next issue will be published on 2 March at…
stcynic | February 15, 2006Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jason Kuznicki, Positive Liberty is back up and running smoothly. You all should be going there every day, not to see my posts because you can see that here, but to see the posts written by Jason, Jon and Timothy. They really are three of the finest minds and writers in the blogosphere and it is a genuine honor and privilege to be associated with them.
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006After complaining nearly ceaselessly to the good peeps at ScienceBlogs.com about the font, I went ahead and changed it myself to Garamond Georgia for the post body. Despite my inexperience with MovableType, inexperience that led to problems with the overall format of the blog itself, I actually did intend to accomplish this one teensy thing. I like this font. Then, at the request of one reader, I also changed the font for comments to Garamond, but I do NOT like that. Do you?
Hopefully, I will have something more substantial for you to read tomorrow (and definitely by Friday, when Birds in the…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006The 2005 Koufax Awards have finally compiled a list of all their nominees for Best Writing and I am included. As usual, there are approximately a bazillion nominees, but you can find me between the top and the middle of the list as "GrrlScientist". They present the nominees so you, dear readers, will have a chance to read at least some of them before voting has commenced. Apparently, there will be several "rounds" of voting before the final award winners are named. They claim that "round one" voting will begin sometime next week (or at least sometime before 2007 has arrived).
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006
A friend, Ian, sent me a link for yet another Harry Potter Quiz so of course, I had to share it with you! I really liked this quiz because, unlike most web-based quizzes, this one is top rate, featuring wonderful graphics and music. I only have two complaints; they should ask more questions and the questions should be harder!
What was your score? My score is below the fold ..
As you correctly predicted, my quiz score was 100% -- LOTS better than my US geography quiz scores and better even than my Asia geography quiz scores (GASP!).
grrlscientist | February 15, 2006Okay, I am back in business after finally resolving the coding issue on my blog, thanks to kind advice from my blog sibling, Tim.
Several blog carnivals have been published recently that will interest you. First, my favorite blog carnival, Tangled Bank, issue 47, was published by Kete Were. Tangled Bank is a celebration of the best science, nature and medical writing recently published on a blog. There is plenty of good writing there to keep you busy during your lunch breaks. They also included a piece that I wrote.
The granddame of them all, that blog carnival that started off all blog…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2006
Happy Valentine's Day to all my readers, especially those of you who, like me, are alone today. As an added bonus, you can print out this valentine, tape it to your desk and tell everyone it is from a secret admirer!
grrlscientist | February 13, 2006 Okay, I want to brag. One of my most favorite-ist stories among all those that I've written was noticed and appreciated by the gods from the Church of the Flying Electrons, dear readers. I just hope that history repeats itself. Soon.
Unfortunately, I had no clue this was going to happen, so I began my template modification project in earnest this evening, shortly before the link was made, so things are rather untidy here right now.
grrlscientist | February 13, 2006
The Big Apple Blog Festival (BABF), issue 25 is now available. The BABF is a representative roundup of the previous week's posts by NYC bloggers, and it is packed with lots of NYC goodness! Also, I am pleased to tell you that one of my pieces was nominated to this festival (you will have to go there to learn which one).
The Big Apple Blog Festival likes to go on tour so if you have a NYC blog or you blog about NYC and would like to host an upcoming BABF, let the peeps at A Guy In New York know. The next BABF will be on February 20, 2006 and will be hosted by Harleys, Cars, Girls &…
stcynic | February 13, 2006DarkSyde continues his series of interviews with science bloggers at DailyKos with this interview with Carl Zimmer, hands down the best popular science writer working today. If you want an almost perfect book that explains how scientists go about filling in the details of evolutionary lineages, you can't do any better than Zimmer's At The Water's Edge. He details the data on the evolutionary transitions both out of the water (the first tetrapods) and back into the water (dolphins, whales and other marine mammals) and also tells the stories behind how that evidence was found. Great book, great…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2006Today is the anniversary of Charles Darwin's 197th birthday. Besides the fact that Darwin was a gentleman naturalist, he was also a prodigious writer and was quite popular in his day due to his travel books. But it was not until he was 50 when his most influential book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, was published. This was a seminal work that formally describes the theory of evolution and was followed by several more books by Darwin that further developed his ideas of how evolution occurred.
Darwin was…
stcynic | February 11, 2006Bruce Bawer, writing in the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger, absolutely nails the situation with the Muhammed caricatures:
On the contrary, what's happening here is that a gang of bullies - led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely labeled "apes and pigs" in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished by death - is trying to compel a tiny democracy to live by its own theocratic rules. To succumb to pressure from this gang would simply be to invite further pressure, and lead to further concessions - not just by…
grrlscientist | February 11, 2006
There is another new online biology journal out there, Biology Direct. This journal is particularly interesting because its stated policy is to provide authors and readers of research articles with a novel system of peer review. This system includes making the author responsible for obtaining reviewers' reports via the journal's Editorial Board; making the peer review process open rather than anonymous; and publishing the reviewers' reports along with the articles, thus increasing both the responsibility and the reward of the referees and eliminating sources of abuse in the refereeing…
stcynic | February 11, 2006This article says that, according to Technorati, there are now over 27 million blogs on the internet, with 2.7 million of them being actively updated at least once a week. And according to TTLB, this blog ranks in the top 1000 by the number of incoming links and in the top 500 by the number of hits per day. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
stcynic | February 11, 2006Sal Cordova has yet another comment attempting to answer an argument I made (though it's in response to someone else bringing up my argument rather than to the argument itself. In response to another commenter who said, "Yes, because as Ed Brayton points out, almost every facet of science will contradict *someone's* religious beliefs. There would be nothing left to teach in science class if we avoided ideas that might be religiously sensitive", Sal wrote:
I doubt that. We have pictures of the world being round. Students can test claims of gravitational theory and electro-magnetic theory. Any…
grrlscientist | February 10, 2006
How well do you know the USA? I have linked to two quizzes that test your knowledge by having you place each state on a map of the USA. This quiz is especially difficult.
After you've taken that first quiz, try this one. My scores are below the fold ..
My scores:
first quiz; 62%, average error 104 miles 368 seconds.
second quiz; 96% average error 22 miles 296 seconds
Hardest state to place? Wyoming.
tags: Quiz, geography
stcynic | February 10, 2006At the risk of raising Lynn's blood pressure a bit, I'll post a link to this post by Tara Smith debunking Tom Bethell's nonsense about AIDS not being caused by HIV (Lynn is a physician who led an AIDS task force at her hospital and an AIDS support group for victims and families, so there are few things that raise her ire more than those who peddle such myths about AIDS and thereby frustrate our attempts to fight it). Dr. Smith is an expert in infectious diseases and does an excellent job of breaking down the falsehoods in Bethell's claims. I should also note that at least two very prominent…
stcynic | February 9, 2006A reader sent me a link to this amusing letter to the Weekly Dig in Boston.
This is a response to the "artist" who in last week's Dig insulted my God by running a comic strip depicting Him clad in an explosive vest, carrying a gun, with a knife between his teeth. I cannot begin to express how deeply offensive this is to my people. My God stands for love, tolerance and peace...
I call upon all believers in our great and beneficent God to find the cartoonist and boil the marrow in his bones, wear his innards like neckties and lop off his loins. If the cartoonist can't be found, however, I urge…
grrlscientist | February 9, 2006
Reader demographics based on 100 visitors.
While I take a brief break from writing this week's issue of Birds in the News, I want to mention that I am proud to say that once again, nearly half of my visitors are from outside of the United States. Not that I have anything against Americans, because I do not, but it pleases me to think that the topics that I write about have an international appeal. Since I have your attention, I am curious to know where you are from? Is this your first visit to Scientific Life or to ScienceBlogs? How did you find ScienceBlogs/Scientific Life? What do you…