My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well– the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren’t there, but want to know what I talked… Continue reading Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help
Category: Blogs
You’re Not Some Kind of Squirrel-Lover Are You?
Despite my best efforts to sleep late and miss my flight, I made it to the airport with plenty of time to get on my flight to DC. Which means that I will, i fact, be giving a talk TODAY at 3:30 pm at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Lecture Hall (room… Continue reading You’re Not Some Kind of Squirrel-Lover Are You?
Au Revoir, Cognitive Daily
Set the bloggy flags at half-mast, for Dave and Greta are shutting down Cognitive Daily. OK, maybe three-quarter-mast, because they’re doing it of their own free will, but still, they’ll be missed. And now I need to find a new example of an extremely successful blog that is always and unfailingly about science, with no… Continue reading Au Revoir, Cognitive Daily
Dog Physics and Academic Blogging
I’ve made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs: When I started my blog in 2002, I had… Continue reading Dog Physics and Academic Blogging
The Internet Is Making Me Hate Your Website
Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year’s question is “How is the Internet changing the way you think?“ This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the… Continue reading The Internet Is Making Me Hate Your Website
Finding Patterns in Data: Fourier Series
Over at Faraday’s Cage, Cherish has a very nice post on Fourier series, following on an earlier post on Fourier transforms in the Transformers movie. She gives a nice definition of the process in the earlier post: A Fourier Transform takes a signal and looks at the waves and then shows us the frequencies of… Continue reading Finding Patterns in Data: Fourier Series
2009: The Year In Blog
It’s a new year, so that means it’s time to take a look back at the previous year. In graphical form, it looks like this: Clears it all up, doesn’t it? That’s the past year in blog traffic, showing pageviews per day. Integrate it all up, and it comes to 717,254 pageviews. That’s kind of… Continue reading 2009: The Year In Blog
The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets
Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show. So, I… Continue reading The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets
Coming Soon, Frame-by-Frame Video Analysis of ScienceBlogs
Rhett Allain’s Dot Physics has joined ScienceBlogs. Sweet. Update your RSS readers accordingly. That is all.
Spoken Like Somebody Who’s Never Read Slush
Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I’m going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be… Continue reading Spoken Like Somebody Who’s Never Read Slush