Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of “open science,” and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I’m a little dubious about it… Continue reading You Can’t Cook a Cow: The Problem with Raw Data
Oooh! Shiny Thing!
I don’t usually read blog carnivals much, and it’s probably a good thing. Scott’s cryptic version of the History Carnival led me to spend a really ridiculous amount of time reading blog posts about cavalry tactics in the English Civil War (that’s the first of several). And, really, I have no need to know this…… Continue reading Oooh! Shiny Thing!
Dog of the Year
What with Time naming everybody the “Person of the Year,” Emmy is angling to snag Top Dog honors by uploading video of herself shredding a chew toy to YouTube: It’s hard to blog when you don’t have opposable thumbs.
News Updates
A couple of quick updates on things posted earlier this week: 1) A New York Times story on the Stardust findings. 2) A somewhat better press release on the single top quark production experiment (from the Fermilab press office, rather than the press office of one of the member institutions.
Season of the List
Along with tacky an inescapable Christmas music, December brings lists, as every publication that deals with music at all puts out their own compilation of songs or albums of the year. The definitive Uncertain Principles Songs of 2006 list will be coming up, but if you’re just dying to see ordered lists of pop music,… Continue reading Season of the List
Grading Season
Colleges and universities working on a semester calaendar are just finishing up classes now, which means that most academics (unlike those of us in Trimester Land, who have been out of session for a few weeks) are currently buried in grading. This leads to some fun blog posts: Grading as a text adventure (via Making… Continue reading Grading Season
ScienceBlogs Showcase
The forthcoming issue of Seed will include a big spread on ScienceBlogs, and the online version is already up. They got pictures of all the bloggers (with stand-ins for the pseudonymous), and turned a caricature artist loose on us, leading to the motley mob scene at the top of that page. The cartoon will be… Continue reading ScienceBlogs Showcase
Science on the Tree 5
We might as well close out the week on a high note, so here’s tonight’s ornament. Actually, there are two of them:
The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results
So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I’ve had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because,… Continue reading The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results
The Band Is On the Field!
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they’re being honored. These frequently involve props… Continue reading The Band Is On the Field!