With silliness running riot at ScienceBlogs, it’s more important than ever to keep your fraud-detection skills sharp. Thankfully, the BBC is here to help, with a list of real news stories that sound like they might be hoaxes (via Making Light). Unfortunately, they’re mostly not very funny. A couple are just lame celebrity trivia. But… Continue reading Know Your Hoaxes
Category: Silliness
21.9 +/- 3.1%
Since you asked. Uncertainty is due to the answer to #7.
Notes Toward a User’s Guide to Synthetic Chemistry Talks
Reading Dylan Stiles’s blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I’ll reproduce the original below the fold:
Give the People What They Want
One of the nice things about the move to ScienceBlogs is that I gained access to a much better stats package than we had for Steelypips. In particular, I can now look at the keywords that bring people to my site (for steelypips, I could only get keywords for the domain as a whole, which… Continue reading Give the People What They Want
Humanists Have All the Fun
I’ve seen the idea of an “Opposite Day” popping up lots of places in the political blogosphere (most recently from Big Media Matt and Will Wilkinson), and it sounds sort of cool. The idea is that you commit to writing blog posts on topics chosen by readers, taking the opposite position from what you would… Continue reading Humanists Have All the Fun
Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!
I’m with Kevin on this one: this whole “Pi Day” thing is just too dorky for words (I’m looking at you, Clifford…) However, as noted by Arcane Gazebo, it’s also Einstein’s birthday, which is an occasion much more worth commemorating. So celebrate as the man himself would have: invent a new theory of the universe… Continue reading Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!
scienceblogs.livejournal.com
It’s apparently PZ Myers’s birthday, which has triggered an orgy of “happy birthday” posts on ScienceBlogs. It’s so, so… LiveJournal. Still, everybody else is doing it, so, hey, man, happy birthday. Celebrate with some spicy baked cuttledfish: (“Mr. Squid” image from this page of weird Asian snacks.)
Oscars Wrap-Up
Skot Kurruk explains the Best Picture result (below the fold, for those with sensitive ears):
In Case You Were Wondering
About my take on the critically important science question sweeping ScienceBlogs, the answer is Cowboy Bebop. I’m cool with that. I get better theme music than any of the others. (Totally scientific quiz here.)
The Classical Zeno Effect
A Dramatic Presentation of a Classical Analogue to the Quantum Zeno Effect A Play in One Act: John Boy: Good night, Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen: Good night John Boy. JB: Are you asleep? ME: No. JB: Are you asleep? ME: No. JB: Are you asleep? ME: No. Repeat several more times Exeunt, pursued by a… Continue reading The Classical Zeno Effect