blog
revere | December 6, 2007As an (unplanned) follow-up to today's morning post about public health use of the internet we have tonight's event in Second Life, a chance to meet and chat with wiki partner DemFromCT:
Our next installment of the Virtually Speaking interview series takes place TONIGHT, Thursday, at 6pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern.
We are very excited that DemFromCT can join us to talk about public health policy, in particular preparedness for a pandemic. He and I have been trading comments on some skepticism I have about this, so this is going to be an especially interesting discussion.
All skeptics are welcome…
revere | November 25, 2007Today is the third blogiversary of Effect Measure. We started it on blogger as a whim in 2004 while Mrs. R. was making a Thanksgiving dinner. Since then there have been posts under the Effect Measure name by the Reveres every day, 365 days a year for three years, some 2300 in all. Since our move to Scienceblogs in early June of 2006 we have averaged a bit over 1100 unique visits a day. In the process we have accumulated an interesting, engaged and idiosyncratic community of commenters: contributors, arguers, polemicists, the outraged, sometimes the appreciative, the hyperverbose, the laconic…
razib | November 22, 2007I downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0 beta. It might have some bugs, but it resolved all the problems I'd been having earlier with Firefox crashing in gmail.
revere | November 21, 2007Blog is short for weblog, originally a chronological set of postings about, well, about whatever. Blogs are/were journals that were published publicly but also allowed readers to comment, read, react and in some ways affect the content. How much dialog and two way communication there was depended on the blog. Some have virtually none, although monitoring traffic and interest is one kind of reader feedback that doesn't depend on a formal comment facility. Others are highly interactive, with lots of comment, a community feeling and vigorous discussion. The big innovation, though, was that the…
revere | November 16, 2007The blogosphere is pretty crowded these days and one might think there's no need for less, not more. But in public health, that's not the case. There are a lot of Doctor/Medical blogs but not many public health blogs. So yesterday marked a significant milestone in the public health blogosphere, the First Blogiversary of The Pump Handle. As Jordan Barab, lately of Confined Space fame, notes in a congratulatory comment over at TPH, first year blog mortality is extremely high, so just making it at all is a significant accomplishment.
But TPH didn't "just make it" but made it in real style. They…
razib | November 10, 2007I'm curious about the readers of this weblog as we've been queried by the higher ups, but I don't know much aside from readers whose handles I am familiar with. I've set up a small survey with two questions, the first which asks which other science weblogs you read and the second on political orientation. Both are optional, and in the first case you can answer as many as you wish (the list is long, but mostly alphabetical). Just click here and enter survey number 56717 in the "Take A Survey" box (to the right side of the screen) to take the survey. You can leave comments about yourself if…
razib | November 7, 2007The title says it all; my first thought when I saw the picture & the caption on The Washington Post's website was to wonder how bad the drought in the American South was! Ah, but it's the other Georgia....
laelaps | November 6, 2007I apologize, dear readers, that today I probably won't be able to keep up with my more usual prolific rate of posting. The reasons for this today are as follows;
I have two major exams today, one in my "Soils & Water" "Soils and Society" class and my Computers midterm (which for some reason was scheduled to start at 10 PM).
I occasionally experience dizzy spells/lightheadedness during this time of the year, today being one of those days.
I have a weekly presentation to give tomorrow about meat-eating in early hominids that I haven't started yet. I have no doubt that I'll be able to…
laelaps | November 5, 2007I'm a little late on this, but if you haven't already, head on over to Greg Laden's fancy new digs here at ScienceBlogs! Be sure to stop by the Sandwalk, too, as it's celebrating it's first blogiversary.
Update: Also, Chris is celebrating his 100th post with a brand new carnival about classification and systematics, Linnaeus' Legacy! Be sure to check out the taxonomic goodness.
Update the 2nd: Be sure to say "hi" to another brand new member of the ScienceBlogs community, The Quantum Pontiff, too.
laelaps | November 5, 2007
The next edition of the paleo-carnival The Boneyard is coming up this Saturday at Catalogue of Organisms, so be sure to get your entries to me (evogeek at gmail.com) or Chris (gerarus at westnet.com.au) soon!
razib | November 4, 2007Just a note to all the nerds, Beyond Belief II is complete. Here is a list of speakers. Many familiar faces, but some new ones too. It will be posted at The Science Network when editing is completed.
Update: PZ has a summary.
laelaps | November 1, 2007I still am a bit disappointed that I had to miss SVP this year, but fellow paleo-blogger Amanda has suggested that everyone who wants to attend the 2008 meeting put a little progress bar on their blog to remind themselves to start saving up for the trip (you can make your own using this word cash meter). I'm setting mine at $1,500, and although registration is only a fraction of this amount, I'm going to need to save a lot for gas, hotels, food, extra activities, the money I won't be making since I'll have to take off from work, and the armful of books I'm sure to come home with. Indeed, I'm…
laelaps | November 1, 2007
A close-up B&W shot of the Willamette Meteorite. The holes the riddle one face of the meteorite were not caused by "cosmic collisions" but by the bolide rusting away in the ground prior to its removal from the Oregon soil (it consists of 91% iron).
Virginia Hughes is an editorial assistant here at ScienceBlogs who was especially helpful in moving Laelaps over to it's new home, and now she's brought her excellent writing to The Gist on Smithsonian.com. The first story? A 30-pound hunk of the Willamette Meteorite appraised at $1.3 million was withdrawn from auction after it failed to…
laelaps | October 31, 2007Creature-features are fun to watch any time of the year, but they're an absolute must on Halloween. Although there are many excellent SF and horror films to choose from, this year I'm going to have to pick John Carpenter's The Thing.
Based on the Don A. Stuart (AKA John W. Campbell, Jr.) story "Who Goes There?" The Thing is a blend of several horror-film styles that leaves the audience guessing as to who's human and who is not. Set at an Antarctic field station, the film tells the story of the crew encountering an alien that can imitate any living form after the slightest of contact, the…