Meta
kbonham | September 3, 2013A little over 4 years ago, I joined up with three friends from grad school and launched a brand new science blog, "We, Beasties!" The name was meant to be a play on a phrase from Paul de Kruif's somewhat tongue-in-cheak translation of the first-ever microbiologist Antonie von Leeuwenhoek's term "Animacules." von Leeuwenhoek was the first human being to glimpse the world of life invisible to the naked eye, and de Kruif, 400 years later, dubbed those minuscule replicators "wee beasties." Of course, we now know much more about our microbial companions, including their immeasurable impact on our…
kbonham | December 21, 2012I disappeared for a while to teach a class. At the outset I had grand plans - Not only would I design the course from scratch, give the lectures, and grade the assignments, I would also write up all of the lectures for the blog and maintain my same level pf productivity in the lab. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that in order to accomplish this goal I would either need to give up sleeping or find one of those time-warp thingies from the 3rd Harry Potter book.
Neither of those options seemed reasonable, and so this blog, and indeed my productivity in lab suffered quite a bit.
The…
kbonham | May 27, 2012The kinks continue to get ironed out one by one after our massive migration. Most of the major problems are happening on the backend, and are likely invisible to you guys (except for the fact that some typically prolific posters have slowed down a bit), but there are a couple of things that I've noticed that probably will affect you.
The biggest one is the RSS feeds, and specifically the "select" feed. If you usually use RSS to keep up to date on the blogs here, your old links are probably broken (at least, all of the one I had were). If you look at the right sidebar, there's a link to a new…
kbonham | May 23, 2012Welcome to the new Science Blogs. You might have noticed some changes around here - let us know which changes you like and which you don't. One of the biggest things affecting your experience is the comment system - you can now reply directly to other people's comments, and you can login so you don't have to re-enter all your information each time (though you can still comment without logging in if you prefer). The moderation system is quite a bit easier from my end, which shouldn't affect you much, but will probably reduce the number of legitimate comments that get buried in the spam folder…
kbonham | April 17, 2012My birthday was last week, which means I get a whole new chance to set some New Year's resolutions. My regular readers (all 3 of you) might have noticed a serious dearth of posting lately. I have many excuses:
1) I'm (hopefully) coming up on my last year as a PhD student, and I'm in serious data-generation mode.
2) I've been spending more time on climbing, photography, and other things that are not science-related in order to give my brain some down time.
A photo I took of 2 friends on the side of Mt Cannon in New Hampshire
3) The current back-end of Scienceblogs is truly awful. While…
tsmith | November 8, 2011As you may have noticed from the extended radio silence, it's been a busy few months between classes (both taking them and giving them), tenure packaging, and research. To add another responsibility to the mix, I gave a talk a few weeks back at the National Institute for Animal Agriculture's annual symposium. This year, the featured topic was antibiotics and agriculture, so I was invited to give an overview of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and livestock.
While I'm always happy to give talks to new audiences, discussing my work and the state of the field in general, I have to…
greengabbro | May 12, 2011Feedburner tells me that there are still more than 50 people waiting patiently for my next post here. Um. Hi?
When I shifted from personal/political blogging to science blogging, and particularly when I started writing here at ScienceBlogs, I wanted to be a reliable source. Turns out that it's difficult for me to care about being reliable without dredging up a whole bunch of other issues about wanting to be seen as an AUTHORITAH! - Cartman voice and and all. So, that slowly got to be less fun.
Turns out, I miss having a blog that was less about explaining things, and more about discussing…
j7uy5 | April 24, 2011The good folks at Shrink Rap are conducting a survey about attitudes toward psychiatry. I would appreciate it is some of you would participate.
tlambert | March 15, 2011Scienceblogs management informs me:
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to manually unblock hundreds upon hundreds of individual IPs. They have advised that we invest in a firewall and additional services from them, but we are still working out what these will cost and how effective they will be. I am not sure if I was correct in thinking that these…
tlambert | November 13, 2010Sitemeter says there have been 4,000,000 visits to this blog. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
lborkowski | July 7, 2010ScienceBlogs has made a distressing move: they've given PepsiCo a blog. It's called Food Frontiers and will feature content written by PepsiCo scientists. For now, I'm not going to get into PepsiCo's contribution to public health problems or what kind of content we might expect to see on the blog. Instead, I want to focus on how ScienceBlogs works and what readers expect and are entitled to.
ScienceBlogs, a venture of Seed Media Group, is a business. It looks for bloggers who are writing interesting science-related content and offers them a spot as part of the ScienceBlogs community. Bloggers…
tlambert | March 12, 2010Such shameless fishing for links by Ataraxia Theatre will not go unrewarded.
sastyk | February 11, 2010Not promising anything - and definitely not promising anything until the book is done, but does anyone have topics they'd like your blogiste to cover? What do you want to hear me go on about?
BTW, if you are interested in more in-depth going on (plus a whole lot of awesome other stuff), Aaron and my next farm and garden design class starts 1 week from today. I'll post details and syllabus up here today or tomorrow, or you can email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for more info.
Also, I've still got spots in my next apprenticeship weekend - come to my house in rural upstate NY and see how we do it…
sastyk | February 9, 2010I have nothing to do with the recent kerfuffle about civility and comment policies that has been meandering through science blogs, but a large quantity of posts on the subject on a largeish number of blogs has, I admit, gotten me thinking about my own comment policies. Since I often get queries, often in personal email, about my comment policies, particularly why I let X or Y person say what they do, I thought it might be useful to make my comment policy more explicit.
My basic philosophy towards commenters is that I don't censor and I don't ban except under extreme provocation. In over 5…
tlambert | February 3, 2010If they are going to include my blog on their list of the top 30 science blogs, I can't help but link to them. There are some good blogs on their list which is only marred by the inclusion of Anthony Watts' anti-science blog.
j7uy5 | December 2, 2009Sharon Astyk will be joining Scienceblogs soon. Everyone is
encourage to
href="http://sharonastyk.com/2009/11/30/new-shiny-stuff-classes-contests-and-the-new-blog-announcement/">read
the post about her upcoming transition. I would especially
encourage my sciblings/colleagues here to read what her commenters have
to say about us. Really. This is what the world thinks of
us.
tlambert | May 20, 2009Andrew Bolt is giving our little panel at the Sydney Writer's Festival some free publicity, describing it as "That baaing sound of writers debating" and as an "ABC-style "debate"". Which is odd, because he's on the ABC all the time and this panel is Bolt-free.
And while I was turning over the rocks at Bolt's blog I cam across this post, where he argues that because "polls show fewer men are excited by the issue (of climate change)", that this
further evidence, of course, that the great global warming scare is fundamentally irrational.
And then
Pick a woman, and you run a comparatively…
tlambert | May 18, 2009Sydney Writers' Festival 2009: Stories from the Climate Change Front: A Forum and Launch of Overland 195 Saturday, May 23 2009 15:00 - 16:00
David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red, Dr Sharon Beder, author of Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, and Deltoid science blogger Tim Lambert discuss the state of the climate change debate today with Overland editor Jeff Sparrow.
Are the big polluters changing their ways or simply greening their public image? Who are the main climate denialists? What kind of action do we need, and how close are we to achieving it?
greengabbro | May 17, 2009
Huh, I suppose it's been a while, hasn't it?
1: I was really surprised by how many of you fell for my April Fools joke.
2: I do have a real job now. I'm an environmental consultant, and I can't be much more specific than that - not because I am trying to keep the details a secret, but because I work for a tiny, multidisciplinary company, which is rapidly expanding my collection of professional hats. Last week I was primarily a technical writer, this week I'll be out in the field doing preliminary ground work for a survey of natural resource use, and in the near future they've promised me…
goodmath | April 9, 2009
Things on the blog are probably going to be quiet for a while. My beloved pup, Nutmeg, died last night. He had pancreatic cancer, which had spread to his lungs, liver, and bones. He finally reached the point where even potent medication wasn't enough to relieve his pain enough, so we had to euthanize him. He died with the entire family
there holding him. I've never known another dog like him; he had the most
amazing, wonderful temperament. He was one of the sweetest, gentlest, most loving creatures I've ever known. I miss him terribly.