The Weekly Smörgåsbord #1
Posted by Darin Hayton on 02/21 at 09:52 AM
Welcome to the first weekly selection of articles and posts that have attracted my attention over the past week. The only real criterion for inclusion is my own amusement.
- “The Giant’s Shoulders #20” — the latest history of science blog carnival over at Skulls in the Stars has lots of great stuff, none of which have I relinked below, so go peruse the entries (PACHS is hosting the next The Giant’s Shoulders, so do contribute).
- “The Story of 1910” and “The Story of 1935” — Two stories look briefly at moments in Linus Pauling’s life 100 and 75 years ago (in preparation for Pauling’s birthday on 28 February)(as a former chemist, I’ve always had a soft spot for Pauling).
- “Reshelving anti-evolution books on Skeptically Speaking podcast” — Michael Barton at The Dispersal of Darwin recounts his efforts to reshelve “intelligent design” books in the religion section rather than the science section (and the attention his efforts attracted).
- “Hawks, Doves, and Various Avian Hybrids” — Will Thomas over at Ether Wave Propaganda has a nice post on “Cold-War Liberals,” which helps me understand some of the history and the historiography that I simply don’t know (the comments are also quite rich).
- “An alternative BBC list for the “educated” reader” — The Curious Wavefunction offers a variety of science books to complement a reading put together by the BBC (I’ve already commented on this post here at PACHS).
- “A Man with a strange name” and “It wasn’t the first but …” — ThonyC at The Renaissance Mathematicus has a couple nice posts on the infamous Kepler-Galileo non-correspondence and early scientific societies (if you don’t read The Renaissance Mathematicus on a regular basis, you should).
- “Science is Awesome! Sack The Journalists,” “Science Communication, Culture and the Media: New UK Government Reports,” “A New Kind of Science Journalism,” “World view: Calling Science to account,” and finally “Science Journalists Have Met The Enemy, and They are Bloggers”— a few of the many posts and articles on communicating science and, more often, on the interminable science journalist vs. science blogger feud.
- “Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity” — The Wall Street Journal’s thoughts on the myth of the young genius.
- “Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility” (behind a paywall) and the popular version “Cellphone traces reveal you’re so predictable” — an interesting way to look at cellphone data, and in many ways so predictable.