UPDATE: The expression, as it may not have been clear, is ‘but is it art?’ There’s an expression I grew up with, and which was often chortled, in an appropriate accent, when I was growing up*. It was also widely spoken by the people I hung out with at university (I was generally the only […]
Posts for January 2012
F1000 Research (squeee!), Higgs hyping and string theory
Huzzah, more open science news! Plans were released today for the launch of F1000 Research, an F1000 initiative. F1000, for those for whom the name doesn’t ring a bell, are the ‘Faculty of 1000, which release post-publication peer reviews of scientific literature. They often do big metareviews. And they are, at least to my knowledge, […]
TOSP Episode 19: January 30th 2012
[Original post on the Sciblogs The Official Sciblogs Podcast site] Greetings, podcast audience of ours! This week’s podcast was supposed to be slightly shorter than usual, but then Elf and aimee got into a Discussion or two. There may have been some slight ranting :) We cover the human brain connectome (peeeerdy), awesome urchin-like nanospheres, a […]
The Internet in Numbers: 2011
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom’s released its ‘internet 2011 in numbers’, and the numbers are, to say the least, pretty interesting! I’ve pulled out a few of my favourites below: Websites The number of websites out there more than doubled in 2011. From 255 million in 2010 to 555 million in 2011. One wonders how many […]
OMG! Earth photography pr0n
Thank you, NASA, for once again providing really beautiful imagery. Fresh off the boat off the orbiting device*, a gorgeous ‘blue marble’ photograph of the little planet upon the surface of which we sail through our ever-expanding universe**. As NASA says: This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on […]
Weirdest comment spam ever
I’ve just received the strangest piece of comment spam ever, over on my Sciblogs blog. I have not approved it, so it will not be appearing anywhere in comments. But I figured it merited a post :P —- blah blah details of IP addresses (nothing attached to them), etc Comment: Hey There Sciblogs, Very interesting, […]
Open Culture: The (internet) keys to the city, and beyond
I wrote this post for the Retake the Net site, where it first appeared. See the RtN website for more details about our work/projects, and how you can get involved! —- It’s a brand new year, and now that everyone’s back and refreshed, it’s time once again to work on the Open Culture project. Late […]
TOSP Episode 18: January 23rd 2012
[Original post on the Sciblogs The Official Sciblogs Podcast site] Hello and welcome, once again, to another episode of TOSP. This week was anniversary weekend in Wellington, so Elf and aimee recorded the ‘cast on Monday instead of Sunday. Because it was, well, a long weekend :) And what an interesting ‘cast we think it […]
A very deep-sea chandelier
I am in lust for this chandelier. Don’t get me wrong - I am often in lust for chandeliers. I am not, as it turns out, without my quirks. But this one if particularly gorgeous. This piece - Skyphos 1 - was designed by Kateřina Smolíková. It’s a low-energy glass-and-LED design. And the reason it looks […]
Citizen Science - Globe at Night
Ah, citizen science. How we love you so :) For those not familiar with the concept, citizen science is what we call distributed science projects in which members of the public contribute to the science being done: they help collect the data, for example, or analyse it. Examples include Galaxy Zoo, as well as a […]