Between scrambling to finish some big projects and avoiding summer brain-fry, I haven’t been doing much science blogging recently. And now I’ll be taking a few days away from blogging altogether. It’s not a blackout at the Loom, though; just a brown-out. I’m going to schedule some old posts I’m fond of, as well as a backlog of science tattoos. Later this month I’ll be rested, refreshed, and ready to blog anew.
Originally published July 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
A quick update to my post from yesterday about Scienceblogs. The dreaded Pepsi blog is gone. Details from PZ Myers and Paul Raeburn.
Originally published July 8, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
It sounds cool to say maybe the Internet has turned us all into one giant superorganism, as Robert Wright does today in the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. But before we bandy about cool-sounding words, it’s necessary to think hard about what they mean–particularly, what they mean to the biologists who first developed them as concepts.
Continue reading “Facebook Is Not A Brain, And Other Failed Metaphors”
[Updated! See bottom of post.]
As I continue to bake today, yearning for just a few minutes in Senator Inhofe’s igloo , I’ve been keeping tabs on a saddening train wreck over at my old haunt, Scienceblogs. Before I brought the Loom to Discover, I blogged at Scienceblogs, which was hosted by the folks behind the now-defunct (?) Seed Magazine. There was a lot I enjoyed about that time, and I still keep tabs on a number of excellent bloggers still at Scienceblogs. Except that, as of today, a lot of them are no longer there.
In April, I noted with sadness the passing of the artist (and friend) John Schoenherr. (His New York Times obituary appeared a few days later.) His son, the artist Ian Schoenherr, has been sifting through his mountain of paintings and other effects, and yesterday he launched a blog to publish interesting things as he comes across them.
It’s a wonderful way to celebrate a wonderful life full of bears, geese, astronauts, and, of course, giant alien sandworms. So check it out!
Originally published July 6, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.