New science blog in the mainstream media

While attending the 2008 Science Blogging conference in North Carolina, I met an energetic and charming medical journalist named Helen Chickering. She will be writing a brand new science blog for MS NBC news. Look for it under the name Six-pack Science. Tune in for the latest in practical science.

NC Museum of Life Sciences

Roy Campbell, the Director of Exhibits, took a group of science bloggers behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. and up front among the exhibits. This right whale is one of several whale skeletons mounted at the museum, suspended over another hall. The museum has a friendly and accessible air and gives off a sense of wonder.

Spreading the science around

In the Open Science session of the Science Blogging Conference, Bill Hooker pointed out that not everything needs to be online. In some countries, such as Thailand, people don't have Internet access but they do have DVD players. New contents of PLOS one could be burned onto DVDs and sent by mail.

Signing in

I'm signing in from the Science Blogging conference in North Carolina. One of the topics is providing open access to science via the Internet to the developing world.

Which blogging software?

Among the free blogging sites, I recommend WordPress over Blogger.

Blogger gives you very simple capabilities: blog, post, tag, and archive posts and enable and manage comments. If you want something more complicated, you must go into your template and edit the code. There are no categories, so things tend to get chaotic. And if you customize your blog or change templates, all your improvements disappear.

Wordpress has more features that are useful for a larger blog. You don't have to use them until you need them but they are there. You can not only set tags but specify categories. You can set up a rotating blogroll instead of hand-coding it. There are simply a lot more options, which give you more flexibility.

Here's my test blog, created during a few minutes of the Blogging Skills session at the Science Blogging Conference.

Science Blogging Conference

After three years, I'm learning how to do it right!

Science Blogs have been such a success for Seed Magazine and others that they are changing the "news landscape" of the Web. Science bloggers are helping others to get started. For the next two days, I'm at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Sigma Xi facility in Research Triangle Park to learn new skills, topics, and approaches.

Driving to the science-blogging conference

I made it! After a late start and a long drive, LotStreetWiz and I arrived at Research Triangle Park at 02:45 this morning.

Saturday is a blogging skills session and a lab tour: for me, behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

How important is staff training?

You know that's a trick question, right? The answer is consistent: training of staff in the workplace is vital.


A year ago today, the inflatable roof at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver collapsed under the weight of slush and meltwater. A report concludes that BC Place Stadium collapse could have been avoided if staff were properly trained.

existing damage to the roof fabric, human error and weather caused the tear in the roof panel. [The report] also found staff did not properly monitor the "cascading effect of water slush," and did not realize what was happening until it was too late. Even then, the report found, the operators were not trained in dealing with ponded water on the roof and did not know how to deal with it.

Meme tag rag

I've been tagged by the Tangled Up in Blue Guy, Mike Haubrich, to tell seven weird or random things about me. So here goes:

1. I'm the wrong person for marketing focus groups. If I like something, it will be taken off the market because not enough people like it.
   
2. I have registered more than 5,000 books at BookCrossing.com to give them unique ID numbers. Of those books, about 1,000 are "in the wild."
   
3. I've seen bald eagles, three or four species of hummingbirds, clapper rails, a sora, scarlet tanagers, and black skimmers.
   
4. I didn't learn about J.S. Bach until I was 21. That's a deprived childhood!
   
5. I daydream about reduction mammoplasty. (You try tying a pair of running shoes around your neck and leaving them there for the rest of your life.)
   
6. Ironically for a technical writer, I'm quite paperwork-challenged.
   
7. It's a random and small world: I've met Stephen Jay Gould, Jane Goodall, Pierre Berton, and Sir Harold Kroto; and at my last contract I worked with a man who had worked for Tuzo Wilson.
   
8. In 1991, I travelled to Costa Rica to see a solar eclipse.

Canadians boil over on new copyright laws

The Conservatives' proposed new copyright laws have provoked a strong negative reaction from concerned Canadians.

Critics have said the proposed legislation will mirror the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and take a hard line against the copying of digital materials, making illegal acts such as the television time shifting enabled by digital video recorders, file-sharing of music and video files, and copying files to DVDs or MP3 players.

Michael Geist, the Canada research chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, has led the charge against the bill and has accused Prentice of caving in to lobbying from U.S. entertainment companies, who are seeking to curtail digital copying in all its forms. He has also accused the minister of ignoring the wishes of regular Canadians and for not including the public in his consultations.

Sign blindness

A friend sent this picture of a sign caught in Wyoming. As he wrote, the sad part was thinking about all the care that went into making the sign just right:


This is an example of that corollary of Murphy's Law which states that the larger the headline, the less likely you are to find the typographical error in it before it goes to press.

Golden Compass preview

This is a link to the first five minutes of The Golden Compass movie and other video clips from the movie.

Jack Chick tracts corrected

Jack Chick tracts corrected! And I must say it makes them more true to life.

Alliance for Science essay contest

The 2007 Alliance for Science essay contest for secondary school students is on. With cash prizes. The deadline for entries is the last day of February, 2008. Follow the link for the rules.

Science Creative Quarterly: The Truth

UBC's Science Creative Quarterly has an article called, "The Truth." It's a bit of a Web experiment: Do you agree or don't you?

Web sites for teens

Wired has an article about what teens like in a Web site: large type, more images, and interactivity. They like to lean back in their chairs and view the screen from a distance. They want text leavened with images. And they want to be doing something and not just reading. For details, read "Wired: What Web sites do to turn on teens."


Wired based their article on a study done by the Neilsen Norman Group.

"Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms" by Thomas L. Hankins

One of the beta readers on Edward Tufte's discussion group recommended this article: "Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms: A Particular History of Graphs" by Thomas L. Hankins. Here is one of its illustrations:


Charles Joseph Minard's carte figurative of traffic on the major railroad lines of Europe. (From Marc Desportes and Antoine Picon, De l'espace au territoire: L'am��nagement en France XVIeXXe si��cles [Paris: Presses de l'��cole Nationale des Ponts et Chauss��es, 1997], page 87.) Collection ��cole Nationale des Ponts et Chauss��es.

Why do people laugh at creationists? 2

You'd think that staying awake in high school general science class would cure this.

"Water is only found on Earth." I think the narrator is pushing towards, "We're special and that proves that God loves us; therefore he must exist." In fact...

Composition of the universe: 92 percent hydrogen less than 8 percent helium more than 1 percent oxygen

...water is the commonest molecule in the universe after hydrogen gas.

Why do people laugh at creationists? 1

Why do people laugh at creationists? See for yourself.


Such ignorance can be attained only by determined striving.

Graphics Library resources online

See the Visual Library and its collection of links.