Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Top Ten Science Stories of 2010

The first thing you need to know about my list of the top ten science stories of the year is this: There are not ten. Well, as I write this, I’ve not settled what’s on the list and what’s not, so maybe there will be ten. Or six. Or one hundred and eleven. In any event, it will likely only be ten if you express the number in Basen where n is the number of stories.

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Retro: Best of the Blog: Concepts

Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of …

The Falsehoods and The Falsehoods II

Retro: Best of the Blog, Stories

Obamadog. Barack Obama’s first serious mistake since the election.

Many of you heard the question at President Elect Obama’s first news conference, which was mainly about the economy, regarding what kind of dog the girls would be getting as per a deal apparently made some time ago. The only safe answer to that question would have been to give the secret signal that cuts the power feed to the cameras, then have the reporter bagged and dragged out of the room and appropriately disciplined. But no, instead, Obama …

Read the rest here.

Retro: Best of the Blog, Education

It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the “evolution” unit that they teach during life science class.

As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that time, the teacher may be verbally abused by some of the parents for not including “alternative theories” in the classroom.

There IS a conspiracy … Teachers under fire!

More Retro: MTV Ruined Everything for Everybody

Half of my regular readers (well, at least four, maybe five) tell me, under duress, that they truly enjoy my more long-winded posts, but the vast majority of random visits clearly come to the quick and dirty posts, the videos that I slapped up with no forethought, the items that take less than five seconds to read though often there is a video, and the occasional kitty kat. MTV-generation pandering. Later I’ll retrospect some of those long winded tomes, but for now, here’s a set of pointers to some of the more visited posts not covered in my previous retrospective:

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Retrospective: Why do people read my blog?

It is end of the year retrospective time. This is the time of year those of us who do stuff others read or watch all year run out of good stuff to do and dredge up old stuff to keep the few of you who are not flying to Mexico or baking cookies busy while we get drunk. This is the first in a seemingly interminable set of such retrospectives that I plan to do this year.

I’ll start my retrospective with a prelude:
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Good Podcasts

This post is a followup on Podcasts good and bad, to which some of you responded with excellent suggestions for podcasts.

I want to say that the criticisms I leveled in the previous post apply mainly to video podcasts in technolology that I’ve seen via the Roku on TWiT TV and other places, and really, on only a few of those. The following list is compiled from your comments but including only science and skepticism podcasts. I’ve added a few that you’all didn’t happen to mention.

Please suggest what is missing and I’ll add that in a future update.

Podcasts good and bad

Do you have a favorite podcast? A podcast that you tried and hated? An idea for a podcast that should exist but doesn’t? And, do you know of a rating system for podcasts (and should there be one)? As a thought experiment, I propose a Podcast Quality index, or set of indexes. To start, let me propose a set of criteria to evaluate the negatives of a multi-person podcast involving a primary host and a number of co-hosts or guests.

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There are two species of African elephant

i-4df9f1c3f1b7fb5409a6d1704a0b7ef4-Elephant_SA_Laden_DSC_3664.jpgEveryone knows that there are two kinds of elephants in this world: Asian and African. The Asian is the only one that can be trained and the African ones live in harmony with their environment until hunters come by and shoot them. Scratch a little deeper, and the African bush elephant lives by destroying its environment and moving on to new areas, where it destroys that environment, cycling back to the original region over generational time; Both African and Asian elephants can be trained; and there are three, not two species of elephant in this world: Asian, African Bush, and African Forest. Once again, everything you know is wrong. But you knew that.
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