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Becoming a Science Hedgehog

Posted on 26th May 2010 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera

In his book The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, Stephen J. Gould talks about scientists falling into two categories, foxes and hedgehogs. I wrote the following summarizing Gould’s metaphor:

There are two kinds of inquisitive minds, Hedgehogs and Foxes. In nature, Foxes rely on a wide range of crafty strategies to avoid prey. Hedgehogs rely on one tried and true defense, rolling up into a ball and baring their quills. Intellectually, Foxes dart from topic to topic, surveying a wide range of ideas across a broad spectrum of research fields. Bill Nye, Science Guy and other science popularizers are good examples of the fox scientist. Hedgehogs hunker down into one topic and research thoroughly. Your typical graduate student working on their thesis is a hedgehog.

For its first four years, I used this blog as a sounding board for articulating what I thought about politics, philosophy, and science. For the last three years, ideonexus has been a fox science blog, darting from subject to subject in the realm of empirical observations and journaling what I learned in all of them. For awhile now, my intellectual interests have been gravitating to computer science, as have my non-link blog posts. When I come home, I want to write programming code and read essays and articles about information technology. So the daily links have become a distraction, a minor one, but one that takes a little time from my being a hedgehog computer scientist.

In finding the stories that most interest me, I had to give up on RSS readers because there was too much noise in the way they homogenize data, so I visited lots of my favorite news sites daily. Here are the links to my favorite and useful science web sites. I’ll keep visiting them for relaxation, and I hope you’ll support them too:

The Best Science Blogs

Chet Raymo
Rationally Speaking
Schrodinger’s Kitten
The Technium

Good Science News (with a Caveat)

The caveat is that some of these sites publish press releases uncritically, have a strong philosophical or political bias, or demand a subscription to read their articles (look for the NYTimes to make this list next year).

EurekAlert!
Futurity
h+
Mother Jones Environment
New Scientist
PhysOrg
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Science Daily
Slashdot Science
Space.com

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Science Science for Venusday, 20100423

Posted on 23rd April 2010 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera

Check out the incredible new photos of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) Image of the Sun
Credit: NASA

Thorough article in the NYT about the complexities of exercise and weight loss, which delves into levels of appetite-inducing hormones after heavy aerobic exercise and how standing at your desk instead of sitting can result in burning hundreds of more calories a day; however, as reading the comments shows, the situation is even more complex.

The Southern United States disproportionately uses more energy than the rest of the country due to inefficiencies and over-consumption; however, adopting greener technologies would reduce utilities bills by $41 billion a year, generate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and allow retiring older power plants by 2020.

SetiQuest.org is a new site that will make the data collected by the SETI project available to Information Scientists who can then mine it for evidence of signals from other worlds.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA)

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Science Things for Jupiterday, 20100422

Posted on 22nd April 2010 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera

With the warming season upon us, Chet Raymo has used a photo of the sun’s surface to put things in perspective for us concerning our favorite star’s energy output and the season.

Earth in Sun Surface Shot
Credit: Chet Raymo and NASA

In 1773, Anna Barbauld, an assistant to the chemist Joseph Priestley, penned the poem The Mouse’s Petition on behalf of one of his lab mice, becoming the first animal rights manifesto ever written.

Is Global Warming real? Ask the companies profiting or going out of business because of it.

Rising Currents is an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that envisions architectural projects to deal with rising sea levels.

Close Up Video of Sun’s Surface:

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Science Woompas for Mercuryday, 20100421

Posted on 21st April 2010 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera

Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice finds that body lice first appeared 190,000 years ago, suggesting humans started wearing clothes just before this time.

Louse
Credit: Janice Harney Carr, Center for Disease Control

Slide show of Polar Bears climbing cliffs to get at murre chicks and eggs.

Study finds that one-third of college students who use indoor tanning facilities have an addiction to the habit similar to alcohol or tobacco addiction.

While human brains do decline and we have “senior moments” as we get older, we also grow more intelligent in other areas, such as emotionally, in inductive reasoning, and making financial decisions.

What Does Head Lice Look Like?

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