Science Etcetera | ideonexus.com

2011 Science Yearbook

Posted on 31st December 2011 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera,science holidays

I used to provide a daily list of links on this blog of science stories I found interesting. I gave that up and took down the link-posts to focus on my personal writing, but I still share links through social media. Here’s my favorite science stories of 2011.

Space

So Long Space Shuttle
Credit: Trey Ratcliff

NASA finalized the retirement of the Space Shuttle program with the announcement of their final resting places, with Washington DC, Los Angeles and Orlando getting real shuttles for their museums and New York getting the wooden training vessel (Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!). NASA also unveiled the Space Launch System (SLS) next generation of manned space explorations vehicles that will (hopefully) be taking us to Mars. Along the same goal, the Mars500 completed its 17 month simulated mission, complete with isolation and delayed communications as a partial proof of concept that humans can survive the trip to the red planet.

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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 Etcetera Marsday, 20080129

Posted on 29th January 2008 by ideonexus in Science Etcetera - Tags: science

Universescale

The above snapshot from a flash demonstration called Universescale.

Although star HE 0437-5439 is flying away from the Milky Way, actually originated from our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

A natural Asteroid recently flew past Earth, but a bus-sized satellite is expected to hit.

Thanks to Bush issuing an exemption, this week the Navy will begin sonar training harmful to whales, and makes them bleed internally around their brains and ears. If there was a hell, Bush would have a seat next to Judas himself.

I”m interested in the idea of predictions markets, so a site that Has Users Wager on News Stories intrigues me. Here’ a prediction for yah: Only 356 days left in office.

UK Scientists are taking on the Catholic Church for making the ridiculous claim that legislation on embryo research will allow for the creation of “half human-half animal embryos.”

Potassium Chlorate meet Gummy Bear (HT BMF):