Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Sunday, March 2, 2003

Why to blog, or not to blog -- Comment()
Yesterday I answered a questionnaire on weblogs, sent by a student doing a master's thesis on journalism. The questionnaire was rather well thought out, not too long and mostly relevant. One of the questions was "Why do you keep a weblog?" A tough question to answer. The weblogging advice by Mike Sanders gives five different reasons, of which "pleasure of meaning" and "pleasure of creating" are closest to my thinking. However, I didn't give this answer, but instead wrote "Finding new thoughts and connections". Perhaps that was also a good enough answer. In any case, I haven't yet found any sufficiently good reasons to stop blogging.

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Scientists Get First Close Look At Stardust: "For the first time, scientists have identified and analyzed single grains of silicate stardust in the laboratory. This breakthrough, to be reported in the Feb. 27 issue of Science Express, provides a new way to study the history of the universe." [Google Technology News]

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Tara Sue: "Once you realize you're just a human nutcase, life is golden." [Scripting News]

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Logical Fallacies and The Rush To War: "Dave Koehler of PhillyBurbs.com has written an outstanding summary of the logical fallacies used by the Bush administration to try to convince the world at large of the necessity of invading Iraq in the absence of any sort of compelling evidence. If you think Bush is full of it, but couldn't put your finger on how, exactly, read the article. If you think Bush is making a good case for invading Iraq, read the article anyway." [kuro5hin.org]

Where is the originality in weblogs? -- Comment()
Michael Koch writes: "My main criticism of weblogs at the moment is that there are so few webloggers who actually have to say something. I want to read weblogs from people talking about the fields in which they are working. I want to listen to insiders, who are able to communicate their knowledge intelligibly and who, due to their extensive knowledge, can evaluate the current situation differently than the average layman." [Monoklon > The Aardvark Speaks]

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Mophos Moblog: "There's a new rectangle above called mophos (short for mobile photos). I put it together because I have a new cellphone that has a camera. The phone can send a photo as an email attachment - so I coded an email-to-moblog gateway. The gateway script works with my mail server and strips any attachments, creates thumbnails of any photos, and adds them to the moblog. It's fun to be able to add a photo to the site from anywhere with about 5 cellphone clicks. As you can see, the camera isn't the highest quality, but I'm hoping I can learn how to take decent pictures with it." [onfocus.com]

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50th anniversary of the double helix: "February 28th is the 50th anniversary of the DNA double helix (not the actual publication, but the day Crick and Watson rushed to the pub to break the news). [...] you will find the DNA 50 special feature, which includes a fine DNA cocktail recipe." [nodalpoint.org - A bioinformatics weblog]

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Nodalpoint.org writes: 'The Genome KnowledgeBase is a database of cellular level processes from "simple" events, such as biochemical reactions, to "complex" events, such as the cell cycle. GK provides process-level annotation of the structure and function of the Human Genome, with dynamic links to other databases relevant to the human system, and to the relevant literature. Our ontology ensures that the various events are linked in an appropriate spatial and temporal context.'

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Ink-jet printing creates tubes of living tissue: "Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs." [New Scientist Article, via BoingBoing > nodalpoint.org - A bioinformatics weblog]

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Nodalpoint.org writes: 'When Watts and Strogatz published a paper on their small-world theories in Nature in 1998, it "touched off a storm of further work across many fields of science" [...] Read the full article, good introduction to network theory.'

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Nodalpoint.org points to an introduction to personal knowledge management: "Perhaps more than anyone else, the contemporary researcher is suffering from information overload. More than a million scientific papers are published yearly, and the output rate doubles every 15 years. By the nature of their work, researchers must closely follow developments in his area and hopefully keep an eye on closely related fields. As a result, there is an increasing demand for reliable cues in selecting material."