Author Archives: admin

Audience participation: help me flag good posts for non-scientists trying to understand science.

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A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following:

Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are archived? An example of what I think might be a good article to include would be your post on Marcus Ross.
Part of why I like reading your blog is because you analyze these fundamental issues in science, and I believe that this will help any laymen who stumble upon your blog for the first time quite a bit. It certainly helped me! I had to trawl through tons of posts to get to posts related to these fundamental issues though (not that the other posts are not interesting!).

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Thoughts on the passing of Leona Helmsley.

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Perhaps you’ve heard the news that Leona Helmsley died yesterday. Her obituaries have noted the the “Queen of Mean” came to be viewed as the embodiment of the greed of the 1980s (at least as it played out in the world of Manhattan real estate).
The public didn’t like her much.
I have no real basis for making a judgment about whether she was a nice person deep down, whether she became a nicer person after doing jail time for tax evasion, or whether she was kind to animals. But I would like to have a look at something she was widely reported to have said (but denied saying):
“Only the little people pay taxes.”

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Piecing together what happened in New York last weekend.

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Actually, my memories of the semi-spontaneous confluence of ScienceBlogs sciblings in the vicinity of the Seed mothership this past weekend are quite vivid, and I’ll put up a proper post on that later today.
But in the event that I hadn’t remembered things so clearly, and had to piece it all together from what came home on my digital camera, my reflections on the last few day might be distorted.

I might end up with something like this:

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Friday Sprog Blogging: thoughts while hiking.

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Last Friday, instead of composing a sprog blog, the sprogs and I were offline and in nature (specifically, Yosemite, pictured above). This is not to say we weren’t talking about matters scientific, but we didn’t have an internet connection with which to check any assertions or hunches.
Some highlights:

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