The saddest song I know is one Lucinda Williams wrote about her brother: See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world: The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips, A sweet and tender kiss. The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone’s ring, Someone calling your name. Somebody…
Monthly Archives: January 2011
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The Journal of Universal Rejection: Submit with certainty
by David Dobbs •
I can think of several reasons NOT to do this post. I’m traveling. I’m trying to mix business and pleasure, family (loud) and work (quiet). I have no time, and, 7 time zones from home, no idea what time it is anyway. I have more important things to blog about. I can smell that the…
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Hey You Men Who Yell “Nice Tits”: STFU
by David Dobbs •
ScienceOnline, more than most conferences, seems to add immense energy and new perspectives to discussions long percolated. Often this rises in an unexpected way, and often from the blog posts re-examining the conference and its sessions. Behold: In the past couple days, two blog posts have energized the often dead-tired but ever-relevant issue of sexism…
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When Your Brains Disagree, You Get Illusions
by David Dobbs •
Your brain, in some ways, is really several brains trying to agree on one account of the world. Sometimes those many brains don’t agree, and they produce confusion — or an illusion. At her wonderful Biophemera, Jessica Palmer uses a review of new book by Roberg Kurzban, to look at how this works. Psychologist Robert Kurzban’s…
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Guest Post: The Dilemma of Women in Science & Blogging: Even when we want something, we need to hide it
by David Dobbs •
I went to some stirring sessions at the incomprable ScienceOnline last week, but I also missed some great ones. One in particular I regret missing (it ran while I was on an eBooks panel) was “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name.” That title sold it short, it seems to me, for as…
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Guardian podcast captures the richness of ScienceOnline & science blogging
by David Dobbs •
I just finished listening to Alok Jha’s podcast at Guardian about ScienceOnline. What a pleasure! Jha gracefully captures what drives science (and all) blogging, and what it offers readers — and writers — that they can’t get elsewhere. Jha and his producers also convey beautifully the spirit and intersection of interests that makes ScienceOnline so…
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Mapping the Twittersphere on New Year’s Eve
by David Dobbs •
Over at Atlantic Tech, Nicholas Jackson brings us a map of Twitter activity on New Year’s Eve: Four seconds after midnight in Japan on January 1, 2011, a new world record was set: 6,939 tweets were sent out in one second, Twitter announced on the company’s official blog. This map of Twitter activity on New Year’s…
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Aglitter in the Net: Golden Age of Serial Murder, Flatworms, etc.
by David Dobbs •
Stuff I won’t get to at length: Ian Leslie considers the decline of serial killing: Christopher Beam, who also wrote the piece I linked to about cash and crime, investigates. My favourite quote: “It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past,” says Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College of the City…
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
The love-hate hormone, ingroup/outgroup wars, and the power of culture
by David Dobbs •
Ed Yong, who among other things is an oxytocin-news watchdog of late, highlights yet another study showing that oxytocin, sometimes typecast as the “
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Open Science, eBooks, and the Bullshit Filter: My Panels at ScienceOnline
by David Dobbs •
I’ll be on three panels at ScienceOnline this weekend — one on ebooks, one on open science, and one on “Keeping the Bullshit Filter” (i.e., watchdogging science and science journalism). The ScienceOnline program describes all these (go there and search for the title). For those attending, considering following the streamed sessions, or curious about the…
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