December 2010
53 posts
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Blackawton bees: commentary on Blackawton, P. S.... →
Published along with the children’s bee paper to put it in context.
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Blackawton bees — Biology Letters →
Full text of the children’s bee paper. The bulk of the article is written by the children themselves and is refreshingly readable.
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Eight-year-old children publish bee study in Royal... →
A very nice piece of research conducted by 8-to-10 year olds and published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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Hyperbole and a Half: Dogs Don't Understand Basic... →
Impossibly funny piece of writing.
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Hyperbole and a Half: The Year Kenny Loggins... →
Small child reinvents nativity play to make it more exciting. Brilliantly funny. :-)
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Travels in a Mathematical World: Math/Maths in... →
Fascinating post about an attempt to track usage of the words math and maths by using the Google tool, and detailing the various ways the search was misled (e.g. by books about Welsh culture: math is is a Welsh noun meaning “sort” or “kind”).
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Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars -... →
Article drawing attention to worrying levels of inaccuracy in the classification and bibliographical details of books. For example numerous books supposedly published before their authors were born, and hundreds of pre-1950 references to the Internet.
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Snow under a microscope - halfblog →
Fascinating images of snowflakes. Some have a startlingly industrial appearance to them.
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International Space Station comes together →
Interesting how this animation gives a sense of the size of the thing and the size of the achievement.
bytesushi:
Right now, over me.
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Twitpanto 2010 →
A pantomime performed on Twitter. This site lets you replay the tweets as they happened: tweets from the cast appear on stage; heckles and other audience participation appear in a separate stream below.
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Kettle tactics risk Hillsborough-style tragedy –... →
Protesters “kettled” by police on Westminster Bridge had to be treated for symptoms of severe crushing and for head injuries. A doctor who was there warns that use of the tactic could lead to actual deaths similar to those at Hillsborough in the 1980s when football fans were crushed to death.
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“It isn’t that I’m not a people person, I’m just not a stupid...”
– via Marie’s Sweet Surrender (it was an image of the words, but I’ve changed it to text because I have a thing about letting text be text. Among other things, it can be searched for, copied, quoted … )
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Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: You pay your... →
Short blog post with video:
Why have so many people become resistant to the idea of paying for music, even as they unthinkingly drop bundles of money on overpriced coffee drinks? This grimly funny little video, perpetrated by the Kansas City vocal ensemble Octarium, doesn’t supply an answer, but it certainly captures the daily frustration of those who work in the non-profit arts.
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Ministers accused of 'burying' damning report on... →
This reminds me of when the Thatcher goverment ignored warnings that their policies would create youth homelessness in the 1980s, and within a fortnight of said policies being implemented, I started regularly seeing young people begging in central Manchester. Before that, the only homeless people I came across appeared to be middle-aged alcoholics.
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Life built with toxic chemical: First known... →
ScienceDaily news article. Normally phosphorus is essential for life to grow. These microbes were able to continue growing when deprived of phosphorus, by replacing it with arsenic in their chemistry.
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Electronic cigarettes are unsafe and pose health... →
More accurately, it’s unclear whether they’re safe or not, and there are reasons to think they might not be. From ScienceDaily.
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