Swans on Tea

A couple days back, Chris Anderson at Wired posted some junk about large volumes of data making the scientific method obsolete, misapplying George Box’s quote, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” I was a little too distracted to respond, but it didn’t exactly escape the notice of the science and skeptic blog-o-icosahedron.
Bee [...]

A side comment by Matt about quizzes triggered a thought (so many of these interactions are induced rather than spontaneous)
I have all my old lecture notes and materials so the only real thing I have to do is make up new quizzes. Students are good at nothing if not gaming the system and they’d notice [...]

I’ve read on a couple of blogs about The Amaz!ng Meeting 6, (TAM6), with some promises of summaries. A couple have been posted. (I’m still waiting on reports from some of you. Listen, I’m not joking. This is my job!)
The Bad Astronomer thinks it was the Best. Meeting. Ever.
Neurologica posts [...]

So, Blake wrote a post on What Science Blogs Can’t Do
Deedle dee dee-dee
Brian at Lealaps weighed in
If you know absolutely nothing about evolutionary biology, physics, ecology, or any other discipline you care to name you are not going to find the equivalent of a college course here on the science blogosphere. That doesn’t mean that [...]

Don’t you see the joker laughs at you?
Over at Physics and Physicists, a followup to an earlier post, to which I had added my two cents.
In an earlier post, I responded to a writer who called professional scientists the “most scientifically illiterate group in the US” and pointed out several fallacies of that statement. The [...]

Sometime you have to let art flow over you. But apparently, this is not one of those times. How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest
Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is [...]

I knew that I would.
[T]he placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.
[...]
Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls [...]

The Nerd Handbook
OK, it’s a little bit slanted toward the computer nerd, but many things apply to general geekage.
Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a [...]

There’s an article in Seed entitled “So” and subtitled “The anatomy of a scientific staple” which purports to discuss the use of the word as a preface to scientific pronouncements in the classroom and, I presume, in conference talks as well. I thought perhaps the author was overanalyzing things, but there is this observation:
In [...]