Net
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April First (and Second)
We take so much of the web for granted today, we often forget how very contingent it all is. Without the very specific work by Tim Berners-Lee inventing the http protocol, perhaps some sort of hypertext communication standard would have come along, but it’s hard to believe that it would be quite the same. Berners-Lee…
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Nature Network London, still-Outstanding Questions, and new Satellites
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom…
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All the news that’s fit to print?
Steinn Sigurðsson points out that the New York Times‘ ridiculous pay-only access to its op-ed content is now free to University students and faculty. Despite claims by Brits to the contrary (and despite a series of newsgathering mishaps over the last few years), the NY Times remains the newspaper of record even outside of the…
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Carnival
My post on the topology of the Universe has been included in the latest edition of the physical science and technology “blog carnival”, Philosophia Naturalis, hosted on Chris Rowan’s excellent blog, Highly Allochthonous. If you liked what I wrote, there’s lots more physics, math and geology excitement for you over there.
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Five things
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OK, I’ve been tagged with the latest blogosphere “meme”: Barry wants me to list “Five Things you don’t know about me”. I thought I was an open book, but here are some of my not-too-deep-and-dark secrets (I suppose you’ve already read enough about my thoughts on cosmology and statistics for now): When I was in…
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Hijacked for Spam
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Apologies if you have one of the, um, tens of thousands (or more?) of email addresses that have been spammed by some damned robot pretending to be me (in the guise of coming from the address on the upper right of this page). Not much I can do about it except hope that I’m not…
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Foo
So apparently this weekend Google, Nature, and O’Reilly Media are hosting a ‘Science Foo Camp‘ at Google’s Silicon Valley HQ. O’Reilly has held a few tech-oriented Foo Camps over the last few years, and apparently the list of invitees has always provoked some debate — if you’re not invited, you’re either not important enough, or…
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Peer review
Scientists complain a lot about peer review. It’s a safe bet that most of us think that our papers are generally not improved in the process, but in the usual self-congratlulatory way, most of us probably think that we’re in the minority of good referees who actually make useful suggestions, or catch egregious errors. We…
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Also…
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Wine: California beats the French (again). Meanwhile, wine seems to be taking over the net, with podcasts and a a spate of sites for reviewing, ranking and cataloguing your wine, some with all sorts of new Web 2.0 goodies. (More commentary when and if I get to around to actually using them.) Song: go read…
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Bruce Sterling
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I went to a discussion by author Bruce Sterling last night, sponsored by the weird alliance of independent tech newsletter NTK and political rag The New Statesman (more precisely, their New Media Awards), with some sort of underwriting from organic chocolatiers Green & Black’s (now rather distressingly owned by Cadbury-Schweppes), supplying lovely samples of Maya…
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