Archive for November, 2007
Philosophia Naturalis #15
Welcome to the 15th mostly-monthly installment of the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival — home of the best blog posts in the natural sciences that you’ll find! There’s all sorts of good reading material for you to choose from, so let’s get right to business…
Philosophia Naturalis — a slight delay
For those waiting for the next installment of the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival, I’ve got to announce a slight delay — rather than today, I’ll be posting it tomorrow. Due to some work commitments pouring over into my home time, I haven’t quite had the free time I’ve needed to do the job well.
I’d rather be a bit late than produce a shoddy product; thanks for your patience…
Carnivalia
Here’s this week’s crop of blog carnival goodness (a bit skinnier than usual, folks must still be sleeping off their Thanksgiving dinners)…
Googlediving, hybrid vehicles, and energy consumption
A recent thread of discussion (namely, some comments on the hybrid cars podcast episode) brings me to remind you of the wisdom of cross-checking ostensibly “scientific” things you hear in conversation, or see mentioned in print or online somewhere. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy these days to check things using the internet. When I run across something that seems to be questionable, I’ve gotten into the habit of doing a quick bit of checking things out with Google. I call this “googlediving” — it’s essentially the information equivalent of dumpster diving but doesn’t leave you all smelly when you’re done. Best of all, it usually takes just a few minutes to run a quick check.
Let’s look at the recent discussion as a good example….
Chaco Canyon
One of the advantages of rearranging your house is that sometimes you’ll find a long-lost treasure in the process. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been going through a big in-house reshuffle to make better use of space, and I stumbled across some old slides I took on a visit to Chaco Canyon decades back.
Sadly, [...]
