'Odds and ends' Category
Carnivalia — 6/11 – 6/17
The past week’s selection of (mostly) science-related blog carnivals…
Things I’d blog about if I only had the time…
Life’s been crazy busy for me the past few weeks (thus, no podcast episode for a while), and it won’t get better for a few more days, but I thought at least I could pass along some interesting links I’ve run across. Yeah, it’s a cop out, but I guess it’s better than nothing….
The Beagle, Redux
Since the last two SOS podcast episodes have been all about Charles Darwin, and the historical context surrounding him, this seems like a good time to remind everybody about the Beagle Project…
The Future of Ideas — it’s free, presently!
If you’ve never read Lawrence Lessig’s great book “The Future of Ideas,” you now have a cheap way to do it — as a free download!…
National Academies Press — for free
Free books — it’s a tough deal to beat, especially when they’re good. The National Academies Press (i.e., the press for the National Academies — of Science, of Engineering, etc.) has over 3700 books available for free online reading. But what spurred this post is the recent update & re-release of Science, Evolution, and Creationism — a quick read at 88 pages, and now free for download in PDF form…
Photo gallery
If you haven’t perused the SOS site lately, I wanted to let you know about the new photo gallery I set up. Basically, I finally got around to setting up a flickr account, and uploaded a ton of pictures I’ve taken that have a (vaguely) scientific or technical bent to them. A handy Wordpress plugin called (logically enough) “Flickr photo gallery” displays all these pictures on a page on the SOS site — you can get to it from that link, or just through the “Photos” link in the sidebar.
Bloody Vikings!
The background of my father’s side of the family has always been a bit of a mystery. We know that some generations back, his ancestors came across the pond from somewhere in the British isles, and that the family name seems to have a fair amount of history behind it. But various sources have given us a variety of stories for the ultimate source of the name. So when I heard about the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, I really perked up…
SOS, graphed
There are a lot of interesting utilities to be found out on the web.Some of them are even useful.Just for fun, I thought I’d show you one of them that I ran against this site’s home page — the utility generates a graph, showing the structure of whatever page you give it.
How logical are you?
You Are Incredibly Logical
Move over Spock – you’re the new master of logic
You think rationally, clearly, and quickly.
A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!How Logical Are You?
OK — give it a shot, and let everybody know how you did!About this site’s layout — tips for readers
One of the handy things about publishing a blog using Wordpress is that the software makes it very easy to change the look of the site with just a few clicks of my mouse. By using “themes” that web developers freely publish, I can pick a pre-made set of artistic choices (generally more tasteful / visually appealing than what I could come up with on my own) in a shot — and with a bit of tweaking, I can easily customize a given theme to “fit” this site. What you may not have noticed, though, is that I’ve set this site up with a number of themes that YOU can choose from…
