Epstein’s science posse
I have been following the story of the late Jeffrey Epstein very closely. The combination of politics and money for this billionaire alleged child sex traffi...
I have been following the story of the late Jeffrey Epstein very closely. The combination of politics and money for this billionaire alleged child sex traffi...
This is going around from people who think it’s hipster and cool and ought to know better: “Africa by Toto to play ‘for all eternity’ in Namib desert - video...
This is a fascinating story of the age of massive databases and loss of human privacy: “How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a dig...
The Botanist in the Kitchen takes a look at the phylogenetic relationships among some of the major plant foods in Western diets: “The Food Plant Tree of Life...
Google today (November 24) is running a Google Doodle commemorating the 41st anniversary of the discovery of the famous “Lucy” skeleton of Australopithecus a...
California Sunday Magazine has a feature profiling farmers losing their water to nut growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley: “Dry”. It’s a story of wells...
Human hunter-gatherers, despite living in small groups of 20-50 individuals, make social contacts with up to a thousand other individuals in across their lif...
Today’s public service announcement, by Virginia Postrel: “Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money”.
As ScienceOnline2012 gets underway later this week, the New York Times is running an article about open science: “Cracking open the scientific process”. The ...
I saw this: “India launches Aakash tablet computer priced at $35” on Slashdot, which notes:
Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.
Kim Hill and colleagues described in last week’s Science a study of kinship within bands of hunter-gatherers known from ethnographic research Hill:Co-residen...
A Twitter virus emerged within the 140 character limit:
Krystal D’Costa (Anthropology in Practice) links to a mini-documentary about the role of social media in the education of “Gen-Y”: “Decade 2: Encouraging Edu...
A little life history theory can be a dangerous thing. Case in point: “Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass.” The article discusses correlati...
New York is considering a plan “to eliminate 170,000 wild Canada geese”:
A Sunday science story from last week: “Choir to sing the ‘code of life.’”
The Washington Post has a story about resellers of human bone and the people who buy them: “An artistic body of work’s bone of contention.”
If you want to give yourself a caveman (or cavewoman) makeover, well, now there’s an app for that:
Time magazine has named paleoanthropologist Tim White as one of its 2010 top 100 influential people. Sean B. Carroll provides a short profile of White’s rece...
Not a comment on anyone in particular, but I’m beginning to wonder if some Twitter users are actually robots. I mean, how exactly does one follow thousands o...
Tried out an iPad this afternoon. It’s a slick little device, very nice looking for games. Some people have commented on iPhone apps looking ugly on the larg...
A real headline:
Re: “The simple foods”:
Jeffrey Zeldman: advice for business that works just as well in academics: “Show up early”
I blame Harold Dibble. Oh, sure, all these “paleo diet” people point the figure at Loren Cordain, but Dibble was the first to give them a cookbook!
Obvious in retrospect:
Lawn Chair Anthropology: “Halloween special: Heterotopy, pleiotropy, and the origins of vampires”
That’s the conclusion of a Reuters article, which describes a book by Australian science writer Peter McAllister. The book is titled, Manthropology: The Scie...
Bill Gates is spending a lot of money to make schools better. And for some reason it’s not working. Gates says it’s bad teachers:
A couple of weeks ago I gave some Google Trends statistics on search terms for fossil hominins. The winner then was “erectus”, with “Neanderthal” coming in a...
Larry Moran writes, “Are you a descendant of Charlemagne?”
At Savage Minds, every so often they’ve included a post about the perennial desert-subversive-anarcho-utopian event “Burning Man”. Recently, Adam Fish wrote ...
And now for something completely different:
On the topic of web searching, I just thought I’d point out that when you search for “Homo erectus” on Wolfram Alpha, what you get is stats for the stupid Na...
Yes, I know, hominin is driving me crazy, too. It’s a taxonomic diktat of breathtaking doofery, but I think we’re stuck with it. So I’ve been writing it to ...
I read Chris Anderson’s book because it was, well, “Free”. The book’s thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.
Today my inbox is full of clueless n00bs writing, “Please remove me from this list” notes in response to some random bulk e-mail.
I hesitate to pass along this story, but I think it’s probably of general interest to anthropologists: “Overload of bodies fills Tennessee morgues”:
I saw this essay on Slashdot, and I think it’s worth spreading around: Paul Graham (of venture capital firm Y Combinator) writes “Maker’s schedule, manager’s...
In the current Nature, the special section on science journalism (due to the upcoming World Conference of Science Journalists) includes an essay history of s...
I’ve had this paper about “adoption speed” and cultural tastes on my desktop for more than a month, meaning to write something about it. Here’s the abstract:
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
Scientific American reports on how Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is hooking up with anthropologists to replicate prehistoric brews:
The Economist runs a little article about Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos:
Word of the day: biohacking.
I follow technology here once in a while, but I actually follow it pretty closely personally. As a research tool, the new Kindle DX is getting close to somet...
Last year, I pointed to an article that Jared Diamond had written in the New Yorker on revenge cycles in Highland New Guinea. Now Diamond has been sued by tw...
I didn’t notice myself, but a number of writers have been pointing out the fiftieth anniversary of a familiar classic, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Sty...
I was reading this story about “genetic surveillance” by law enforcement. I’ll blog about it later.
I think that this NY Times story by Noam Cohen, titled “In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide,” is just fascinating. It’s an old story (from e...
Science magazine’s “Origins” blog is running a little feature by archaeology student Steven Goldstein on how to knap a handaxe.
Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, and Peter Diamantis are teaming up with NASA to bring us the next step in graduate and postgraduate education:
If you’re looking for a way to waste your time today, you might check out The Economist’s online debate, which focuses on the question of whether the world i...
Eric Konigsberg writes a long story in the NY Times with quirky stories about the joy or disenchantment with the results of pet cloning:
I commented on the movie version of the play, “Homo erectus,” when I heard about it a couple of years ago, in a timeless post, titled “[Tom] Arnold will play...
“Cloaking” is like the physics version of the hobbits – catchy name from a fantasy story and fascinating to the press. But there came a time reading “invisib...
Genome scientist Eric Lander has been appointed co-chair of Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:
Wired has a story about the trend toward more television dramas with science content. Some may disagree that a show like CSI is especially science-related; n...
Bina Venkataraman tells the interesting story of Jessica Fridrich, who as a Czech teenager in 1981 developed the fastest algorithm for solving the Rubik’s cu...
Scientific American reports on a taxonomic auction by Purdue University:
The Singularity is a future time when, in theory, the pace of technological change becomes so great that we cannot predict the course of future developments ...
From gaming business guru David Edery, on the Freakonomics blog:
I found myself touched by this story about the restoration of Raphael’s “Madonna of the Goldfinch.” And glad that some people make it their life’s work to pr...
John Bohannon (“The Gonzo Scientist”) gives the videogame “Spore” a flunking grade. He sits down four scientists, including Niles Eldredge, to play the game....
I don’t have a picture, but this week Prince Valiant seems to have encountered a band of Neandertals. At least, they look just like Neandertals that Charles ...
Your brain works to see faces in cars, and automakers want to exploit your taste for the mean machine:
I know many readers are fans of Terry Pratchett, as I am. He has a long, heartfelt article about his experiences with PCA, a type of early-onset Alzheimer’s....
Personally, I think the chances are not good that the NY Times will provide accurate and timely information about camouflage gear.
Cool clock:
Carl Zimmer has a NY Times article today on “Spore”, a video game that let’s you “evolve” life forms from single-celled organisms up to modern-day complexity...
Am I the only one who noticed the irony of a car company named “Tesla” opening its premier dealership in a city called “Menlo Park”?
An excerpt from a Social Security Agency press release about popular baby names of 2007:
That’s the last line of this news item about the cast of the upcoming movie, “Homo Erectus: A Caveman Comedy”: