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...
All posts tagged with social
Link: ‘Africa’ in the desert? Stop it now
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...
Link: People on the receiving end of misaimed vigilante justice due to poor database design
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...
Link: The phylogeny of our plant foods
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 Doodle commemorating Lucy’s 41st anniversary
Google today (November 24) is running a Google Doodle commemorating the 41st anniversary of the discovery of the famous “Lucy” skeleton of Australopithecus a...
Link: Nuts and civilizations
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...
Lifetime interactions of male hunter-gatherers
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...
Perils of recycling
Today’s public service announcement, by Virginia Postrel: “Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money”.
"Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago."
As ScienceOnline2012 gets underway later this week, the New York Times is running an article about open science: “Cracking open the scientific process”. The ...
The box isn't nearly as big, either
I saw this: “India launches Aakash tablet computer priced at $35” on Slashdot, which notes:
No echoing the echo chamber here
Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.
Hunter-gatherer kinship and band composition
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...
Tweets will find a way
A Twitter virus emerged within the 140 character limit:
Social media in education
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...
Questioning the "evolution of an underclass"
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...
Mmmm…geese….
New York is considering a plan “to eliminate 170,000 wild Canada geese”:
A, C, and G, sure, but what's T?
A Sunday science story from last week: “Choir to sing the ‘code of life.’”
Bones for sale
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.”
Neanderate yourself
If you want to give yourself a caveman (or cavewoman) makeover, well, now there’s an app for that:
Tim Time
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...
Twitter thinking
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...
iPad tryout
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...
Neandertal anti-defamation league
A real headline:
Mailbag: Food nostalgia
Re: “The simple foods”:
Lateness
Jeffrey Zeldman: advice for business that works just as well in academics: “Show up early”
"The cavemen are happy in the modern world"
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!
A touching story
Obvious in retrospect:
Vampire odontology
Lawn Chair Anthropology: “Halloween special: Heterotopy, pleiotropy, and the origins of vampires”
Is modern man a "wimp"?
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...
Schoolective statistics
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:
Who's your favorite hominin now?
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...
Genealogy and genetics
Larry Moran writes, “Are you a descendant of Charlemagne?”
Burning money
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 ...
Cryonics tales
And now for something completely different:
Wolfram paleoanthropology
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...
Who's your favorite hominin?
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 ...
Book notes: Free, by Chris Anderson
I read Chris Anderson’s book because it was, well, “Free”. The book’s thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.
Take me off this list
Today my inbox is full of clueless n00bs writing, “Please remove me from this list” notes in response to some random bulk e-mail.
The cadaver overload
I hesitate to pass along this story, but I think it’s probably of general interest to anthropologists: “Overload of bodies fills Tennessee morgues”:
Working your schedule around your work
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...
A history of science journalism
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...
Names, culture, and popularity
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:
Quote: Real men don't compare phones
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
Craft beers of the ancients
Scientific American reports on how Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is hooking up with anthropologists to replicate prehistoric brews:
Archaeology informing the modern
The Economist runs a little article about Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos:
Biohacking
Word of the day: biohacking.
Kindling my interest
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...
Jared Diamond sued for New Guinea revenge article
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...
Does your Style have the right Elements?
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...
How many genotypes does it take to nab you?
I was reading this story about “genetic surveillance” by law enforcement. I’ll blog about it later.
"Historians Gone Wild" on Oprahbulations
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...
Knapping a handaxe
Science magazine’s “Origins” blog is running a little feature by archaeology student Steven Goldstein on how to knap a handaxe.
Summer school at Singularity University?
Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, and Peter Diamantis are teaming up with NASA to bring us the next step in graduate and postgraduate education:
A debate: information overload?
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...
"With clones, what good does similar do?"
Eric Konigsberg writes a long story in the NY Times with quirky stories about the joy or disenchantment with the results of pet cloning:
"Homo erectus" becomes "National Lampoon's Stoned Age" on DVD
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
“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...
Eric Lander to co-direct Obama advisory council
Genome scientist Eric Lander has been appointed co-chair of Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:
Science from television drama
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...
Rubik algorithm to Ph.D.
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...
This year's gift: The vanity taxon
Scientific American reports on a taxonomic auction by Purdue University:
The tuition Singularity
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 ...
Quote: Time spent on Solitaire
From gaming business guru David Edery, on the Freakonomics blog:
Restoration
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...
A "Spore" review in Science
John Bohannon (“The Gonzo Scientist”) gives the videogame “Spore” a flunking grade. He sits down four scientists, including Niles Eldredge, to play the game....
Prince Valiant encounters Neandertals?
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 ...
Word of the day: pareidolia
Your brain works to see faces in cars, and automakers want to exploit your taste for the mean machine:
Terry Pratchett describes his Alzheimer's
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....
Digital fractal camouflage to fool deer
Personally, I think the chances are not good that the NY Times will provide accurate and timely information about camouflage gear.
Grasshopper, eater of time
Cool clock:
Gaming evolution
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...
A new "Wizard"?
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 infatuation with names that rhyme with 'maiden'
An excerpt from a Social Security Agency press release about popular baby names of 2007:
"[Tom] Arnold will play Rog, a gay caveman"
That’s the last line of this news item about the cast of the upcoming movie, “Homo Erectus: A Caveman Comedy”: