It has been noted that blogging is in decline, that some long time (in blog years) bloggers have retired. I've come, gone, come again, gone again etc. since 2000 so I have some understanding of this. Unless you have a compelling reason to persist it's likely that some other compelling reason will pull you away, at least for a time. But there's churn, new blogs to replace the retired ones, and IMO the quality continues to improve while the range of topics and issues grows wider. There may be less war blogging and other pure political type blogs, fewer gadget blogs etc., but there seems to be a slow increase in technology and science blogs of substance. I couldn't be more pleased. The new group blog Climate Feedback is an example. Climate Feedback is a blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming. The blog...

Timothy makes a specific point that I think generalizes well. Most of us tend to turn on this kind of skeptical parsing of research results only when the reported results offend against our own common sense or our political commitments. If the research supports our prior commitments, then we tend to act as carriers of the meme. So here’s the pledge I think we all should take. Do not endorse research about social behavior or social psychology without first looking very carefully at the methodology and the effect size. If you would disregard the study on those grounds when it contradicts your own social views, disregard it when it endorses your views. I think this applies across the board, not just for research about social behavior or social psychology. Something that I sometimes worry about isn't that I endorse research that doesn't bear close scrutiny as that I don't bother to speak about it unless it offends my priors....

If one buys Matthew Nisbet's argument that members of the public are "cognitive misers" (and it seems to me a pretty reasonable argument that I'm at least willing to seriously entertain), then there is little point to giving the public the details. This is of course a problem for me, as I have no other marketable skills. I'm thinking of learning to weld. That's a comment left on a Prometheus post by John Fleck, an apparently ink-stained wretch who runs jfleck at inkstain: A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things living in New Mexico. Phunny. I'll take the feed for a while to see if there are repeats....

I have nothing to say, but I've been offline for a while due to seasonal coms difficulty. It happens every year when the rains come and this has been a worse than normal year. It isn't that there has been so much rain - just right in fact - but phone repair services aren't what they were in the day. It may be due to the switch from land lines to cell technologies for voice, and satellite for data, that has made POTS a lower priority. I found being offline for several days to be instructive. At first there was an itch, then I forgot to scratch, and today didn't even notice until late in the day that the repair had been made. I'm adaptable I guess. It seems, given the evidence gathered so far doing my net route, that I didn't miss much. The kind of stuff that interests me seems to go dormant for the holidays. There...

A few folks, most recently Norm, have asked if I intended to post at Crumb Trail any longer. I let the domain name lapse, and haven't kept up the old Blogspot version from back in the day. I don't have the time for blogging I once had. So, I'll just combine them, drop the crumbs here so to speak, and follow paths as time permits. For example: It seems obvious, but not well quantified, that Soil nutrition affects carbon sequestration in forests. Building on preliminary studies reported in Nature, the researchers found that trees can only increase wood growth from elevated CO2 if there is enough leaf area to support that growth. Leaf area, in turn, is limited by soil nutrition; without adequate soil nutrition, trees respond to elevated CO2 by transferring carbon below ground, then recycling it back to the atmospheric through respiration. And there are implications. Looking at the beast with a slightly different lens we see...

This is another post about strings used to get here. I repeated the search to see what would result but didn't find any actual "glomalin critics". I did find this older overview that had some information that was new to me. In 1996, Dr. Sarah Wright and colleagues at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service isolated a glycoprotein called glomalin that literally "gums up" the soil rhizosphere (the interface between soil and plant roots) with carbon fixed from the atmosphere. The compound is produced by common soil fungi called mycorrhizae that frequent the roots of many crops. When Wright removed glomalin from soil samples, the result was a lifeless mineral powder. The soil had lost its tilth - the substance that conveys texture and health. She had inadvertently discovered the fundamental factor of soil welfare, elusive for over 10,000 years. Humic acid, previously thought to be the main contributor to soil carbon, could muster only a tiny percentage of glomalin's...

First, read Too Much Information. I'll wait here till you return ..................... There is, perhaps, an explanation. Everybody has experienced a sense of "losing oneself" in an activity--whether a movie, sport, sex, or meditation. Now, researchers have caught the brain in the act of losing "self" as it shuts down introspection during a demanding sensory task. The researchers--led by Rafael Malach and Ilan Goldberg of the Weizmann Institute of Science reporting in the April 20, 2006, issue of Neuron--say their findings show that self-related function actually shuts down during such intense sensory tasks. Thus, an "observer" function in the brain does not appear to play an active part of in the production of our vivid sensory experiences. These findings go against common models of sensory experience that assume that there is some kind of "homunculus", or observer function in the brain that "looks at" sensory brain areas. Thus the finding, they said, has significance for understanding the basic nature...

and family trees. The last blog I excitedly pointed out here was Transect Points, Philip Small's soil science blog. So you see, I give good blog advice. I'd also like you to consider bit-player, the personal blog of Brian Hayes who writes the Computing Science column for American Scientist. See Library Daze for a taste. . . . at the end of my junior year in high school, I told my parents I was going to the beach for the summer, a fib I had concocted so they wouldn’t worry about me; I actually ran away to the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania, where I wrote a novel about a kid who goes to the beach for the summer. (Yes, I know, what a waste! Next time I’ll write about a kid who goes to the library for the summer.) But don't miss 0.203188. In a “Computing Science” column titled “Rumours and Errours,” not quite a...

There is such a thing. First patented in 1887, the idea of a true image mirror still was never seen as more than a curiosity until a key benefit was discovered by founder John Walter. What he saw was that his "real self" was present in the true image; a big contrast over the "self" seen in a flat, traditional mirror. You probably knew that. But did you know that visitors to your web site decide in 50 milliseconds whether your site is any good? Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny. ....

Last year about this time Tozier asked What’s in dirt? How much?: Let’s define a “molecular species” in the context of this thought experiment as a particular arrangement of covalently-bonded atoms (I’m ignoring hydrogen bonds, ionic associations and other supramolecular complexes for the sake of sanity). But just to make things challenging, say we count ionization states and radicals as different molecular species, too. So, you have a little pile of dirt? Great. Stop time. I want to look at it instantaneously. Make a list of all the molecular species in that sample. Count how many individual examples there are of each molecule. Got that? Good. Now make a little histogram of the molecular species, sorted in order of decreasing occurrence. So the common stuff like atmospheric gases and common mineral stuff will be over at the left, and weird, rare gunk like bug metabolites and DNA will be over at the right end. Draw it. Show me. Hell,...

When my wife left 20 years ago this month she accused me of being a workaholic, of needing to work like a drug addict needs a fix, and that this was a form of spousal abuse. I denied it at the time and made excuses for my behavior, but she was right. My name is Gary and I'm a workaholic. I don't want to recover. I like it, even now that I have fully faced my "condition". In a way admitting to myself that it is so was a great relief, a liberating act that allowed my to embrace it heartily and develop it more fully. I've even committed poetry (a crime I never do in public), waxing lyrical about the mental and physical high I get when I've worked long, hard and well. It sharpens my perceptions and awareness, speeds my mind and body, gives me a sense of physical and mental well being that at my age...

If you don’t respond to this, your computer will explode and assorted bad things will happen Susan Miles ignored this chain blogmeme, and within 48 hours she had become the inspiration for both a grisly waxworks tableau at Madame Tussaud’s, and an unpalatable sandwich at a notoriously unsavory Knoxville delicatessen. Be warned. You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? I'm not good at lists, tend not to have favorites and, like cheesecake in the deli case, absorb the odors of whatever else is in the case. Ever had dill pickle cheesecake? So, I'd try to be useful, be a reference text of some sort, perhaps the OED. I am cursed with a good memory, which may account in part for my difficulty with favorites, but the indexing system is erratic. As a reference text I would be random access rather than serial access. Just ask. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional...