Fine Structure

I remember a lot of todo about this a while back when I wasn't blogging here yet so this is the opportunity to (briefly) revisit it, I suppose.

It's another attempt to create an instant measure of quality for researchers. It doesn't determine your ultimate scientific worth so your choice is to trust it's accuracy or not. I'm curious how many people will dismiss you without an h-index of n or more though - that really shows it's popularity.

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Finally! If you weren't aware, there is a dumb amount of fervor from certain bloggers whenever you mention the airplane on a conveyor belt "problem" and I guess it takes an actual attempt to set them straight. MythBusters to the rescue!

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Well that just sounds downright unpleasant.

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An excellent post on Spontaneous Human Combustion, a topic that really fascinated me as a kid.

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This is an interesting approach at blogging+paper reviewing. Essentially you add some HTML snippet to a post which gets picked up and put on their site. Then another user clicks through and reviews it, rates it, etc.

It's definitely a new and different way to review science content. Not quite sure if it'll be picked up by many though.

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Leveraging the dwindling price of storage and bypassing the cost of bandwidth altogether, Google hosts a huge amount of scientific data for free - assuming you're ready and willing to share it with the world.

I'm fascinated by the idea of being able to provide an audience for those scientists without enough computing power or time to go through all possible uses for their own data but high-profile projects seem a little too competitive to ever make it this far into the public realm.

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I've heard about the subtle acceleration boosts before but this is the first I time I've read about a possible explanation. The description in the article strikes me as similar to the way spinning bodies speed up when their mass moves towards their axis.

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NOVA has a new two-part series on the coldest-of-the-cold coming out on the 8th and 15th of January. Watch the preview at the link above.

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John Baez writes about how he changed his mind about working on quantum gravity. Exceptionally relevant, especially this: "... the more work we did, the more I realized I didn't know what questions we should be asking!" I'll have more to say on this more or less continuously, I think.

[via woit]

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