Clever tagline.
Feb 19 2009
A project has been set up which monitors the astrometry tag on flickr and hashes photos to determine what in the sky is being looked at. Not only does it add annotations for notable objects to the photo, it will allow compilation of a growing set of located images. Apparently a rotation invariant hashing algorithm […]
Jan 26 2009
How do you know the relative weight of a scientific paper? Is it well respected in the field? Often Cited? Maslov and Redner discuss the Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google’s PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks. Interestingly, of the top 10 papers by pagerank, 9 are by Nobel Prize winners.
Jan 06 2009
The recent genesis post reminded me of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and prompted me to check its Amazon listing. I thought there must be many people who never read it, and would now be trying to sell it used. Sure enough, there’s more than 100 copies available for $11 and up. However […]
Jan 06 2009
Interesting article on Wired from a few months ago that was brought to my attention by their end-of-year best-of post: Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life It’s interesting that there are a variety of primitive bacteria and archaea that are still hanging around the planet, but the simple precursors of them […]
Dec 20 2008
ArbCamp08 was great, thanks to all the organizers, who had to scramble at the last minute to handle a huge turnout by changing the venue. With more than 160 attendees, there was a wide variety of interesting breakout sessions and impromptu discussions. I enjoyed the parallel programming session led by Jon Cohen – I hadn’t […]
Sep 09 2008
Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination. While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection. It’s a game about intelligent design. You have godlike powers over your […]
May 20 2008
I have a problem with this saying. I think it’s good and healthy to have a posture of skepticism when encountering any argument, especially one that is not backed up by evidence. You could say this evidence is essentially data. Data itself can easily be very unwieldy, and statistics is a tool with which a […]
Aug 17 2007
Galaxy Zoo is a project which is enlisting the eyes and minds of the public to help classify a large number of galaxies present in sky survey images. It’s fun for a few minutes, and would be great for kids, as they can learn about science while making a concrete contribution. Do galaxies prefer to […]
