Tag: tabclosing

Tabclosing

Tabclosing

Slimming down my browser again.

Myth #4: Scientists follow the scientific method as it was taught in high school: Observation, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion Truth: In reality, the way scientists work is more like: Fiddle Around, Find Something Weird, Retest It, It Doesn’t Happen a Second Time, Get Distracted Trying to Make It Happen Again, Go to Chipotle, Recall the Original Purpose of Your Research, Start Over, Apply for Funding for a Better Instrument, Publish Some Interim Fluff, Learn That Someone Has Scooped You, Take Your Lab in a New Direction, Apply for Funding for the New Direction, Collaborate With an Icelandic Poet, Eat Chipotle With an Icelandic Poet, Co-Write Scientifically Accurate Ode to Walrus, Get Interested in Something Unrelated, Apply for Funding for Something Unrelated, Notice That 20 Years Have Passed.

Tabclosing

Tabclosing

PAC-MAN HIGHWAY – Level 1 (gameplay) from NotWorkingFilms on Vimeo.

Too Many Tabs

Time to thin out my browser window.

  • I keep meaning to find time to watch Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s presentation on OpenLeaks, his proposed Wikileaks offshoot project.
  • Franklin Veaux (who writes a lot about polyamory and BDSM at his site) has made a fascinating map of nonmonogamy.  I found this via Dr. Marty Klein’s excellent blog, Sexual Intelligence.
  • There is a storm on Saturn the size of a planet.  And it was discovered by amateur astronomers!
  • Matthew Squair on the affect heuristic. I need to think about this more, as I think it may have implications for Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory.  (Also interesting is Haidt’s essay Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion and the responses to it.  For the record, while I am not knowledgeable enough about evolutionary biology to have an opinion on group selection, my thinking is most in line with the commentary by P. Z. Meyers.  Also, after reading Sam Harris’s recent book The Moral Landscape, I think there is some truth to Haidt’s criticism that Harris’s prose is frequently more flash than substance.)
  • Chiasmus” is one of those words whose meaning I can never reliably remember.  Maybe if I put it here it will stick.
  • Via Jen Volant, the Declutter-365 Project.
  • Finally, I don’t want this to become one of those things that so outrageous and hard to believe that I forget that it really did happen: the Pope explained over Christmas that the clerical sex abuse scandal is really a matter of context, and that “[i]n the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children.”  It’s comments like these which inspired Tim Minchin to write a song in his honor. (Warning: contains enthusiastic profanity.)

My Browser Window Has Grown Too Big

Time to close some tabs.

Closing Some Tabs

Sally Wister’s Journal — M. T. Anderson  recommends this Civil War era journal in an interview, saying it was one of the more interesting things he read doing research for Octavian Nothing.  He claims that if Wister had ever turned her hand to fiction, she would have been one of the great American novelists.

The Quiet Coup — article in The Atlantic in which Simon Johnson, former economist with the International Monetary Fund, explains exactly how the IMF would be treating the United States if it were any other country.

Fear and the Availability Heuristic — post on Bruce Schneier’s blog about the non-rational basis of most human risk assessment.

360 Degree Character Reviews — John Rogers talks about some interesting exercises a writer can use to get to know his or her characters.

Join or Die — artist Justine Lai’s series of paintings of herself having sex with the presidents of the United States.

BOINC — Open source software to donate unused processor cycles to many scientific projects.  I’ve donated mine to the World Community Grid.