Tangled Bank 52

Welcome, everyone, to the latest issue of The Tangled Bank. Everyone has sent in their submissions, and there’s been some really good stuff submitted to me. I now fully appreciate the efforts of all Tangled Bank Hosts, because it is a serious task evaluating several magazines-worth of articles to put together an issue. The Tangled Bank is a model science blog carnival, now let’s set the gold standard!

A long time ago, on a weblog far, far away…

Tangled Bank Coming up

The 52nd issue of the ultra-cool science blog carnival, The Tangled Bank, is coming up right here at The Inoculated Mind mindlog! If you are interested in reading the latest and best science blog entries (as submitted) summarized for you, or have never read the Tangled Bank before, check out the last one, then come back here on Wednesday, April 26, 2006.

Get your deleted journalism here

The controversy over “Dr. Doom” has taken an interesting and expected turn. After the Sequin Gazette-Enterprise broke the story that Dr. Eric Pianka advocated the deaths of 90 percent of the human population to save the rest of the biosphere from us, the creationists jumped all over it. Now, not only have most of the creationists totally abandoned their interest in Pianka, (expected) but when you try to access the articles on the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, they are coincidentally missing… Interesting. But I’ve got them right here for you.

Stupid is as stupid does

The blogosphere (and the regular media) just hit a big firestorm, with people typing away like madness. Over what? The claims made by a creationist about an award-winning ecologist named Dr. Pianka, aka “Dr. Doom.” Forrest Mims, whom you see to the right sporting a hat embroidered with a higher lifeform, claimed that Dr. Pianka advocated the elimination of 90% percent of the world’s human population with airborne ebola. Did Dr. Doom do it?

Claims not Truths

Here is an excellent article by Nicholas Wade at the NYT about the differences between textbook science and frontier science, while discussing the issue of Dr. Hwang. I particularly like the concluding paragraph:

“Tightening up the reviewing system may remove some faults but will not erase the inescapable gap between textbook science and frontier science.

The Mindlog Part II, Entering the Blogosphere.

So I’ve decided to start a weblog. The weblog, or blog for short, has had a shaky beginning. This is largely because of the stereotype that blog authors are just bored and lonely technophiles who have nothing to say but are telling people they have never met what they had for breakfast, featuring a live mood-indicator. Or perhaps you’ve thought of them as places where angry people vent their grammatically poor, factually atrocious, and ethically mal-adjusted personal views hoping that someone will subscribe to their drivel. Finally, perhaps you heard warnings about blogs through the print, radio, or television media during political campaigns as having posted dubious information and so-called anonymous ‘expert analyses’ about candidates or political issues. Yes, they can be used for that, just like the print media has its tabloids, television has its trash, and even radio has its idiotic ideologues.

But blogs as a delivery system for information have far more potential than people may yet realize.