Learning from science blogging
I'd like to do a good job on this blog so I set out to look at other science blogs.
I just started to look at good math, bad math and like the substance in that blog. And although it's not a blog, Wikiepdia's math portal is really top notch. I like these examples because I come away from them feeling "smarter". Notice I said "feel" - who knows if I actually learned anything or not, but I should have...
I'm not so keen on science blogs that are anonymous. I won't call anybody out, but I believe scientists need to be accountable. A science blog is on some level an outreach tool; science is about credibility and objectivity. So feel free to check out my job page some time.
I like the bad science page, and also Bob Park's weekly column What's New , both of which are able to debunk pseudo science in a usually light-hearted and mature way. I'll try to do the same, but I've noticed other science blogs which revel a little too much in assaulting pseudo-science to the point that I think it serves their own egos more than it interests a reader. So I don't want to do that - I do want have fun and go on about cool and neat things in science.
This could go on for a while...so let's wrap it up. Earlier today I found a blog that I can't find again. Sigh. It was a blogger who succinctly took an objective look at science blogs. Some, he found, weren't about science - and I noticed this too - how strange. Anyway he raised the interesting issue that some blogs can become so content-oriented that they are sliding down the knife edge towards publishing results. That's kind of interesting. I worry a lot about the spiralling cost of science journals and maybe I'll mention that next time, but blogging preliminary or extensively analyzed data is not the solution.
OK, I love watching those mentos and coke vids on Youtube. I had a few guesses about the chemistry of how it works and started poking around online. Amazingly, it is not very well understood and there is some debate ! The mythbusters show that it is at least partly physico-chemical: you need a porous surface to start the CO2 nucleation, and others claim this as well. But there's more going on I think (and Hyneman thinks so too). It's not exactly Fermat's Last Theorem, but it's a great chemical mystery that anyone can experiment on at home.