Of Schemes and Memes Blog

The Best of Nature Network: 11-17 September 2010

Blogs

Tom Webb asks a question we’ve all considered:

I’m pondering the following vexed question: exactly how bad does a paper have to be in order for me to drop what I’m supposed to be doing, fire up the old critical faculties, and spit out a vituperative rebuttal? At what stage does ‘petty complaint’ upgrade to ‘vital corrective response’?

Help Tom decide whether he should rise to the bait. Speaking of which, Mark Schrope provides a photographic account of a recent deep-sea fishing trip. Working with a team of marine biologists, he discovers some very strange creatures lurking in the Gulf of Mexico. Happily, the survey (tentatively) suggests that population numbers are at normal levels following the oil spill, but more research is needed to be sure.

Jennifer Rohn once again provokes heated debate after analysing the numbers of male and female bloggers on prominent science sites. Here’s her data:

BoyBlogs1

Whatever your gender, you might want to join the 90+ commenters and many more tweeters and share your views on gender imbalance in the sciblog-cum-twitterosphereomoverse.

Elsewhere, William Lu discusses the neuroscience of creativity, Kausik Datta reveals his typographical anathema, Jeremy Bentham considers family planning in China, and Eva Amsen maps science in Toronto as part of our ongoing series.

A New Look

We recently tweaked some code to allow our bloggers to upload their own banner images. We’ve been impressed at the creativity. Among others, Nicolau Werneck has created a subtle banner based on the Sierpinski Triangle, Eva Amsen splashes out the claret and blue, Anthony Fejes goes for a calm, blue ocean, and Stephen Curry opts for the geometric beauty of a crystal diffraction pattern. Which is your favourite? And, any suggestions for images we might use on the Schemes and Memes blog?

And Finally…

Another classic cartoon from Viktor Poór, who condenses down that annoying lab itch into graph form.

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