Science Friday: Culture Night, No Rainbows and Unicorns in Science Blogging, and the Softer Side of Mr. Spock

First of all, it's Culture Night tonight in the gallery (squee!), We've got our last BIORHYTHM Live event on next Friday, and we're not saying farewell to blogging (we're mad for The Twitter and the face-book so we are...).

That said, there have been some major changes afoot in the wide world of science blogging.  If you want to get up to speed, here's Coturnix's farewell to ScienceBlogs. Chad Orzel has posted a thoughtful counterpoint, however, which is more concise and worth reading as well:

"Do I think that things are all happy rainbows and unicorns? No. there are plenty of things in Bora's manifesto that I agree with. I think the network is way too big and diffuse to be any kind of coherent entity, but that decision was made a long time ago and well above my pay grade. The technical support leaves a lot to be desired. The management could do a much better job of communicating with the bloggers about major site changes (though, again, there may be confidentiality issues there that complicate matters, that we know nothing about, and have no particular right to know anything about).

At the same time, though, I think a lot of what's being said about ScienceBlogs and the management of the site is based on unreasonable expectations of how things ought to work rather than how things are actually set up. Throw in the fact that the dominant mode of expression in blogdom is hysterical overreaction and, well, you get what we've been reading for the last couple of weeks."

thus...

Oh, by the way, weird coincidence: Wired has started it's own science blogging network. Can you guess where the majority blogged previously?

One more note about blogs-- perhaps it's the way to plug the hole in the Irish Economy? In Philadelphia, they're taxing bloggers with a $300/year license... Better optimise those adword accounts, baby.

(Viking) Ireland in the news for better things...

Not only in the news actually-- io9 to be exact! Nearly missed this story of "Dublin's long-lost Viking sister city finally rediscovered."

And since we're talking media... 

 Imagine what you'd get if you could mix Scott Pilgrim versus the World, with a university lecture.  Voila:http://vimeo.com/13361673

Drake equation nearing 50

The Beeb has a documentary on SETI and the Drake equation.  Mindhacks have a nice little review that puts it in perspective:

     "The occasion is the 50th anniversary of the Drake equation, a mathematical formula that attempts to estimate the number of alien civilisations that exist in the universe.    

On one hand, it’s quite charming (admittedly, in a slightly patronising way) to think of scientists earnestly looking for aliens from outer space, but on the other, it’s an interesting psychological problem that involves a guess about what other forms of intelligence might be like.    

As artificial intelligence researchers will tell you, we tend to increasingly define intelligence to mean exactly and only what humans can do. When machines manage to equal a human cognitive ability, by playing chess for example, we just move the goal posts and suggest ‘real intelligence’ is whatever the computer can’t do yet – something called the AI effect."

And lastly, just to clear things up, I Am Not Spock

Why is it so hard for Leonard Nimoy to distance himself from the logical sci-fi uber-nerd character Spock? Check out his exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to see a different side...