Tag Archives: blogging

Denim and Tweed, now with more talkback?

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In addition to self-congratulatory navel-gazing, I’m starting the new year with two new features to hopefully make it easier for readers to comment on posts, and contact me directly in a pinch.

The first is the Disqus commenting system, which will let anyone comment using their login identity from Twitter, Facebook, or Yahoo!—or any OpenID system. Disqus has all sorts of shiny social-site integration, so now you can explain what an idiot I am on the site, and then immediately tell all your Facebook friends, too. Give it a try and see what you think!

And if you hate Disqus because it won’t let you log in/ ate your brilliant critique of Disqus/ is the wrong color, you can now e-mail me about those problems at denimandtweed AT gmail DOT com. Messages to that address are forwarded directly to my personal e-mail account, which is not posted on this site.

State of the blog, 2010

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Happy New Year, everyone! The year 2010 was another good one for this little corner of cyberspace. As I did last year, I’m going to spend a post quantifying how good the year was.

Weekly visitors to D&T in 2010 (blue line) compared to the same date span in 2009 (green line), as tabulated by Google Analytics.

In 2010, I wrote 184 posts, just over 15 per month. These drew 28,308 pageviews by 18,994 visitors—that’s almost 154 pageviews and just over 103 visitors per post, on average. That’s also more than 1,580 visitors a month, and over 35 percent more than in 2009. This is all given that I actually did a little less posting than in 2009, when I wrote 229 posts.

More navel-gazing after the jump!

The top three Google search phrases (excluding my name and “Denim and Tweed”) bringing visitors to the site in 2010 were “eastern and western yucca trees,” “cuckholding,” and “what makes a species.” Further down the list are “eating tits” and “clitoris,” which I can only imagine result in disappointed searchers.

You were popular, J.B.S., but not as popular as orgasms.

The three most popular posts of 2010 were mostly in the last couple of months of the year. In no particular order, they were about being a gay biologist (which received 368 pageviews in its first two weeks online), J.B.S. Haldane’s ties to the Communist Party (283 pageviews), and the adaptive function (or lack thereof) of female orgasm (599 pageviews). If there’s a common thread uniting those three, I don’t know what it is. The first is among the most personal things I’ve posted here, the second is easily the most ambitious piece I’ve written for D&T, and the third I frankly tossed together as a quick and fun Carnal Carnival contribution. They all benefited from strong interest on Twitter, though, and I’m mighty grateful for the folks who passed on links, especially power-Tweeters Bora Zivkovic and Steve Silberman.

Although D&T is still a side project, I’d like to think I’ve made it a bit more professional and integrated it into my scientific career more solidly this year. I sprang for a unique domain in February, instituted weekly linkfest posts, and—apart from a hiatus for fieldwork and another for being a grad student—kept pretty close to a once-a-week rhythm for science posts. I’ve now cited this blog as a “broader impact” in a couple of grant applications, and link to it directly from the publications list on my professional site. So I guess it’s officially something I do as a scientist.

Have yourself a coevolutionary Christmas

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Snow in the Mojave, March 2006. Photo by jby.

… whatever that means. I’m doing the family travel circuit during the traditional worst time of year to travel in the U.S., and taking as much of a break as I can while doing it. Regular posting will resume with the start of the new year. In the meantime, here’s Pink Martini’s rockin’ multilingual rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Google’s new reading comprehension filters

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Blag Hag Jen McCreight points out that Google is now tagging pages by reading comprehension level. And you can get a nifty little breakdown of pages by comprehension level for individual sites, using Advanced Search.

Denim and Tweed pages, sorted by reading comprehension level.

Standards for comparison are in Jen’s post. Nature.com gets 3%-22%-73%; Blag Hag 90%-9%-0%. I would gloat about D&T’s relative similarity to Nature, but I’m not sure this is the sort of thing about which one gloats.

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Science online, looking forward to #Scio11 edition

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Clownfish, anemone—and zooxanthellae makes three. Photo by jby.

First, the latest on ScienceOnline2011: The keynote speaker for the annual online science conference will be Robert Krulwich, the inimitable NPR science correspondent and co-host of Radiolab. And NESCent has announced the winners of its (now annual?) Science Online travel award for science blog posts: How Some Females Respond to Nuptial Gifts by Danielle Lee and Do mother birds play God? by Neil Losin. Go give them, and all this year’s entries, a read.

  • Twenty-eight thousand copies of “Romeo and Juliet.” In one genome. Sequencing the human genome, by analogy to Shakespeare. (The Occam’s Typewriter Irregulars)
  • Take your time, fellows. Men who put on condoms too quickly are more likely to experience “breakage, slippage and erection difficulties.” (NCBI ROFL)
  • Is Yossarianensis taken yet? Online journals are great for rapidly publishing new taxonomic names—but taxonomic descriptions must be published on paper to be “official.” (Open Source Paleontologist)
  • Don’t get your hopes, up just yet, Mom. Some clever genetic shuffling has produced mice with two genetic fathers. (Dan Savage, Wired Science)
  • It’s a regular undersea love-in. The mutual protection relationship of clownfish and sea anemones has another mutualistic wrinkle: anemones’ symbiotic algae benefit from clownfish, um, nitrogenous waste. (Sleeping with the Fishes)
  • X-ray apparatuses, Zeiss microscopes, and fire insurance. That’s what Dr. Skyskull figures scientists wanted for Christmas in 1903, based on ads in a contemporary issue of Nature. (Skulls in the Stars)
  • P(interesting|Bayesianism) = surprisingly high. Nate Silver explains Bayesian logic in the context of the legal travails of Julian Assange. (FiveThirtyEight)

Science online, yawning opossums edition

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Opossums eat lots of disease-carrying ticks. So that’s one thing they’re good for. Photo by graftedno1.

Remember that story about NASA having discovered bacteria using arsenic in place of phosphorous? UBC microbiologist Rosie Redfield ripped into the data underlying that conclusion on her blog RRResearch. (She’s also writing to the journal.) Redfield’s complaints and others prompted a lot of discussion about the the trouble with over-publicized science—see David Dobbs at Neuron Culture and Carl Zimmer on Slate, as well as Zimmer’s comprehensive roundup of scientific criticism of the study. Slate also took the opportunity to re-post an old piece on problems with peer review, but, as Chris Rowan wisely pointed out at Highly Allochthonous, peer review continues after a paper is published, especially in the case of “cutting edge” results like this one.

Meanwhile, in non-arsenic-based science news:

  • “… like the appendix … only more fun.” Scicurious tackles the question of whether female orgasm is adaptive. (Neurotic Physiology)
  • Save the ‘possums. The relationship between mammal diversity, tick host use, and the risk of Lyme disease spread to humans (previously discussed on D&T), rendered into charming narrative form. (EcoTone)
  • Short answer: cancer isn’t smallpox. Why haven’t we cured breast cancer yet? (White Coat Underground)
  • Ho-hum. I mean, wow. Yawning is measurably “contagious” for adult humans, chimpanzees, and dog—but not for children under the age of five. (The Telegraph)
  • Get out and play. Sitting around all day is worse than simply not exercising. (Obesity Panacea)
  • They’re all legs men. Like many other animal species, deep-sea octopodes practice multiple paternity. (SouthernPlayalisticEvolutionMusic)
  • “It’s not just kids who are bullying. Adults are stacking the deck.” Gay teens—especially openly gay teens—”suffer disproportionate punishments by schools and the criminal-justice system.” (Blogtown, NY Times; original article in the journal Pediatrics)

And now, via Craig McClain of Deep Sea News, video that answers the pressing question of what happens when an alligator attacks an electric eel. Don’t watch this if you don’t want to end up feeling bad for the alligator.

Twelve months of Denim and Tweed

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Following DrugMonkey’s example, here’s the first sentence of the first D&T post in each month of 2010:

  • 1 January—Happy New Year! Link.
  • 3 February—Regular readers of Denim and Tweed know that I’m fascinated by the evolution of species interactions: interactions between plants and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, Joshua trees and yucca moths, parasitoid wasps and butterflies, and between ants and the trees they guard. Link.
  • 4 March—Field Season phase I, in which I play tour guide for my parents through the sights of the California and Nevada desert, is now complete. Link.
  • 9 April—Getting serious mileage out of the new camera! Link.
  • 1 May—Here’s a great American, fretting about immigrants: Link.
  • 2 June—I celebrated the Memorial Day weekend by, among other things, not getting around to writing the final installment of the Big Four series, which was scheduled for sometime this week. Link.
  • 2 July—Between the all-day conferencing of Evolution 2010 and the fact that car trouble stranded me in Kennewick, Washington, almost exactly halfway between Portland and Moscow, I haven’t done enough online reading to justify my usual end-of the week roundup. Link.
  • 3 August—For all living things, information is critical to survival. Link.
  • 1 September—The cover article for last week’s issue of Nature promised to be the last word in a long-running scientific argument over the evolution of cooperation—but it really just rejiggers the terms of the debate. Link.
  • 1 October—Okay, I think I have things back under control. Link.
  • 1 sNovember—Scicurious has officially posted her epic compilation of recipes by and for graduate students, i.e., compiled with budget and preparation time in mind. Link.
  • 2 December—Security expert Bruce Schneier thinks that we should close the Washington Monument. Link.

There’s one or two instances of genuine unintentional out-of-context humor there. Also, I write some long-ass sentences, don’t I?

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Science online, inhospitable conditions edition

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Precarious, yes, but he’s protecting his sperm count. Photo by Ed Yourdon.
  • Don’t roast your junk, dude. Scicurious takes on the recent study showing that laptop computers can raise dudes’ scrotal temperatures, putting their sperm at risk. (Neurotic Physiology)
  • In case you needed another reason to hate them. A grad student specializing in mutation repair mechanisms considers the risk of the TSA’s new X-ray backscatter body scanners. (My Helical Tryst)
  • Too late to change the name to Phoenix? The neuroscience blog carnival Encephalon is back, in spades. (A Blog Around the Clock)
  • It’s that time of year again. Bora kicks off the lead-up to ScienceOnline 2011 with a series of posts introducing registered participants. (A Blog Around the Clock)
  • More than cat videos. Jonathan Eisen lists the ways blogging and microblogging have contributed to his scientific career. (The Tree of Life)
  • Actually, it’s just an eternal dissertation defense. Neuroskeptic imagines what scientific Hell would be like. (Neuroskeptic)
  • Waterproof sunscreen, anyone? Depletion of the ozone layer may mean whales are at greater risk of sunburn—and skin cancer. (Mental Floss, original article in Proc. Royal Soc. B)
  • Preadaptation for the win. One of the few Australian predators that can tolerate invasive cane toads is a snake that may have evolved the tolerance in response to selection from toxic prey in its ancestral range. (Oh, For the Love of Science)
  • NASA has not found extraterrestrial life. But it has found bacteria that use arsenic in place of phosphorous, which means there’s one more form extraterrestrial life could take. (Nature News, NY Times, Not Exactly Rocket Science; original article in Science [$a])

Regarding that last item, I’ll give the final word to good ol’ xkcd.

Comic by xkcd.

Carnival of Evolution No. 30

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Photo by ricmcarthur.

Or maybe it should be Carnival of Evolution XXX? Anyway, it’s online at This Scientific Life, and full of good posts from all over the evolution-inclined science blogosphere. Go check it out!

Science online, Black Friday edition

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There may be more going on in those tiny heads than you think. Photo by shadarington.
  • Attention, bacon fans. Epileptic seizures can be controlled by an ultra-high-fat diet. (NY Times)
  • A few mg of prevention. Men who have sex with men can substantially reduce their risk of HIV infection by taking antiretroviral drugs. (NY Times, Dan Savage; original article in The New England Journal of Medicine)
  • Oh, now you tell us. Turkeys have enough social intelligence to recognize other turkeys from their own social group. (Jason Goldman for Scientific American)
  • Mmm. Cranberry genomics. Jason Goldman rounds up Thanksgiving-themed online science writing. (The Thoughtful Animal)
  • Meta-blogging science? The fellows behind Obesity Panacea have launched a blog about science blogging. (Science of Blogging)
  • A pithy comment is beyond the scope of the present linkfest. Incremental publication can be a good thing. (DrugMonkey)
  • Well, that was easy. A simple 15-minute writing assignment closes the “gender gap” between male and female physics students. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
  • To be fair, science is pretty difficult. The leadership of the American Anthropological Association is moving to remove references to science from the organization’s mission statement. (Fetishes I Don’t Get)

And finally, Robert Krulwich narrates a beautifully animated short film about an enduring mystery of human behavior: our inability to walk in a straight line without help from visual cues.