Mid-week links and a milestone

I have too many interesting articles to read and too little time to write… here a few articles I can recommend, and a milestone. Of sorts.

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  It’s officially sex week over at the Loom. Given Carl Zimmer is one of several science writers who also blog that last year brought us far more than we really needed to know about duck penises, so this is worrying. He starts out with fungal sex; reading between the lines viruses may turn up somewhere along the way. (You’ll have to ask him if he is going to include Aves.)

• Science writer Deborah Blum, who blogs at Speakeasy Science, has a piece in Slate, The Raw Milk Deal, about the health issues of drinking raw milk. New Zealanders, being the big milk drinkers we are, might want to compare an American science writer’s perspective.
• Ben Goldacre has put up a podcast of the British government’s response to homeopathy, a topic I’ve frequently written about in the past. It’s long (30 mins), so try this when you have time.
• Dave Munger writes about plagiarism, science writing and blogging, including what happened to Brian Switek’s article. I fairly regularly get posts copied by the robot plagiarists that he mentions in passing. (These copy posts in their entirety onto websites set up to show off advertising.) I’ve also had an advocacy group copy an article wholesale, which I was less impressed with. (I let them know that I didn’t approve in my comments but got no reply.
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  There’s $US500 up for a science/medicine poem. The $500 seems to be coming straight out of Dr. Charles’ pocket. Entries close August 31st; there are 14 entries already. Go for it!

  Molecular biology is getting it’s own blog carnival. Fellow bloggers, here and elsewhere, should consider contributing.

• Yet another school board in the USA considers if they should teach creationism. Will it never end? Surely the USA needs to insist that high school teachers have university qualifications and that only qualified people (read: scientists, well-qualified senior teachers) can determine science curricula? Also as usual, the comments section far exceeds the original articles many times over… plenty of entertainment for those that like that sort of thing.
• The scienceblogs PepsiCoGate has rolled on too long to sustain my interest, but Newsweek has now chimed in belatedly with a thoughtful piece mainly about the institutional blogs, which appeared before the fuss. I expressed a little wariness of these at the time they first appeared, and I agree the SETI Institute blog is, initially, the most in the open spirit that I hoped would develop.

In fact, by the time you are reading this I’ll probably have passed it.

Let’s see, 1472 approved comments. That means for every genuine comment I get about 34 spam comments. If that ~78% of all email is spam is a useful guide, I suppose that’s not too bad.

Other articles on Code for life:

Who has the most bioinformatics scientists?

Vitalism ideology in chiropractic advertising

Consumer brain-computer interface

When ideas have sex