900 of the best

If you’re in need of science reading to kill time, the list of submissions for Open Laboratory 2011 might help. At a little shy of 900 entries, it ought to you going for a while…

Open Laboratory asks bloggers and readers for the best of science blogging over a year, judges them, with their selection edited and polished, presented as an anthology of 50 articles, a poem, a cartoon and an item of art-work (cover), in print or electronic form.

Aside from myself, local bloggers with submissions include The Atavism (David Winter), and The chicken or the egg (Hilary Miller). Good luck!

(Let me know if I missed someone out.)

I have no idea how the judges are going to cope with reading this lot! Let’s see. Giving a judge 15 minutes to read an average article, times a little shy of 900… that’s about 225 hours straight of reading. About 6 working weeks. Hmm. I’m guessing they have some cunning scheme that shares the load around the judges. Still a big job -all of it voluntary.

If it were me, I’d ask that bloggers assist the judges by limiting each blog to only, say, five entries. Stingy though, huh?

Another way you could look at it is how long it would take to write all these. I don’t even what to try calculate that.

Local entries include:

Does a forty thousand year old finger point to another human species? (The Atavism)

Sensitivity, specificity and predictive power (The Atavism)

Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease: too good a match for the immune system (The chicken or the egg)

Book sales, frumpy readers, and mental rotation of book titles (Code for life)

Rubella, not a benign disease if experienced during early pregnancy (Code for life)