- Southern California is the land of palm trees. But also the land of one sad and miserably lonely coconut palm.
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The Annual Review of Public Health just published an article with a detailed comparison of many kinds of popular diets and dietary choices. Here’s a writeup of this article from the pages of The Atlantic. The upshot is that Michael Pollan turned out to be right, if only by accident: eat unprocessed foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
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You know those stupid quizzes, like “which character are you?” Here are two non-stupid quizzes about biodiversity featured in a post by Holly Menninger.
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Did you know that the football huddle was invented by deaf football players so that the other team wouldn’t steal their signals?
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Charley Krebs and Judy Myers have a provocative blog called Ecological Rants. A post by Krebs that caught my eye was about how we might reconcile classic methods in community ecology with the radically different approaches that microbial ecologists must use to ask the same questions. A conversation on twitter was interesting and well as the comments on the post itself.
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In a literature class, there are times that you or the students might be reading text out loud. So, how do you handle it when the text you are reading is written in dialect?
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It’s wonderful to have quality administrators running things. But, the traits that would make a person a good administrators are also the traits that would inhibit a move into administration. I really liked this list of five reasons that helped Chris Buddle choose to move into admin.
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It’s reassuring that the former Secretary of Homeland Security, now running the University of California system, is sour on online education.
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I thought this site featuring horrible old books found on the shelves of libraries was hilarious.
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A paper just came out in PLOS Biology showing exactly how flies fly. It comes with some spectacular animations of fly thoraxes and the musculature associated with wingbeats. I’ll be psyched to share this the next time I get to teach insect biology.
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Forget doodle polls. When trying to schedule a meeting, When Is Good is way easier and better. This sounds like an ad, but it’s not. I just find doodle to be only slightly more convenient than a thousand emails, and this site is way easier.
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I’d like to bring to your attention the site Memoirs of a SLACer, by a sociologist in a small liberal arts college. That is, if you aren’t already familiar with it, as it’s been around for more than five years!
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For links, thanks to Rebecca Weinberg and Trevor Branch, and also thanks to my departmentmate HK Choi, who got me to start using Markdown. Next, I’m going to get all github and figshare on you, shave down to a handlebar mustache, and pop open a can of PBR.
Small Pond Science 
That link to awful library books reminds me of an old New Yorker essay of Anthony Lane’s, in which he went back and read the top 10 books on the NYTimes fiction bestseller list from a week in 1944. In at least one case he was the first person in decades to check the book out (in no small part because the book was terrible).
That is hilarious. I can only imagine in a few decades, the current NYT bestseller list will read just as hideously. (It does now, but that’s a minority opinion.)
“I can only imagine in a few decades, the current NYT bestseller list will read just as hideously.”
Anthony Lane was way ahead of you on that. The essay I referred to in my previous comment was a follow-up to a previous essay he wrote in 1994. In that 1994 essay, he read the top 10 books on the current NYT bestseller list. He finds that it’s mostly rubbish, but with a few gold nuggets:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/06/27/1994_06_27_079_TNY_CARDS_000368463
The one about the WW II bestsellers is good, but that 1994 essay is *fabulous*, you should totally check it out.
So here’s an idea for a fun blog post: go back and read the “top 10 ecology papers of 1950” or something, and write a post about them.
Only challenge would be identifying the top 10. If you go by total # citations, you might end up reading 10 enduring classics. What you want is more like “the top 10 papers, as perceived by ecologists in 1950”. Not sure how you do that. Maybe you could approximate it by reading the 10 most-cited ecology papers published in 1950, but only counting citations accumulated through 1955 or something? Or maybe just read the lead articles in every 1950 issue of Ecology, Am Nat, JEcol, and JAE?
this is a good friday recommended read about write science news
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/28/news-story-research-paper-wellcome-trust-science-writing-prize?commentpage=1
Thanks for the link to the diet article, which is excellent. Still, most of the evidence is correlational, which has a notorious record in medicine.
I found this article was a good read.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2014_03_24/caredit.a1400076
Should have prefaced the article. Its entitled “Teaching is Powerful credential” and it dabbles in many topics that are discussed here about teaching and landing a job.