Miniblog

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  Blog Roll How-To
  

  Gred Laden has a great introduction to and how-to on blog rolls, including some choice DIY bits of code for making your own javascript powered link list. Greg's method seems a little cumbersome to me, but I agree that the third party services leave a lot to be desired even though I used blogrolling.com back when this was a Drupal powered site. Personally, for Wordpress anyway, I like the Better Blogroll plugin.

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  She's left, she's right, she rocks
  

  ...and she's a year older. Happy birthday Blue Gal.

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  Coming soon...
  

  Keep a watch out for Neural Gourmet's exclusive interview with the Mars Phoenix Lander. That's right, we went out of our way, about 35 million miles out of our way to be exact, to talk the robotic pioneer herself. Why bother talking to those stuffy scientists when you can go direct to the source? We'll have the full interview in just a couple of days.

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  Periodic Table of Videos
  

  A very cool periodic table of the elements with each element getting it's own video talking about and demonstrating it's unique properties, produced by the University of Nottingham. I love stuff like this that manages to squeeze real information into a compact, entertaining format. H/T to Andy.

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  Sir Clive Sinclair interview
  

  BBC Radio 4 has an absolutely delightful interview with British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair, best known in the states as the progenitor of the ZX-80, the first $99 computer.

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  Kid and cholesterol
  

  What's the clinical evidence that kids should be taking cholesterol-lowering drugs? Not much according to Junkfood Science.

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  The Day The Earth Stood Still trailer
  

  The trailer for the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is up on Apple Trailers. Despite the whole Christian allegory thing, TDTESS is one of my favorite movies of all time so I both fear and anticipate the release of this film to see what they've done with it.
  

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  Skeptics Down Under
  

  The 90th meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is taking place at The Millenium Project.
  

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  Your Brain Lies To You
  

  That's the title of an excellent op-ed in last Friday's NY Times by Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience. Wang briefly lays out some of the ways our brains select and mold the information we take in to accommodate our mental models, emotional attachments and beliefs. I'd like to think that people would be better critical thinkers if they understood how and to what extent our mental apparatus is simply faulty.
  

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  Belated carnival announcements
  

  Better late than never I suppose, but here's a sampling of some recent science-y blog carnivals we quite like. Encephalon #48. Tangled Bank #108. 89th Skeptics' Circle. Finally, a new blog carnival is getting started focusing on classic science papers: The Giant's Shoulder's.