Bee Policy

I really will try to start updating again someday. Meanwhile, the pelagic sea slug wins for best sea creature, and also for sea creature that looks most like a star-nosed mole while still actua...

https://beepolicy.com/2007/03/unquiescing-briefly-to-mention-creature.html

Besides being picturesque, temperate, clean, charming, and Canadian, it's also the home of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique . If you are "possibly p...

https://beepolicy.com/2007/02/as-if-you-needed-another-reason-to-love.html

God, I know, right? Been a while. I remember there being a poll on ScienceBlogs about how people managed to do their high-level scientific or academic work and still blog all the time, and I wis...

https://beepolicy.com/2007/01/if-im-not-posting-whatever-will-you.html

Mostly I keep Truth Tables and Bee Policy relatively separate -- what does logic have to do with science anyway, right? But I've just posted a critique of a New York Times op-ed that is relevan...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/10/bad-logic-meets-good-science.html

Okay, not your mom. My mom. But the formula stands, and that means that local geeks and nerds should get their butts to Bar Pilar on October 2nd for Café Scientifique. (I know, it's Yom Kippur. ...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/09/beer-science-your-mom-awesome.html

Apropos of my last post, I was a little disturbed to read a huge article about this new book The Female Brain in Sunday's WaPo. Like any book of slightly distorted science that plays into popula...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/09/be-quiet-louann-brizendine.html

I haven't been very assiduous about keeping up with blogs, since I'm sort of doing two jobs right now; when I was just doing writing/research/legwork for the marketing team, I had some free time ...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/09/girls-science-and-girls-doing-science.html

Stop the presses, fire the judges, dig up Terri Schiavo, and burn your living will: They've found brain activity in a vegetative patient . It's a great day for real Americans, which means people ...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/09/discovery-ripe-for-misinterpretation.html

The inimitable Jonathan Coulton has penned a touching tribute to Pluto , narrated by the non-planet's moon Charon: > Let them shuffle the numbers > Watch them come and go > We’re ...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/plutonic-serenade_28.html

Well, Pluto, you had a good run . But if we let you into the club, we'd have to start letting everyone in , and then it's not a very good club, is it? So you'll have to give back your monogrammed...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/thanks-for-playing-pluto.html

I blogged a rather hurried apology to dark matter yesterday, but today I read Boing Boing's collection of links , none of them to the somewhat science-eliding Post article. Here's the original NA...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/more-on-dark-matter.html

It appears that I owe dark matter an apology. I may be a physicist only by osmosis, but I'm a science historian by (undergraduate) training, so I've studied the fall of a lot of good-seeming idea...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/im-sorry-i-called-you-epicycle.html

I'm currently entering reviews of our books into the database, working against a six-month backlog. Nobody here can believe that they originally intended to have me on for only three weeks -- the...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/string-theory-zen.html

Yesterday I got my first actual religious dissenter in the comments. She is, by all appearances, a well-meaning young lady who happens to think that the Big Bang is "fake" (a usage I'm not famili...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/having-your-faith-and-eating-it-too_02.html

We sell this shirt in the NAP bookstore, where I am working for half of today (making three times what I used to make for working in a bookstore, so I can't really complain). The bookstore mana...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/08/all-of-it.html

I'll ruin the lingering aftereffects of yoga if I read any more of this, but anyone who's hankering for a good dose of misguided internet idiocy should check out the Flying Spaghetti Monster hate...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/07/making-baby-spaghetti-cry.html

I am temporarily doing some publicity work for my old press , which means I have the capacity to send people review copies if they really are going to review them. One of the nice things about wo...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/07/free-books-for-bloggers.html

The job search has been unfruitful and frustrating, a lot more frustrating than a job search needs to be even in the current economy, so I haven't felt up to posting. (I'm having a hard time even...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/07/trespassers-will.html

On Iowahawk , guest blogger Sen. Ted Stevens follows up his recent explanation of the dangers of net neutrality by explaining how the internet can bring chaos into your home or office . Basical...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/07/internet-ruins-senate-naptime.html

I got into an argument recently about whether, if Einstein hadn't described the theory of relativity when he did, someone else would have inevitably done so at some later point. The claim had bee...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/07/is-science-sandwich.html

For complicated reasons, I suspect that this editorial was emailed to me by accident, but it's a pretty thought-provoking and worthwhile read nonetheless. The author, Harvard psych professor Dan...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/07/global-warming-lacks-mustache.html

A few years ago, I was at a restaurant with a friend, and we were getting routinely ignored by the waitstaff. So I proceeded to stare intently at the back of the waiter's neck. He came over in a ...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/06/making-eyes-at-each-other.html

PZ has put up an amusing repost about fish and spider penises . The findings may surprise you. I find the spider penis-analogues a little creepy -- something about translucent genitalia doesn't d...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/06/weve-got-armadillos-in-our-trousers.html

While Dan made his QSOs this weekend, I read QED. Overall I found it pretty congenial, though one or two of the metaphors were actually too simplified for me -- I could understand how I was supp...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/06/oh-richard-feynman-we-love-you-get-up.html

So I haven't posted since last Friday, but I'll be extending my break for at least another few days. Basically, it has become impossible to ignore the fact that the internet is full of jerks, and...

https://beepolicy.com/2006/06/internet-and-i-are-fighting.html