Links, links and additional links

I have been swanning off around the globe recently to meet all kinds of interesting physicists in anticipation of the launch of PhysMath Central. That means there has been less activity on the blog than I would like - but hey, that's life. I can't be doing everything at once.

However, there have been some great blog posts recently that I wanted to highlight for my lovely readers:

• Rafael Sidi, from Really Simple Sidi, points out that Nature have an island in Second Life called... Second Nature. I am really interested to see what will happen with this. I suspect it will be visited by very few authors who currently publish in Nature, but maybe they are aiming for the next-generation of scientists who will publish in a few years time?
• An interesting looking series of videos from the Berkman Center on science and (scroll down a little) open source strategies. I confess to not having watched them all yet.
• One of my favourite bloggers, Scott Aaranson, describes what makes a computer scientist a scientist (in answering a somewhat cheeky question from CosmicVariance's Sean Carroll). Sample quote: "the theoretical computer scientist is basically a mathematical logician on a safari to the physical world: someone who tries to understand the universe by asking what sorts of mathematical questions can and can't be answered within it. Not whether the universe is a computer, but what kind of computer it is! Naturally, this approach to understanding the world tends to appeal most to people for whom math (and especially discrete math) is reasonably clear, whereas physics is extremely mysterious."