Coala vs Man

Coala vs Man
Originally uploaded by highglosshighs.

It's Friday, so I am sharing my favourite image ever. Make sure you check out the comments on flickr too.

Dutch banknotes

Having lived in Holland for 7 years and seen the Euro takeover the Guilder, I have a lot of sympathy for those Dutch people who mourn the passing of their beautiful banknotes. No-one could truly love the Euro notes, with depictions of non-existent bridges - but I have yet to meet anyone who did not instantly love the old 50 guilder note.

Read more here about the full set of notes and their designer.

New PMC blog (& CC & BMC)

OK - they're here! New official blogs for PhysMath Central, BioMed Central & Chemistry Central.

This will probably mean a decrease in postings on here for matters PhysMath-y, but I'll duplicate postings on both blogs where appropriate.

Why not subscribe to all three and see what happens behind the doors of an open-access publishing company?

Awful poo lady gets long-overdue come-uppance

When 2 of your favourite bloggers gang-up against someone you have very little time for, the results are synergistically satisfying. The target in this case is 'Dr' Gillian McKeith. I had the misfortune of reading one of her books that my wife had left lying around in the bathroom. Let's just say I was sat in the best place to enjoy McKeith's writing.

• Ben Goldacre in The Guardian on Gillian McKeith - 'A menace to science'
• Tom Coates on Ben Goldacre on Gillian McKeith
  

More CERN videos

Robert Scoble is continuing his physics videos series(!) by visiting CERN recently. Look out for another great set of videos from him soon. But Charbax got there before him:

Visit to ATLAS at CERN

Science & Web2.0 - slowly coming together.

Sometimes it seems there are not enough hours in the day. I had planned to spend a part of this weekend having a good look at Yahoo's Pipes (as it were) and seeing how I could integrate RSS feeds form various scientific sources - including BioMed Central - and see what happened as a result. However, domesticity is a cruel mistress and instead I spent the weekend painting, painting and re-painting and touching-up bits I missed the first 3 times.

However, the weekend did throw up several blog postings which indicate that science journalists and bloggers (if not the scientists themselves yet) are noticing that there might just be something useful in this interactive web2.0 thingy. I think we have only just touched the surface with what is possible, but whether it is practical, desirable and useful, remains to be seen. The inherent conservatism of the typical scientist is one thing not in favour of blogs and social networks being rapidly adopted [edit: for research purposes/collaborations], but the newer generation of scientists who have grown up with MySpace and their own blogs may be about to change things fast.

• The value of blogs in academia - Flip Tomato
• Using Twitter productively - Lifehack [I'd also be interested to hear if anyone is using MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, or any other social network environment for scientific purposes]
• One link, many link, social link - Dave Bacon, The Quantum Pontiff

Update: Seems I missed one good link - this recent editorial in Nature Medicine.

Nearly forgot...

...we also have a video up on our site - an excellent interview with Jens Vigen, librarian at CERN, on open access & physics publishing. Big thanks to the BioMed Central team for this one.

Watch this

One of my favourite bloggers at Microsoft was Robert Scoble - but now he is working for PodTech and seems to spend an inordinate amount of time visiting successful companies and interviewing the movers and shakers behind the scenes. This time his chosen 'company' is SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator team - maybe because they put up the US's first website, but the conversations with the team at SLAC are interesting and diverse and cover not only the birth of the web (both at SLAC ande CERN), but also much about particle physics too.

The videos are kind of long (first one is 76minutes!) but ideal for those of you with video iPods and long journeys to work.

Scoble Show: SLAC (7 Feb 2007)
Video tour of SLAC

Winter's here at last

February
Originally uploaded by Chris Leonard.

Having spent last weekend fixing the front door (which meant having it open for a few hours in glorious sunshine) - this is the sight that greeted me when I opened that same door this morning. Seems that winter now starts in February.

APS Meeting in April

No time for real blogging right now, we are busy getting on with things for PhysMath Central. Hopefully we will have something to announce sooner rather than later. Also, for those of you planning to be at the APS meeting in Jacksonville in April, you'll be able to come along and meet us, grab some freebies and may even be offered one of our exclusive staplers! Form an orderly queue.