HAPPY NEW YEAR! BUT FIRST, A WORD FROM 2011. Yes, those annual best-of lists are widely mocked. But let's be honest. They are entertaining. They can even be useful, filling in gaps and generating material for science-writing ToDo lists. And most important, they can generate many pleasurable hours of Writing Avoidance. It's Writing Avoidance of the best kind, too: Writing Avoidance you can classify as Research for your own science writing. Reading this stuff is, therefore, Work. Completely guilt-free. It certainly was for me.
So here's a roundup of selected roundups of last year's blog posts on matters of science.
LET'S BEGIN WITH LISTS OF LISTS. At the Gleaming Retort, John Rennie delightfully relieved me of work by compiling a very long list of bloggers who published "best" lists. These frequently resurrected their own work, but in a selfless display of seasonal generosity, sometimes they comprised best posts by other bloggers. Rennie's post can, all by itself, supply many hours of no-guilt Writing Avoidance.
Knight Science Journalism Tracker Charlie Petit agglomerated a list of lists too, in this case lists of the top science stories of the year. John Dupuis collected lists of what he calls the best sciencey books at Confessions of a Science Librarian. Find his 2011 list of sciencey book lists here.
NEXT, LISTS OF BESTS, MOST POPULAR, ETC. Beginning with health, at the Well blog Anahad O'Connor assembled a list of most popular medical topics on various search engines in 2011. At Patient POV, Laura Newman lists her best posts of 2011. The list is based, she says, on discussion, feedback, and commentary from readers and bloggers. At the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, Katherine Hobson also lists the blog's best. Posts, she notes, were "chosen by subject matter, quirk factor or just because they tickled us." My selection criteria here exactly.
His list of biggest science stories of 2011, John Timmer pointed out at Ars Technica, comprised many topics that were still developing. So we can expect more of them this year, too. A post from Scienceline at NYU's science, health, and environmental reporting program lists staff picks of the best single science posts from around the Web.
Blogs linked to 2011 noteworthy videos as well as text. At his Tree of Life blog, evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen presents an array of what he calls humorous videos. A couple of them, alas, are too tragic to be funny. See in particular this clip from the Daily Show. I picked up the link to Eisen's blog at Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle listed his must-see science videos of 2011. They included a bizarre and somewhat alarming conversation between two of Cornell's AI robots — alarming because, while funny, it was not unlike some arguments I've witnessed (or, yikes, participated in.)
See also Corning's disquisition on the future of glass, and let us hope Homo sap endures long enough to see this transparent future for real. iPhone schmiPhone, the phone I lust for is that notional glass phone.
"BEST OF" LISTS ON SEX AND GENDER. A Kate Clancy post on "Ladybusiness" at Context and Variation rounded up several bloggers' comments on gender matters. Quite terrific stuff, but then I would say that, wouldn't I? NCBI ROFL is a periodic feature of Discoblog. ROFL collects papers from Pubmed on topics that amuse the compilers. These mostly concern sexual anatomy and sexual behavior, so you'll want to hurry right over to its recent list of its 10 most popular 2011 posts.
POSTS ABOUT MISBEHAVIOR IN THE SCIENCE WORLD AND WEATHER. At Embargo Watch, Ivan Oransky honors organizations that have revised their policies toward science journos as a result of his critiques. He also vows to write more Embargo Watch posts; in 2011 he was pulled away by a heavy load of work at his other blog, Retraction Watch.
What he doesn't say, although my hunch is it's a perfect alibi, is that it was a heavy load at Retraction Watch because there were so many papers retracted last year. Let us choose to regard that high volume of retractions as ridding the literature of bogus science — and, therefore, as Progress. Peruse a Retraction Watch roundup of about-faces in 2011 here. It numbers more than 400. Pretty impressive. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that there were fewer retractions from a couple of what Ivan calls the "glamor journals" — the likes of Cell and Nature — than in 2010. Science, however, bounded from two retractions in 2010 to five last year.
Yes, your amateur assessment is correct. 2011 was a badly weird year, weatherwise. Jeff Masters tells the awful tales at Climate Progress. He toted up nearly 3 dozen weather events that cost more than a billion dollars each, and selected a Top Ten list that contains eleven events, plus several that get honorable mention, which is a discombobulating way of putting it. Number 1 is the East African drought and famine. It has killed more than 30,000 people, but has gotten little publicity.
THE RETURN OF OF FASTER-THAN-LIGHT NEUTRINOS — AND TIMELINES.. Proving John Timmer correct, 2012 opens with topics from last year. A few weeks ago I discussed the possibility of neutrinos violating precepts laid down by Lord Einstein. At Basic Space, Kelly Oakes has now made following this developing story easy as pi by putting together a timeline, replete with links to the original paper, pieces about it, and more. Best viewed with the free online timeline software at dipity.com.
Easy as pi for us, that is. Not, I suspect, so easy for Oakes. Using Dipity to put together a timeline to illuminate a continuing science-writing saga was pioneered last year by the redoubtable blogger Ed Yong and discussed at length here. It's a brilliant way to help tell a tale, in Yong's case about stem cells. Not least, it's also a huge help to the likes of us science writers when we must play catch-up.
But timelines are an enormous amount of work for the assembler, and not necessarily paid work either. And it's open-ended work, because an ongoing story is, well, ongoing. Oakes vows to keep adding to the neutrino timeline. We can only be grateful, but it's potentially a staggering commitment. With no end in sight.
.png)
