I’ve just been spammed by the American Chemical Society. The spam starts:

Polymorphism Articles from Crystal Growth & Design

Based on your previously published work related to polymorphism, we thought you might be interested in these recently published articles:

and then lists a bunch of articles about crystals. Something that has nothing to do with my work – I don’t even take sugar in my coffee!

Because I’m not a chemist, I’ve no idea if this is a reputable society, or a bunch of jerks. I’m leaning towards the latter, but can anyone fill me in?

Over at Myrmecos, Alex Wild was musing about blogging about peer-reviewed research.
One of his commenters, Psi WaveFunction, commented

I don’t get the whole peer review worship going on in the general public as well as academia. It’s almost as if people in the whole WANT to keep scientific knowledge locked up accessible to few and practiced by even fewer.

This got me wondering – why do we consider peer reviewed research to be important? I’d actually suggest that peer review is of secondary importance, so I’ll discuss that later (if I remember). So, why do we need a scientific literature? Well, here are my half-formed thoughts.

This was another post, but I’m not sure what happens when you save rather than publish (there was a bug that screwed things up). I created it as a new post, but thought I’d do something with this one.

Admit it. Next February you all want to read read about the frozen wastes of Antarctica. Well, if you want to help you can.

Grrlscientist has entered a competition for a blogger to go on a cruise to Antarctica, and blog about it. And take photos. And probably fall over and break her arm.

Anyway, you should all go and vote for her (you’ll have to register). and then tell all your friends to vote for her too. Do it, or all the penguins will be sad.

Sorry, I’m the only one up. The rest are still in bed, crying because you wouldn’t help Grrl visit us.

It was Earth Day on April 22rd, and Mike Dunford started a blog meme around this. As you can see, I am (ahem) a bit late on this. I was so late that I decided to do this 2 months after Earth day.

ahem

Anyway, as I’m so late on this anyway, why not use it as an opportunity to see how we’ve all done over the last few months to make the environment a better place.

Anyway, Mike asked us all about three things we could do to help save the earth. Here’s what he asked, and my responses:

Via Snowflake, and others, and because it’s Saturday, here’s my cyborg name:

Get Your Cyborg Name

Someone at The Guardian is trying to stir up conflict. They have an article up that claims that dogs are smarter than cats. a boffin (dressed, no doubt, in a lab coat) tested cats’ abilities to work out how to drag treats on string towards them. On the basis of this test she concluded that “cats do not understand cause-and-effect connections between objects”.

The Beast begs to differ. He knows when one object goes into the kitchen, there’s a high chance that the fridge will be opened:

None of us really has anything better to do, do we? So why not follow Grrlscientist’s lead and find out which Science Scouts badges you have earned.

I wonder. I’m sat on a bus between Tallinn and Tartu, and yes. It does have its own wifi. Just to prove it, here are some photos:

I’m now sat on a ferry going to Tallinn (conference in Tartu, in southern Estonia). It has a wireless connection (yay!), but it’s a bit slow. Which means that the html gets confused. So, the comments in Henry’s latest post look like this on the screen: