Blog Carnivals

Time grinds ever on patiently milling exciting potential into missed opportunity. I’m probably not a January person. Making it more bearable are a few blog carnivals.

I’ve been working on and off, more off than on, on a poem about publication by press release. I’ve decided that I’m not willing to take it’ll be published in full in the future as an excuse for poorly written up ideas. If it’s good enough to publicise then it’s good enough to critique and if the evidence isn’t there it’s hardly my fault. To large extent I’ve been beaten to it. The Skeptics’ Circle 78 is as usual a collection of interesting stuff, including The Digital Cuttlefish on keeping an open mind. It’s much better than my poem will be, even getting double-blind tests in stylishly while mine is more ham-fisted. Nonetheless I will be putting up my poem soon, because it’s January and I don’t see why I should be the only person suffering.

Also online is Four Stone Hearth 32 at Testimony of the Spade. One of the highlights is an increasingly passionate debate about the relationship between genetics and history. It’s something I plan to get back to, because while I think genetics does have something to tell us about the past, the questions historians, archaeologists and geneticists are asking are often quite different. Archaeologists can have an embarrassingly simplistic view of genetics, but the same is often true when geneticists study history. At the moment that seems to be a debate which requires someone with the time to strap themselves to a flagpole in a thunderstorm and right now I don’t have the time.

Carnival of Space 37 is live at Colony Worlds. There’s plenty there to read. Highlight for me is this reflective post on Cumbrian Sky which talks about the lack of images from the Messenger mission to Mercury.