Feeds and Vanity
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 6th 2007 at 12:00pm
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. According to Google Reader, exactly 65 of them. A lot of those feeds are the rarely updated blogs of friends (or in the case of Angelo and Heather, regularly updated).
The nice thing about Google Reader is that it has a “shared feed” feature, which lets me choose posts out of any of the feeds I’m reading and share them. Those posts get packaged together and displayed, even given their own feed). You can notice that little feed widget on the left side of the screen for my shared posts, too.
On top of the geek and programming blogs and webcomics, there are bunch of feeds I follow that are – for lack of a better word – uncharacteristic. At least, they’re feeds that you probably wouldn’t think I would read. I figured I’d profile them here…
Cognitive Daily
Cognitive Daily is a blog about cognitive psychology, published by Dave and Greta Munger. Greta is a professor of psychology at Davidson College and Dave is a writer. Together they report on peer-reviewed papers in the field of cognitive psychology – stuff like What we hear, how it affects what we see and Insight into how children learn cultural values.
I have no idea why I’m interested in this stuff, but I love it. I suppose on some level, my interest in the subject was piqued with Kathy Sierra’s presentation at CUSEC 2006 (listen to the podcast, though it’s not as good without the visuals). Kathy brought up interesting insights about how pleasing your users, and creating passionate users, is about understanding how humans think and feel and react. Although I know I’m more of a head-buried-under-the-code type of programmers and probably don’t think about users (other than myself) nearly often enough.
Deep Astronomy
I discovered Deep Astronomy thru Digg, when there was a post about How to Destroy the Earth with a Coffee Can. Astronomer Tony Darnell writes about various aspects of astronomy and cosmology, with a lot of tongue in cheek humour that makes it entertaining (and you learn a ton) – like How to Avoid Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Sickness in which he describes the universe as “one very big microwave oven.”
Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog
Retrospectacle is a very recent addition to my feed aggregator. I discovered it when there was a post on microscopic images of beer. Beer is extremely pretty up close. The blog is written by Shelley Batts, a 3rd year PhD candidate who researches hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, in the opes of using it as a therapy for hearing loss. She recently had a post about the basic concepts of hearing that was a great article about the ear and how hearing actually works.
Again, I have no idea why I find this stuff fascinating, but Retrospectacle is definitely an interesting and fun dose of science.
Seed Magazine – I Can’t Believe It’s Science
Astute readers will notice that two of the above three blogs are part of Seed Magazine’s “ScienceBlogs” section. Well surprise, surprise, I subscribe to Seed’s main feed as well. But the only thing I really read from this feed is Maggie Wittlin’s weekly ”I Can’t Believe It’s Science” column which documents interesting and weird sort-of-related-to-science things.
Tenser, said the Tensor
Named after a song from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Tenser, said the Tensor is a blog about linguistics. Unlike more generalized linguablogs like languagehat – which I used to read – Tenser, said the Tensor focuses on linguistics in science fiction. One example is a post about the language of the Children of Tama in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” episode. Linguistics is a subject that’s always interested me to varying degrees. In fact, I probably would have gone into Linguistics or English Literature if I didn’t get accepted into Computer Science when I started university. (Just imagine! Skrud the linguist instead of Skrud the programmer!)
Mind you, I don’t think linguistics and programming are all that different. At some level, you’re still dealing with grammars, syntax and semantics. The only difference is that computer languages are context-free. (Mmmm… finite state automata…)
The Dilbert Blog
The Dilbert Blog is Scott Adams’ blog, and thusly named as he is the cartoonist behind Dilbert. Scott Adams is hilarious. His blog covers tons of things I’m not interested in at all (politics, philosophy, etc.) yet with the delivery of a stand-up comedian at a Just for Laughs gala. Sometimes he posts about current events and warns asexually reproducing Komodo dragons to stop giving our human women ideas. Or he’ll write about a gender test and how ridiculous a test like that might be.
TVInJapan
Finally, there’s TVInJapan. The best thing since prepackaged, sliced bread. TVInJapan is loaded with tons and tons of random, hilarious, interesting and often absurd clips from television in Japan. Clips can be loaded with Ultraman doing the Scatman, or the reproduced-everywhere Hand-made Star Wars. Sometimes there are television commercials with the infectious Tarako Cupie Girls or Superpowered School Girls. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Greased-up movers, Surprise crowds of 100 people chasing random pedestrians and much, much more. On TV. In Japan.
Unfortunately Japan is pretty anal about copyrights and those clips constantly get removed from YouTube, so in order to make sure you really get the most of TVInJapan you definitely need to subscribe to the feed.
And there you have it … a small subset of blogs that I read that have nothing to do with programming – though I guess they could still count as geek blogs given how heavily science-oriented they are.
Enjoy!
