Mar 8, 2007

Looking for more science blogs

Posted in Science at 1:00 pm by David Bradley

Science blogs are accumulating at an alarming rate out there in the blogosphere. Some are awful (ah, ah, hold yer tongue!), others are humourous/informative/sexy (del. as applicable). Here are just a few that I’ve visited recently and found useful in one way or another:

Everyday Scientist – an oxymoron if ever I heard one, this blog remarks on the unremarkable, an intuitive impossibility on a par with wave-particle duality, the very act of remarking making the unremarkable at once remarked upon and therefore making it remarkable and by turns then endowing it with a remarkability equal to 1.

A Synthetic Environment – covers medicinal and organic chemistry, science history and “more nonsense”. It’s the nonsense I’m interested in, interesting as med and org chem are, but who’d have thought of listing the Top 5 chemists who died in really lousy ways?

Lamentations on Chemistry is another intriguing spin around the chemical blogosphere, providing meditations on science and politics. But, who has got time for meditation with all these superb blogs to read? Time to ponder a personal domain though rather than hanging on the WordPress hosting apron strings.

And, here are a few old favourites – UsefulChem, Chemical Forums, OntheRoad, QDIS blog.

Incidentally, it was rather gratifying to discover that Sciencebase is ranked seventh second of all the thousands of chemistry blogs out there by the Chemical Blogspace site, the readibility of my blog is apparently on a par with Newsweek, which can’t be bad. Compare that with the wonderful Molecule of the Day site, which is as readable as Gravity’s Rainbow author Thomas Pynchon or the RSC’s Chemistry World blog, which is like reading a manual for Taiwanese DVD player, allegedly, and who am I to argue?

By the way, if you want to subscribe to any of these blogs remember to click the little orange rss newsfeed icon in your browser. Firefox will add the feed to your bookmarks and grab the headlines as they appear, alternatively, if the feed pops up a subscription page a la Feedburner you can add them to your Google Reader, My Yahoo page, Bloglines, etc etc.