The science of collaborative tagging networks, Mars colonised in a mere millennium, food/books metaphor…

• 1 – Tag, You’re It: Scientists Describe Collaborative Tagging Sites like Del.icio.us

  “A team of physicists [...] sought to determine the underlying statistical properties of this new information paradigm by studying the behaviors of tags [...] on the social bookmarking/collaborative tagging sites del.icio.us and Connotea.”

  (tags: internet web behaviour tagging tags research science bookmarking networks social del.icio.us)

• 2 – A picture is worth a single photon

  “A single photon has been used to create and store a nearly perfect copy of an entire image at a U.S. laboratory, in an important step toward light-based data storage.” Quantum behaviour has its uses after all!

  (tags: innovation physics science properties wave quantum photon single storage image)

• 3 – Report Has ‘Smoking Gun’ on Climate

  “Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.” I predict that denial is not going anywhere yet.

  (tags: science report gun smoking warming global change climate)

• 4 – Colonize Mars Within 1,000 Years?

  “Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society has developed a five step plan towards conquering the red planet and enabling humanity to establish a second home within the solar system.”

  (tags: Zubrin Robert time-scale atmosphere breathable science climate terraforming colony Mars space)

• 5 – Robot Of The Day: Chaos Keeps Coming And Coming

  “Chaos is well-named because when this little guy can’t get up an obstacle he slaps those pointed appendages wildly until something sharp sticks and he moves on.” Pretty impressive little device.

  (tags: technology obstacle all-terrain robot Chaos)

• 6 – What to Know Before You Ask Me to Read Your (Unpublished) Work

  Scalzi will not look at your manuscript; here’s why. I imagine that most of these reasons apply to other writers too.

  (tags: reasons refusal manuscripts unpublished critique writer author Scalzi)

• 7 – Food and books

  “Books can be broken down into four classes: popcorn, steak, caviar, and celery.” An intriguing metaphor, via SF Signal. Can one live on a diet of steak and caviar?

  (tags: sustenance literary metaphor food novels style literature reading books)

• 8 – Brains can tell the difference between metaphor and irony

  “…our semantic distinction between irony and metaphor actually corresponds to real differences in how the brain processes those statements.” Well, *that* was counter-intuitive…

  (tags: neuroscience metaphor irony semantics language flow blood MRI scans psychology cognition brain)