Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The willow is too close to the house.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Consistently wrong since 2002

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

T R E 4 5 O N

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Knowable Magazine

Knowable Magazine

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Just started publishing, a new resource.

 

Annual Reviews is a publisher that you probably never heard of, but which is important to many areas of science. They publish yearly volumes, all of which are titled Annual Reviews of _______.

The blank includes

  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Animal Biosciences
  • Anthropology
  • Cell and Developmental Biology
  • Computer Science
  • Earth and Planetary Sciences
  • Food Science and Technology
  • Medicine
  • Physical Chemistry (YAY!)
  • Statistics and Its Application

And many others. Each volume includes articles about developments during the year. They are very technical, not the kind of thing you read for recreation.

Having all those resources is a good basis for a general science magazine, which seems to be the point of Knowable. The articles I checked out were long and fairly dense, the kind of thing I used to like in Scientific American before it decided to become more like Popular Science.

Check it out.

 

Reader Interactions

54Comments

  2. 2.

    The Moar You Know

    They are very technical, not the kind of thing you read for recreation.

    You don’t know me very well. This is EXACTLY the kind of thing I read for fun.

  8. 8.

    scav

    Sort of a longform Science News? Is this devastatingly tempting kibble for the internal geek or nerd (I lean for the latter but usually get confused).

  12. 12.

    scav

    @Cheryl Rofer: Oooooo, Science News is known catnip, this would be more of a solid buffet. And with Snowflakes and Ripening (go green shoulders!) already? I knew I’d be in trouble.

  13. 13.

    Ken Pidcock

    Thank you for the link. Annual Reviews are a tremendous resource, so this would seem to be real quality content.

  14. 14.

    ProfDamatu

    Oooh, excellent! Annual Reviews Anthropology rocks, so I’m really looking forward to checking this out. Thanks for the heads-up!

  16. 16.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    Do they ever write about Bigfoot? Cuz that shit’s real. Oh, and have they tackled the tides or magnets yet, because most conservatives really seem to be struggling there.

  17. 17.

    sharl

    Thanks Cheryl; this publication looks like it has promise! I’ve already notified my vast army small handful of twitter followers.

    It looks like they are currently funded by grant money. If that is meant to last just long enough to get them going, I hope they’ll garner sufficient interest to build up a sustainable base of paying subscribers (assuming that’s the long range plan).

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    Looks good. I like how the web page is designed and organized.

    Hmmm. I must admit that I have some reservations with the article on taxation.

  19. 19.

    ruemara

    Thanks! I do scicomm for a living and like reading and reinterpreting things for the masses. You never go wrong having extra sources.

  21. 21.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Mike J: I am thinking out some things on Twitter. I hope to be able to wind things up into a post or maybe a series of posts. Right now the Twitter series is kind of loose and needs a lot of work to become a post. I’m seeing some ways to pull it together.

  22. 22.

    Humboldtblue

    Is there one for beer, weed and boobs? Because the ones you listed all seem like really really hard subjects and I speak for the dumb people who hang around here who come for the jokes the sexy ladies and the Pabst.

  23. 23.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    Magazines like Popular Magazine are more for lay people. I didn’t know Scientific American was scientific journal at one time.

  24. 24.

    MattF

    You’ve got to do several hard things to get a general-purpose scientific magazine right. You’ve got to be accurate– specifically, you’ve got to get the details right. And how do you handle scientific controversies? Science and Nature are the big dogs– how does what you do relate to what they do? What happens when you get it wrong? Are authors all in-house? Are authors allowed to (gasp) include an equation or (double gasp) two?

    I’d love to see a good, new, more-or-less general scientific magazine (like what Scientific American used to be), but to assess it, I’d have to see them cover something that I know about.

  25. 25.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Scientific American once relied primarily on scientists to write its articles. It had articles on disarmament from people like Hans Bethe, and many other topics like it has now. The difference was that the level of writing was more difficult and the information more detailed. It’s never really been a scientific journal, always for general readers. But the approach has been different at different times.

    And to all you who want to see what is at Knowable, CLICK THRU! Is it that hard?

  30. 30.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Cheryl Rofer: I subscribed to Scientific American back in those days. It was a great read. Not all scientists can write in a popular mode, but the ones who can will go into detail no regular journalist will touch.

  32. 32.

    MattF

    @Matt McIrvin: Right. It’s great to have articles from people who did the work, as the old SciAm did, but explaining technical things to a non-specialist audience is a rare skill.

  33. 33.

    No Drought No More

    The single, greatest blunder by those entrusted with teaching mathematics to my generation- which was damn near criminally irresponsible- was in treating us as guinea pigs in what was preposterously billed as “the new math”. Richard Feyman in his autobiography devotes a entire chapter to his participation if the farce (‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Fineman’). I’m almost bitter the fools prevailed in the subjecting us to their little experiment. Indeed, were I six years old again and able to construct my own curriculum, I would “major” I’m math. I’ve spent a lifetime needing to take off my shoes to count to eleven simply because I was betrayed by idiots, and I will always resent it.

  35. 35.

    MattF

    @No Drought No More: I think the ‘new math’ curriculum was aimed at six-year olds who intended to get Ph.Ds in mathematics. Didn’t help that it was largely taught by people who avoided math.

  41. 41.

    Humboldtblue

    You scientists will appreciate this story, a local Doctor awarded for her excellence.

    Eureka, CA (October 26th, 2017) – Renowned breast cancer researcher and St. Joseph Health Cancer Care Program medical director, Ellen Mahoney M.D., was honored this past weekend with the California Medical Association’s (CMA) most prestigious award, the Frederick K.M. Plessner Memorial Award. The award, which honors the California physician who best exemplifies the ethics and practice of a rural country practitioner, was announced Saturday, October 21st, at CMA’s annual House of Delegates meeting in Anaheim.

    The first of her family to graduate from college, Dr. Mahoney graduated from Stanford Medical School as one of the first woman general surgeons. After completing her residency—also at Stanford—she became the first woman ever to open a private surgical practice in Palo Alto.

    In 2000, Dr. Mahoney “retired” to Humboldt County. When she saw the acute cancer care issues in this remote part of California, she had a vision for comprehensive cancer care for residents of Humboldt so that they could get the same quality of care locally that they would get in Palo Alto.

    “A few years ago, colleagues and I developed a new rural cancer care delivery model so that our patients with complex cancer would receive a standard of coordinated care equal to that of a comprehensive cancer center in any urban area,” said Mahoney. “With big dreams, limited resources, and terrific local support, we became very creative in using community resources to help fill our patients’ needs.”

    As medical director of the Cancer Care Program at St. Joseph Health, Humboldt County, Dr. Mahoney continues her commitment to providing care to patients with breast cancer and developing collaborative teams to care for our community, including a partnership with the Stanford Cancer Institute. That relationship helped create a joint videoconference tumor board. Under her leadership, the joint weekly tumor board has become a vibrant, standing-room only demonstration of collaboration and the constant search for each patient’s best possible care.

  42. 42.

    SiubhanDuinne

    specialist, socialism, ambient all contain names of pharmaceuticals, reference to which is forbidden because of The Spam Within. There are many others, I’m sure.

    Wasn’t somebody — the good Quadruple Major, maybe — going to post a list of all the spam words and some of the cromulently normal English words which innocently contain them?

  43. 43.

    Enzymer

    Thanks Cheryl, this looks like a great new resource. Annual Reviews were always a great resource during sudden shifts in research focus (Oh the joys of industrial R&D)

  44. 44.

    Major Major Major Major

    Just LOL’d reading the start of one of the articles:

    For decades, physicists have appreciated the power of sandwiching layers of different substances to create materials with novel properties. Such sandwiches, called heterostructures because they are not edible, are essential components in a wide range of modern technologies.

  47. 47.

    Gin & Tonic

    @No Drought No More: If you’re talking about mid-1960’s era, SRA “new math”, I loved, loved, loved it. Its primary drawback, IMO, was not the material, but the fact that it was required to be taught by the median criminally math-averse elementary school teacher. New math made sense to me then, and it made even more sense in retrospect when I was getting my BS in math.

  50. 50.

    sharl

    I just read through the article “How Snowflakes Grow.” The topic is a subcategory of the field of crystal growth, which I know a little something about, though largely on an intuitive level (mixture of art and science, basically).

    It’s an aesthetically lovely piece, in my opinion, and gave me an opportunity to see just how sciencey they were gonna get on a topic I’ve had some exposure to. They kept it pretty light – no discussion of crystal nucleation, for example (an area I always found hairy as hell to understand) – while addressing other factors controlling crystal (snowflake) growth, such as temperature and concentration (humidity) of the precursor solute (water vapor).

    Readers wanting to know more of the science behind snowflake formation can click on the link at the bottom of the piece, which opens up the review article “Physical Dynamics of Ice Crystal Growth” (no paywall) from the publisher’s journal Annual Review of Materials Research. Unlike the Knowable piece, there is detailed scientific discussion of snowflake crystal nucleation and growth there. In fact the detail is likely to be too much for the lay reader; it was for me, despite having some collateral background in the topic. It’s likely I could puzzle it all out, given time and motivation; but will I and other lay readers bother to do so, and will that matter to the publisher and editors? Obviously I don’t know their business model.

    I wonder if the publishers have a specific readership demographic in mind, or if the feedback from their initial articles will be used to feel their way toward a readership that can sustain them for the long term. In the case of the Snowflake article, the difference between the Knowable piece and the linked scientific review article was like the difference between the shallow end and the deep end of a swimming pool, with a precipitous fall-off in depth mid-way. On some scientific topics – I suspect crystal growth is one – there won’t be a multiplicity of articles available that offers a comfortable easy-to-difficult gradation of ease of reading. But I suppose a reader whose curiosity is piqued always has the option of google searching, with all the risks that come with that (veracity, rigor, etc.).

    I hope this effort succeeds.

    (minor edits made)

  52. 52.

    adog

    I am a die-hard lurker (who rarely comments), but this post is right up my alley. One of my top-cited papers is in Annual Reviews of Analytical Chemistry. I also had a more recent one in Annual Reviews of Biomedical Engineering. BJ Nerds unite!

  53. 53.

    joel hanes

    Yow! Just the kind of stuff I love.

    I’m delighted to note that the current Knowable front page has an article on one of my obsessions:
    the replacement of grain agriculture based on annual species with a new grain regime based on perennials
    (plant once; harvest for many years, as orchardists do today)
    Farming would be a _lot_ better for the environment if grain farmers did not need to till
    and replant every year.
    The article includes a shout-out to Wes Jackson and The Land Institute of Salinas KS,
    who are about halfway through a fifty-year research project to develop just such a
    perennial crop regime, one that would also require much less fertilizer and no
    annual application of pesticides or herbicides.
    The Land Institute runs on a shoestring, and (if we survive global warming) bids fair
    to help make the world a much more ecologically-healthy place.
    (Wendell Berry works with these folks, which may tell you something about which
    species of hippie we’re discussing.)
    Your small donation WILL make a difference.
    https://landinstitute.org/

  54. 54.

    joel hanes

    @Gin & Tonic:

    If this is the New Math that started over with sets and the elements of number theory, and went on to math in arbtrary bases
    (binary, trinary, duodecimal, hexadecimal) I too loved it — but I had to tutor my own sixth-grade teacher, because she Did Not Get It.

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