Since I had to ditch del.icio.us, I’ve been looking for a replacement online bookmarks manager. Furl is useable but poorly designed and unresponsive to feedback, Spurl is better but clunky (I don’t like their folders+tags system), Simpy is good but the RSS feed didn’t work and there were some uptime issues. I’m not sure why I didn’t just mail Otis (Simpy’s developer), since he seems pretty keen on feedback and improvement. I may go back to Simpy yet, but for now I’m sticking with Ma.gnolia. It’s got all the basics down, and I got a good response when I sent mail, and it gives me a way to put up a sidebar like all the cool kids have. Only I’ve decided not to do it as a sidebar, but rather as regular “linklog” entries — so that readers can comment on whatever I link, and so that it will all show up in my RSS feed. For now I’ll use Magnolia’s linklog widget, but when Feed Digest opens signups again I’ll also try the RSS-to-html method, because Magnolia’s feeds show tags and include thumbnails. I’ve also added my public Magnolia account to the sidebar, so without further ado:

Link Log (powered by Ma.gnolia)

Displaying RSS Feeds

More than I will ever understand about RSS feeds.

A Golden Age for a Pinup – Los Angeles Times

Sad and sweet article about Bettie Page in her retirement. Never mind Ellison’s blather about golden means, the photo-touchup guy has it: she looks like fun.

blackprof.com: Crime Fighting Ticket Cheats?

The St Louis metro is an honor system — and everyone cheats. Eric Miller has some interesting observations about the Broken Windows theory, and (what seems to me) a smart practical solution to the case at hand.

Nautilus-Fiberarts | Home

Nautilus Fiberarts – Katazome by Karen Miller

One Foot In | Alice Domurat Dreger

Member at Bioethics Forum. Likes penises.

Google Answers: Red States / Blue States

Why are Republicans red and Democrats blue? Turns out there’s not much reason or design behind it.

under the fire star: Timepass

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I read Nancy. “Timepass”, what a charming coinage.

Astroseti.org : How to discover asteroid impacts

Emilio decided to have a look at the new Kebira impact crater on Google Earth. Then he decided to go hunting for others; pretty soon he’d discovered what appear to be two previously-unknown members of the Aorounga impact line.

ScienceDaily: Manchester Scientists Create New Bio-gel For 3D Cell Culture

3D bio-gel for cell culture; may be an early step on the long road to grow-your-own organs.

Largest-ever galaxy portrait is awesome | Science Blog

The image of spiral galaxy Messier 101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy) is a composite of 51 images, collected for various purposes and mined from the Hubble archive. Messier 101 is about twice as big as the Milky Way and some 25 million light years away; it covers an area about one-fifth the size of the full moon in the constellation Ursa Major. It contains at least a trillion stars, of which maybe 100 billion physically resemble our Sun. If you go outside and look at it tonight, the light striking your eyes will have started its journey at about the same time as Antarctica was breaking away from Gondwanaland.

GeoWhen Database – Geologic Timeline with Stages

Handy chart for when you need to know your Jurassic from your Devonian.

Wetsuit helps Third World women survive complicated childbirth | Science Blog

A neoprene suit can save the lives of women suffering from obstetrical hemorrhaging due to childbirth, which accounts for about 30 percent of the more than 500,000 maternal deaths worldwide each year due to childbirth, nearly all in poor countries. The mechanism is amazingly simple: the suit provides pressure to prevent blood from pooling in the lower abdomen and extremeties, mitigating the most immediately lethal effects of shock.

ScienceDaily: Smallest Triceratops Skull Ever Found Provides Clues To Dinosaur’s Growth

Cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute!

LiveScience.com – The World’s Toughest Coffee Cup

Now *this* is science. The winning design doesn’t look to me as though it would be particularly tough.

LiveScience.com – Mom’s Genetics Could Produce Gay Sons

The pattern of X chromosome inactivation appears to influence the sexuality of male offspring. The lead scientist (Sven Bocklandt, UCLA) has it exactly right regarding the “it’s not a choice” vs “we could cure it” views of the possible genetic underpinnings of (homo)sexuality: “I think if there’s ever a time when we can make these changes for sexual orientation, then we will also be able to do it for intelligence or musical skills or certain physical characteristics — but whether or not these things are allowed to happen is something that society as a whole has to decide. It’s not a scientific question.”

Baby’s helping hands

This is encouraging for those of us who (want/have to) believe in the possibility of human improvement: “Felix Warneken and Mike Tomasello found that children as young as 18 months willingly helped complete strangers. ‘The results were astonishing because these children are so young – they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language,’ says Warneken. ‘But they already show helping behaviour.'”

The APC tumor suppressor counteracts beta-catenin activation and H3K4 methylation at Wnt target genes.

Does APC/Wnt play any role in cell cycle entry repression of MYC? From the abstract: “beta-cat recruits Pygopus, Bcl-9/Legless, and MLL/SET1-type complexes to the c-Myc enhancer together with the negative Wnt regulators, APC, and betaTrCP. Interestingly, APC-mediated repression of c-Myc transcription in HT29-APC colorectal cancer cells is initiated by the transient binding of APC, betaTrCP, and the CtBP corepressor to the c-Myc enhancer, followed by stable binding of the TLE-1 and HDAC1 corepressors”

LiveScience.com – Immortal Styrofoam Meets its Enemy

Pseudomonas putida can convert styrene oil, made by simply heating polystyrene, into polyhydroxyalkanoates — from which can be made biodegradable cutlery, plastic film, and so on.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | New rodent is ‘living fossil’

Laonastes aenigmamus is the only known representative of the otherwise extinct family Diatomyidae.

slacktivist: Filtered Camels

I’d never heard this “interpretation” of the camel/needle parable — viz., that the “eye of the needle” referred to an actual gate through which a camel could, just barely, pass. It is, of course, bullshit, but that it persists speaks volumes.