Friday recommended reads #22

• Southern California is the land of palm trees. But also the land of one sad and miserably lonely coconut palm.
• The Annual Review of Public Health just published an article with a detailed comparison of many kinds of popular diets and dietary choices. Here’s a writeup of this article from the pages of The Atlantic. The upshot is that Michael Pollan turned out to be right, if only by accident: eat unprocessed foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
• Need some science jokes?
• You know those stupid quizzes, like “which character are you?” Here are two non-stupid quizzes about biodiversity featured in a post by Holly Menninger.
• Did you know that the football huddle was invented by deaf football players so that the other team wouldn’t steal their signals?
• Charley Krebs and Judy Myers have a provocative blog called Ecological Rants. A post by Krebs that caught my eye was about how we might reconcile classic methods in community ecology with the radically different approaches that microbial ecologists must use to ask the same questions. A conversation on twitter was interesting and well as the comments on the post itself.
• In a literature class, there are times that you or the students might be reading text out loud. So, how do you handle it when the text you are reading is written in dialect?
• It’s wonderful to have quality administrators running things. But, the traits that would make a person a good administrators are also the traits that would inhibit a move into administration. I really liked this list of five reasons that helped Chris Buddle choose to move into admin.
• It’s reassuring that the former Secretary of Homeland Security, now running the University of California system, is sour on online education.
• I thought this site featuring horrible old books found on the shelves of libraries was hilarious.
• A paper just came out in PLOS Biology showing exactly how flies fly. It comes with some spectacular animations of fly thoraxes and the musculature associated with wingbeats. I’ll be psyched to share this the next time I get to teach insect biology.
• Forget doodle polls. When trying to schedule a meeting, When Is Good is way easier and better. This sounds like an ad, but it’s not. I just find doodle to be only slightly more convenient than a thousand emails, and this site is way easier.
• I’d like to bring to your attention the site Memoirs of a SLACer, by a sociologist in a small liberal arts college. That is, if you aren’t already familiar with it, as it’s been around for more than five years!

—
For links, thanks to Rebecca Weinberg and Trevor Branch, and also thanks to my departmentmate HK Choi, who got me to start using Markdown. Next, I’m going to get all github and figshare on you, shave down to a handlebar mustache, and pop open a can of PBR.