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Tune in to State Of Things today at 12noon EST.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


WUNC is the local NPR station. The State Of Things is one of the popular North Carolina programs, usually featuring local people doing interesting stuff. This week is the Science Week there.

I will be on today. The show starts at 12 noon EST, but my segment is at the end, so around 12:40pm or so. The topic is The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (aka "The Open Laboratory") anthology. We mention and discuss a few of the articles from the book (sorry, I love all 50, so this was hard, like choosing a favorite child - Sophie's Choice). And use this as a starting point for discussing how the Web and blogs are changing the way science is written and communicated these days.

I hope I did well - you'll tell me, I know! At one point, host Frank Stasio surprised me. As you know, apart from the 50 essays, the collection also includes a poem. I have read the poem perhaps once or twice months ago, silently to myself. Frank asked me to read it out loud. Cold. I hope I pronounced all the words right, let alone read it the way a poem would be read! Yikes!


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Anyway, The State Of Things runs at 12noon EST and is rebroadcast at 9pm. There is livestreaming online, and they are also pretty fast at putting the recordings up as podcasts (should be up around 3pm or so). Tune in!