I tend to oscillate between two types of blogging: 1) writing an entry that has little to do with what might be happening this day and is therefore not terribly topical and 2) passing along news stories and tidbits I find interesting. I've started to use SharpReader, a RSS aggregator to help gather news for me. I'm also able to quickly piece together the items I gather to form an entry. This mode is definitely of type #2. Some tidbits I found today:
Harvard Medical School is setting up a new department, the school's first in two decades, devoted to the emerging field of systems biology. [New York Times: Education]
Canada is a country where compromise, consensus and civility are the most cherished political values. [New York Times: International]
In taking the helm of the Emmy-winning show, John Wells has the task of making the series more politically relevant. [New York Times: Arts]
Inpsired by Quicksilver, his giant doorstop of a new novel, Neal Stephenson has put up a wiki where his readers can collaboratively annotate the ideas in the book:
[Boing Boing Blog]
Monster miscreant database now in state hands [The Register]
Although I suppose that most NYT readers would learn some new things about Canada from the article, to me it contained so much common knowledge that seeing it in print reminded me of the Onion’s parody of a few years ago:
http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~kaminssl/TheOnion/perkycanada.html
According to the Economist magazine’s website
http://www.economist.com/printedition/
the latest issue has a rare *cover* about Canada. I haven’t seen it yet, and all of the Canadian articles on the website are readable with subscription only.