I often find that books on the history of science and technology are fun to read because they give me an opportunity to try to forget what I know about how things turned out and piece together an older worldview. For example, I am currently reading the new book by Tom McNichol "AC/DC - The Savage Tale of the First Standards War". On p. 38 is reprinted part of Edison's article in North American Review, written in 1878, shortly after his invention of the phonograph:

Among the many uses to which the phonograph will be applied are the following: ... 2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part. ... 9.

We just ran a quiz race in Second Life for the second time yesterday in my organic chemistry class. Two of the students were physically with me in the classroom and two were coming in remotely.

Initially, Beth was still the owner of the obelisks and we learned the hard way that all but one stop working when the owner is not on the island.

The Scientist printed an article on the blogging of scientific data, with a focus on Reed Cartwright's inclusion as a co-author on a paper because of ideas that he shared on his blog. This is an impressive example of how social software can serve as a primary information source in science (whether intentionally or not). The part I enjoyed the most (referring to Bora):

Zivkovic concedes that he has had less luck in convincing people that he should post his dissertation on his blog before he publishes it.

Thanks to Joanna Scott, we've been taking advantage of our invitation to contribute to the Nature island on Second Life. Beth made a copy of the Open Notebook Science building and created a cemetery filled with blue obelisks so that multiple students can take organic chemistry quizzes at the same time.

There is a new kid on the cheminformatics block. ChemSpider Beta went live on Saturday March 24, 2007 with over 10 million compounds. Anyone using other free online molecular databases (like eMolecules or Chemistry Search Lookup Service) should definitely give this one a spin. At this time, it is possible to use the system not only to find molecules in databases but also to predict molecular properties (like density and boiling point), which can come very handy. But the best reason for keeping an eye on this one is that it is led by Tony Williams.

Yesterday I presented my second talk, this time on the use of blogs and wikis to do laboratory research. This was under the Chemical Education symposium: Communicating Chemistry. Most of the talks were about teaching so it was perhaps not the best audience but that doesn't concern me as much since I started recording my talks at conferences. And if I hadn't presented there I would have missed meeting Thomas Poon, whose high quality organic chemistry pre-lectures I have used in my classes as an extra resource for a while.