Blog post w/ Twitter thread about Twitter threads & blog posts & how to turn a Twitter thread into a blog post

So I am writing a blog post here where I have captured a Twitter thread about blog posts and Twitter threads. I saw a Tweet from Pat Schloss and responded to it:
But that was not the only Tweet I made about this. I made a whole frigging thread. You can see the thread in most Twitter clients by clicking on the Tweet. But I figured I would also capture the thread here in this blog post. Tweet #2 in the thread.
Tweet #3 in the Thread.
Tweet #4 in the Thread.
Tweet #5 in the Thread.
Note - I got the embed codes for these Tweets from Twitter by selected the drop down menu in the upper right of the Tweet which I see in Safari at the Twitter site. I am not sure if this shows up in all Twitter clients but it works on the Twitter web site.



This gets me this menu


I then selected "Embed Tweet" and it gives me this



I then selected customization options because when posting all the Tweets I wanted just the Tweets and not the full conversation of the Tweet. First you get this menu:



I then selected "Hide Conversation"


And clicked update and then it showed me the new Embed code.  I then copied it and inserted it into this blog post.  I did this for each of the five tweets shown above.

And Voila - I have a blog post with a Twitter thread embedded in it where the thread discusses blog posts vs. Twitter threads.

Also - one can also include other Tweets about the same topic here.  So for example I can include responses too ...

Like this one.

If a thread is long, this is a real pain.  A much easier though less controllable approach is to use Wakelet or Twitter moments.  However, since Twitter seems to be abandoning moments as far as I can tell, Wakelet seems a better option


Here is the Wakelet I made --- Anyhow - there you go. A quick guide to turning a Tweet thread about blog posts and Tweet threads into a blog post.

Most popular Sandwalk posts of 2018

Blogging was light last year because I was busy with other things and because the popularity of blogs is declining rapidly. The most popular post, based on the number of views, garnered only 9229 views, which is more than the most popular post of 2017 but only half as much as the most popular post of 2016. The post with the most comments (53) has almost 10X fewer comments than posts from a few years ago but that's partly because more people are commenting on Facebook and because I'm restricting blog comments in various ways.

Here's the most popular post by total views. It attracted a number of people who attempted, rather unsuccessfully, to defend evolutionary psychology.
Is evolutionary psychology a deeply flawed enterprise?

You may disagree with these criticisms of evolutionary psychology but there's no denying that the discipline is under attack. In fact, it's hard to think of any other academic discipline whose fundamental validity is being questioned so openly.
The post with the most comments generated a lively discussion about Neutral Theory and Nearly-Neutral Theory and I learned a lot.

Celebrating 50 years of Neutral Theory
The journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution has published a special issue: Celebrating 50 years of the Neutral Theory. The key paper published 50 years ago was Motoo Kimura's paper on “Evolutionary rate at the molecular level” (Kimura, 1968) followed shortly after by a paper from Jack Lester King and Thomas Jukes on "Non-Darwinian Evolution" (King and Jukes, 1969).
One of my posts that took a lot of work is also one that I think is pretty informative.
How many protein-coding genes in the human genome?

There are many ways of predicting protein-coding genes using various algorithms that look for open reading frames. The software is notorious for overpredicting genes leading to many false positives and that's why every new genome sequence contains hundreds of so-called "orphan" genes that lack homologues in other species. When these predicted genes are examined more closely they turn out to be artifacts—they are not functional genes.
I figured out how to do pie charts and how to represent the overlapping categories of junk DNA (e.g. defective transposons within introns). You can see my first attempt in the figure at the top of the page but watch for an update in the post below.
What's In Your Genome? - The Pie Chart

This adds up to 8% of the genome. The remaining 92% is junk.

Most of the junk consists of: (1) very obvious examples of broken genes (pseudogenes 5%); (2) bits and pieces of transposon sequences that used to be capable of transposing but have mutated over time (45%); and (3) ancient viral sequences that have degenerated (9%). That's 59% of the genome that's clearly junk DNA. In addition, there's plenty of evidence that most intron sequences are dispensable. That accounts for another 28% of the genome. The total amount of junk DNA is at least 87%.

Note that protein-coding genes take up about 23% of the genome (1% exons, 22% introns). Genes for functional noncoding RNAs take up an additional 7% of the genome (1% exons, 6% introns). (Much of the functional region of noncoding RNA genes consists of 300 copies of ribosomal RNA genes (0.4%).) The important point is that roughly 30% of the genome is genes when we define a gene as a DNA sequence that's transcribed. A lot of this is junk within introns.


Most popular Sandwalk posts of 2017

I was looking at some of my posts from the past few years and wondered which ones were the most popular. I had previously identified the most popular post of 2016 but not the most popular ones from 2017 so here they are.

The one with the most views (7481) is a link to a video by Michio Kaku who tells us that humans have stopped evolving [Another physicist teaches us about evolution].

The one with the most comments (259) is a post about my attempts to teach a creationist about glycolysis and evolution [Trying to educate a creationist (Otangelo Grasso)].

The post that I'm most proud of is: Historical evolution is determined by chance events


The most popular Sandwalk post of 2016

My most popular post last year was: An Intelligent Design Creationist disputes the evolution of citrate utilization in the LTEE ... Lenski responds. It had almost 20,000 views and 227 comments.

The article discussed a paper by Intelligent Design Creationist Scott Minnich who criticized Richard Lenski's ongoing evolution experiment on the grounds that no new information had been created in the evolution of ability to use citrate.
Intelligent Design Creationists are not happy about this experiment because it not only shows evolution in action but it also illustrates features of the process that ID proponents don't understand; features like drift, neutral alleles, and contingency that expose the ignorance of the average creationist. However, there are a few ID proponents who actually understand evolution so they are forced to come up with other kinds of criticism to soften the impact of the results coming out of the Lenksi lab.

One of those creationists is Scott Minnich, a professor and researcher at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho (USA). Minnich wants you to believe that the LTEE isn't significant because no new genetic information was created. This is part of a strategy to accept microevolution but deny that macroevolution can be explained by naturalistic processes.

Minnich's lab did some experiments in order to replay the evolution of citrate utilization in E. coli cultures. They found that they could evolve strains that utilized citrate under aerobic conditions but in their hands it took much less time than it took in the LTEE and it was much more likely to occur. (Recall that the Cit+ phenotype only evolved in one of the twelve cultures in the LTEE and it took 30,000 generations.) Here's the Minnich paper and the abstact.
Lenski and his postdoc, Zachary Blount, responde to the critique. I summarized the exchange as follows,
Evolution works by modifying pre-existing DNA to create new genes or new regulatory elements from sequences that were already present in the genome. Creationists seem to think that new genetic information has to be "poofed" into existence from nothing or it doesn't count as new information. They would like very much to demonstrate that there are real examples of such magic because that would lend support to their claim that goddidit. So far they haven't come up with a single, credible, example of such a gene so they have to be content with denying that evolution can create new genetic information.

It's sad, really.
Surprisingly, some people wanted to debate this point!


Best blog post in the past year

3 Quarks Daily is running their annual contest to pick the best blog posts in the past year. The finalists will be picked by popular vote and the winner will be selected from the finalists by Nick Lane. You can review the rules at: Nick Lane to Judge 6th Annual 3QD Science Prize.

The formal description of the prize is "6th annual prize for the best blog and online-only writing in the category of science." This is important because although the rules refer to "blog posts" and "blog entries" it's clear that most of the nominees are more like online poplar science articles than typical blog posts.

Here's a list of the current nominees ...

All I didn’t know about Cancer
Wonderful Latin Names, Part III: Two creatures named “merianae
The Monarch Butterflies
Mo'orea Scavenger Hunt
Masters of deception: how spiders trick ants
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
The public subsidy of scientific publishing monopolies
David Kordahl on After Physics and The Island of Knowledge : The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning and Our Mathematical Universe : My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Artificially Flavored Intelligence
Randomness: the Ghost in the Machine?
3 myths of physics, especially in textbooks
Proof that Hell is Exothermic [DANGER! Popup Quiz]
Destiny's Child
The fundamental philosophical dilemma of chemistry [Danger! This web site locks you on the page so you can't use the "back" button!]
On Optimal Paths & Minimal Action
Tambora 1815: Just How Big Was The Eruption?
Serotonin and the science of sex
From Discovery to Dust
How Does a Dog's Brain Respond to the Smell of a Familiar Human?
When a Giant Asteroid Impact Created Its Own Magma
Intemperate Planet: How Natural Systems Magnify the Effects of Global Warming
A gynandromorph moth comes to the light – and tells a story about science
Ants have group-level personalities, study shows
Infinite hotels in swirling beams of light
How 'unspecial' are you? What other animals have taught us about human uniqueness
The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers"
Four-Legged Snake Shakes Up Squamate Family Tree – Or Does It?
Geoscience Column: The Oldest Eurypterid
Another Brick in the Wall
Why Is There Dark Matter?
Feeling Bipolar Disorder In Your Gut
Bezoars are gross bits of gunk that get stuck in your guts
CONFIRMED: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang!
Both Beautiful and Disturbing, a New NASA Visualization Shows Carbon Dioxide Emissions Swirling Around the World
No Love in Boulder for Colorado’s GMO Labeling Proposition
The Beginning of the End: How Blow Flies find Corpses
Ask Ethan #96: Is the Multiverse science?
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
Editing Human Embryos: So This Happened
Your Guide to Pluto: Everything We've Learned From New Horizons So Far
Shadows on the Moon: an ephemeral archaeology
How a 19th Century Math Genius Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
The pain in the brain game
When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours

What we need is a prize—or at least serious recognition—for blog posts exclusively from "amateurs," that is people who write for non-profit sites and who do not get paid for their posts. Surely we want to encourage scientists, graduate students, and post-docs to communicate about science? We aren't going to succeed if all the recognition for "science" writing goes to science journalists.

Also, let's make sure we distinguish between good science and good writing. Most people who vote for best articles don't know if what they are being told is accurate or not. All they know is that the article is a good read and it tells then something they didn't know.

Take a look at the previous winners to see who makes to the Top Quark.

2014
2013: no prize given that year
2012
2011
2010
2009

I was thinking of nominating one of my posts so I looked over the past year's list and found four that I thought were suitable. I realized when I re-read them that they are very different from the ones that make the finalist list on 3 Quarks Daily.

It's clear that I'm not writing for the general public. My science posts tend to be directed at people who already know a lot about biology and the level of understanding is much higher than that found in the wining posts of the past few years. I'm also not very good at the popular writing style in my blog posts. I have to fix that if I'm going to publish a trade book.


Jerry Coyne doubles down on his criticism of how evolution is taught in Ontario schools

A few weeks ago, Jerry Coyne got his knickers in a knot because the Ontario school curriculum didn't specifically prescribe the teaching of evolution in the way that he would like [Ontario schools require teaching evolution—except human evolution].

I replied to that post, quoting the Ontario curriculum and pointing out that it was pretty damn good when it comes to evolution [Teaching evolution in Ontario Schools]. The curriculum concentrates on fundamental principles of evolution as they apply to all species. It does not cover any details of the history of life per se. It doesn't specifically mention the evolution of whales, or birds, or any other lineage. It doesn't say which examples have to be included in the classroom instruction. It refers frequently to the fact that humans are not different than any other animals when it comes to biology.

Jerry take this to mean that detailed descriptions of human evolution are specifically excluded and he now claims that this is due to government policy [Ontario school officials respond—or rather, fail to respond—to queries about why they don’t require teaching human evolution].
Until I learn otherwise, then—and the Ministry of Education hasn’t seen fit to answer my letter—I’m going to assume that Ontario doesn’t require the teaching of human evolution because it’s giving a sop to creationists. Of course some enlightened teachers will go ahead and teach about our own species in the evolution unit anyway, but the point is that that isn’t required. Bowing to “cultural sensitivity”, the government of Ontario says it’s ok to prevent children from learning what is probably the most important thing about their own species.
Just about everyone who has ever taken biology in Ontario, and everyone who has ever taught it, is telling Jerry that he is wrong. Human evolution is covered in class as a good example of evolutionary concepts.

This jibes with the experience of my own children and with the three different high schools that invited me to talk about evolution. It's also consistent with the views of several colleagues (university professors) who were involved in creating the curriculum. Members of the Ontario Legislature, including the Minister of Education who I've met, are not creationists, nor are they sympathetic to creationism. The professors and teachers at the Ontario Institute for studies in Education (OISE) (part of the University of Toronto) are not creationists and are not sympathetic to creationists. I been to many talks at OISE and I've met many of the people who are in charge of designing and implementing school curricula.

I don't know why Jerry Coyne is ignoring all of the advice he's getting from people who live in Ontario and who know that he is misrepresenting the teaching of evolution in this province. It's very disappointing to see him behave like that.


PLOS ONE’s Top 5 Videos of 2015 (So Far)

At the end of 2014, we highlighted some of our favorite research videos from that year. We’re only mid-way through 2015, but we already have a number of popular research videos that we’d like to share. Here are some of … Continue reading »

The post PLOS ONE’s Top 5 Videos of 2015 (So Far) appeared first on PLOS Blogs Network.

Sordid tale of a study of cognitive behavioral therapy for schizophrenia gone bad

What motivates someone to publish that paper without checking it? Laziness? Naivety? Greed? Now that’s one to ponder. – Neuroskeptic, Science needs vigilantes. We need to Make the world safe for post-publication peer review (PPR) commentary. Ensure appropriate rewards for … Continue reading »

The post Sordid tale of a study of cognitive behavioral therapy for schizophrenia gone bad appeared first on PLOS Blogs Network.

Patrick Ross, and the end of a very long road.

My friend, Robert Day, (Canadian Cynic) was subjected to a vicious and protracted serial defamation by Patrick Ross. Wanna know what happened?

Read: Patrick Ross, and the end of a very long road..


Most popular Sandwalk post in 2014

Lot's of people are publishing year-end summaries of their blog activity. It got me to wondering which of my posts was the most popular in 2014.

The result was a surprise ...

August 18, 2014: John Wilkins discusses the "Demarcation Problem"
One of the most fascinating things about philosophy is the fact that philosophers still can't agree on the major issues even after debating them for hundreds of years. For example, they still can't, as a discipline, agree on whether there are good arguments for the existence of gods. Many universities have theologians who masquerade as philosophers and publish in philosophy journals....