In a blog post on the renowned Scientific American site, John Horgan (@Horganism) takes aim at drones, but unscientifically so. Right on the eve of the national election for the presidency, his blog post starts off with his stating that a lot of his liberal friends are "disappointed" with President Obama. Then Horgan zeroes in on drones and their use by the USA in Pakistan and the Yemen.

His entire argument is slapdash. He points to problems the Pakistani democracy has with legitimization...

It often costs to get the truth out to you, and that cost is often a reporter's life. Today it's reported that Marie Colvin, an American who was currently working as a reporter for the British Sunday Times, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed in Syria. They appear to have been directly targeted and there are fears for other journalists in the area. This is only a week after Anthony Shadid, working for the New York Times, died in Turkey of an asthma attack brought on by stress and...

Yesterday an op-ed article by Saba Khalid appeared in Pakistan's Express Tribune newspaper, which is published in partnership with the famous International Herald Tribune, and is owned by the Lakson Group of companies. The article by Saba Khalid was titled "Celebs with mental disorders: Lock up the crazy"; while the online version has now been taken down, you can still for a short while find the Google Cache copy of the original page here. I also include a screen-capture pic of part of the article...

Owing to comments on a previous blog post of mine, I started thinking about comparisons between being burnt badly and being blown up. Having had both happen to me, being blown up is definitely better than being burnt badly, as long as you survive, lose no limbs or hearing permanently, and don't get burnt too much. Being blown up is over in a flash, leaving you to recover (I once knew a bloke, a fellow worker in a mine, who was blown 100 yards through a tunnel by an explosion, like a pea in a shooter...

9/11 was marked today in the USA by a minutes' silence and, in New York City, sirens, and a remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero. Pakistan managed to officially send its support through its Foreign Ministry to the USA, also pointing out that Pakistan itself remains very much a victim of Islamist terrorism. And so it does; in the years between 2001 and now, Pakistan has suffered over 10,000 dead in that struggle.

And only a short while back the son of Salmaan Taseer, Shahbaz Taseer, was kidnapped in Pakistan;...

I recently did a post in which I mentioned low down in the post some diversity blogs. I'm going to repeat that here and add to that, with special emphasis on women atheist bloggers, in relation to bottom-up rather than top-down planning of atheist conferences, and in relation to interaction with other aspects such as feminism, sexism, science-blogging, interfaith dialogue, etc.. Please bear in mind the following are mainly restricted to those in the USA who have been ignored by others. These are...

Apparently (organized on fairly short notice?) there has just met this weekend the very first Pakistan Social Media Summit (PKSMS), in Karachi, with the likes of the bloggers @sanasaleem, @RazaRumi (both regularly mentioned in my blog) and many others. It would have been really great to have gone to that, but I found out about it far too late, i.e., on Friday, which is definitely late.

You can read the tweetstream concerning the Pakistan Social Media Summit by searching with the hashtag #PKSMS....

Another Pakistani investigative reporter, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who worked in Pakistan for a news service based in Hong Kong, has been murdered, and his body shows signs of having been beaten and possibly tortured in other ways. Syed Saleem Shahzad had very recently done a news story investigating into why Al-Qaeda had attacked a Pakistani naval base in Karachi on the 22nd of May; he wrote that it happened because negotiations between Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Navy had broken down, the negotiations...

Not only am I (apocalyptically) flooded in what I need to blog about, having been knocked out of commission for over three weeks, but also very current events are having tsunami-like proportions for me, since I still cannot work fast or much (and I'm currently writing two long and difficult other blog posts I need to finish). So very quickly, a few things:

Another big demonstration today in Tahrir square, Cairo, Egypt, this time because of all the things the protestors have noticed...

So there was a terrorist attack on a Pakistan Navy base last night in Karachi, and the Pakistani Taliban took the credit for the attack, though other groups may have been involved. A long prolonged firefight followed, some of the terrorist attackers seem to have escaped capture, and at least 10 Pakistani military were killed in the firefight or otherwise by the terrorists in their attack....

So in an operation very near to Islamabad, Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden has been killed by USA forces. There is a Guardian report on it all here. The first reaction from official Pakistani sources close to the Pakistani military and ISI seems to have been almost panic, a denial that they knew of the operation at all; possibly this was a calculated denial, an attempt to deflect any anger inside Pakistan and Afghanistan. Certainly most in Pakistan were caught by surprise.

Twitter once...

This is late - but since there will be no weekly round-up from me this coming weekend, as I will be in New York (if you're wondering where I will be, I will be at this; I'm taking citizen journalism and developing myself at it very seriously indeed. If you're interested, I shall be tweeting from there, hashtag #ASJA2011. I will also be blogging when I can). The weekend after, I will try to do a round-up, but no promises; a week after that and regular service (such as it is) will resume.
...

Yes, it's late. What else did you expect? But in my defence, I'm drowning in work. However, here it is! The blogs round-up from around the net, and including a couple of mass media reports. You can read my previous blogs round-ups listed here.

Science, ecology: blog post of the week goes to Dr. Carin Bondar, who (guest-)blogged on silviculture as applied to coral reefs. A good excuse to pepper this page with coral reef photos from the web; I do have photos of my own, but no time to...

Very recently, as you know, UN and support staff were murdered in Mazar-e Sharif. Further demonstrations and riots have followed in that part of the world, all allegedly in response to the theatrical burning of the Qur'an by Pastor Terry Jones. "When Journalism 2.0 Kills" was how Jeff Bercovici, a columnist, described it, in his headline on his blog post made on the Forbes site. In that post, he used the deaths of UN staff and others to first blame, rightly or wrongly, a 21-year-old student who...

Just a very quick note, but a good one, for RevSimmy and all: the inter-blog Festival Of The Trees has happened again (FOTT 58). Many thanks to @GrrlScientist for the alert and to the blog Festival of the Trees for the further link.

You will find the whole Festival Of The Trees 58 blog carnival at this link here, and it is really worth looking at it; some links to great blog posts there.

And below, just because, no connection, courtesy of Wired and of HuffPo, a photo...

I am now at least 5 days behind in my blogging schedule, and it's getting worse. Here is a very quick post, which is of information I ripped out of another blog post I am writing at the moment, so as to decrease the incredible length of that other blog post, and just to get this bit out. And this is important stuff, so please pardon the incompleteness and sheer lack of polish on this blog post of mine.

Women and diversity in science and tech is a very essential area to bring to attention....

My weekly blogs round-up, on science and society and, well, everything. This time round including as much info as possible so you can see how to garner info yourself, giving Twitter handles and so on, and a fair few press reports.

Science, nature conservation, ecology: Some good news at very long last (with thanks, h/t to @geostuff for the alert): "Tiger Numbers Increase in India". And while on the animal/nature conservation front, the Scientific American blogs have a guest post up...

This is all too good. A note of merriment in these sad days. FOX News (USA) has been comprehensively pwned by the Pakistani version of something like the satirical Onion spoof-news site. Here is the FOX news story (and I've included a screen-capture picture below in case FOX pulls it later): "Pakistan: Islamic Clerics Protest Women Wearing Padded Bras as 'Devil’s Cushions' ".

FOX of course basically nicked the story straight from this (the original spoof, by @JBXN, a Pakistani of...

Nick Cohen has a piece up in the Guardian today on Western liberals regarding the situation in Pakistan after the murders of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti. I'm a bit critical of a few aspects of Cohen's piece.

Speaking as a Western "liberal", I personally have no troubles openly criticising the blatant hypocrisy and murderousness of many Muslim clerics in Pakistan. Nor do I have any trouble trying to get and pass on a reasonably accurate and critical look at what is happening...

At least eleven people have been killed, and thirty-seven more injured, by an explosives attack on a mosque, at the Akhond Panjo Baba shrine in the village of Akbarpura in the Nowshera District, Pakistan. The attack came during the distribution of food after prayers.

The significance of this is that the mosque and shrine are Sufi Muslim. The Islam of the terrorists is often Barelvi, Deobandi (which both belong to the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam) or similar.

All moderates...