Puny Banner and tip jar

A couple of house-keeping things.

Firstly, if you cast your eyes a few pixels upwards, you’ll notice the snazzy new banner. All the Discover blogs now have them to give us a bit more of an individual feel. I love mine/them. The designer’s done a great job with reconciling the “rocket science” bit with the fact that I write almost entirely about biology. You can see the rest of the logos on the sidebar, and I’ll probably be doing a Cafepress store at some point.

Secondly, you might have noticed that there’s also a “Support Science Writers” box in the sidebar. I’ve added this in light of my new initiative to voluntarily pay for the best science writing that I read. In the comments, people suggested various ways that these micropayments could be done easily, but all the best suggestions involve adding some sort of code to one’s site.

While a simple solution may take some more work, I’ve implemented these Paypal buttons as a temporary fix. The top one goes to the writers I pick every month, distributed equally (any donations this month will go to February’s picks, and so on). The bottom one goes to me and I’ll match a third of the donations and send that to the chosen writers too.

Both go to my Paypal account but they’re tagged differently so I can sort through all the donations and distribute them easily. This isn’t ideal by any means, but like many things on the Internet, I thought I’d give it a go and see what happens. So if any of you would like to support NERS or any of the other great blogs that I link to, please feel free to contribute. There is, of course, no expectation to do this.

For reference, here are the people who I’ve donated to this month:

• Human (amphibious model): living in and on the water, by Greg Downey
• Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor, by Bora Zivkovic
• Hidden Light: The Visual Language of an Autistic Photographer, by Steve Silberman
• Iron-deficiency is not something you get just for being a lady, by Kate Clancy
• Ancestor Worship, by Brian Switek
• Running out of antibiotics — and other drugs too, by Maryn McKenna
• How IBM’s Watson Computer Excels at Jeopardy!, by John Rennie
• Saving Ethiopia’s Church Forests, by Delene Beeland
• The Mere Existence of Whales, by Carl Zimmer
• Science education for all, by Alice Bell