Three Bloggers Who Have Influenced Me

Among the many people who've influenced my thinking about science and journalism, there are three whose blogs I want to highlight today.

Wray Herbert, the former science editor of U.S.News & World Report, now works for the Association for Psychological Science and writes the blog We're Only Human.... Wray assigned and edited the first science story I wrote. His blog posts are consistently interesting reports that often link the latest brain science to everyday experiences.

Ivars Peterson founded Science News magazine's website, which he handed over to me when he left the publication early this year. (I followed him out the door a few months later.) At Science News, he maintained the column and blog MathTrek (partial archive available here). He now works for the Mathematical Association of America and blogs at The Mathematical Tourist.

Greg Laden, who writes Greg Laden's Blog and this morning posted the first in what promises to be a series on global warming, was a teacher of mine in college. He led weekly discussion groups for a course taught by the acclaimed anthropologist Irv DeVore. The course had some official name that probably mentioned evolution and human behavior, but it was almost universally referred to as "Sex" by both its professor and the hundreds of freshmen who filed in and out of DeVore's lecture hall thrice weekly.

Tomorrow, I'll introduce readers to a fourth blogger who has had a profound effect on my journalism.