Links to Other Conversations and Articles:
"In the long run men hit only what they aim at." H.D. Thoreau, Walden This post's title is the poorly reasoned conclusion to a poorly reported and poorly conducted study. I couldn't tell if it was simply bad reporting at...
Posted on May 20, 2008 1:25 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Concerned they look "not so smart" without this new-fangled "Intelligent" modifier. (Or so this joke would have it.)
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Posted on May 9, 2008 11:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Big claims. Not too much support. Mostly unconvincing."
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Posted on May 9, 2008 10:15 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The more human robots become, the more likely they'll act like assholes
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Posted on May 5, 2008 2:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Office of EPA administrator Stephen Johnson tells regional administrator to quit or be fired by June 1 after conflict with Dow Chemical.
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Posted on May 5, 2008 10:30 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." And so a long series comes to an end.
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Posted on May 1, 2008 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Don't you just hate it when you're about to be dead in five minutes?
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Posted on March 26, 2008 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As much energy to run the farmer's market for a day as running a household for a year...but so?
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Posted on March 24, 2008 9:30 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is there an arrogant/sleepy divide in academia? A PowerPoint/chalkboard divide?
Posted on February 27, 2008 9:15 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A comment about bombs and mercury and Communists and theater and world history
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Posted on February 25, 2008 8:30 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Pen Names in the Digital Age: wither the pseudonym? Plus the must-read of the day.
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Posted on February 20, 2008 10:30 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
How do we add moral and qualitative dimensions to the prevailing quantitative mindset about environmentalism?
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Posted on February 12, 2008 5:10 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Headline of the year, and its only February.
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Posted on February 8, 2008 8:20 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Invention stopping the fluctuations of nature": Part 7 in a series on truth, evidence, and everything there is.
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Posted on February 6, 2008 3:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is Venter's newest pursuit the greatest gap b/t science's creative abilities and the public's understanding of it?
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Posted on February 5, 2008 4:25 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Saying something's "obvious" indicates the absence of a logical argument, asserting truth by speaking loudly.
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Posted on January 22, 2008 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Continuing to ponder knowledge, evidence, Errol Morris, and The Crimea's Sebastopol of 1855
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Posted on January 21, 2008 9:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Consumers and producers of scientific knowledge unite! Maybe? A little? Could we?
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Posted on January 14, 2008 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There are two words that you can never apply to them: 'true' and 'false'.
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Posted on January 8, 2008 8:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Has there ever been anyone who's served that hasn't had bad dreams about being forced to return?
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Posted on January 7, 2008 8:20 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You take technology and nature, avoid assuming they're opposed, and get a bunch of engineering undergrads to write a book about it.
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Posted on December 19, 2007 9:20 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment." Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science and political science at Alleghany College, contributed a compelling op-ed to the Washington Post recently, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't...
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Posted on December 10, 2007 9:00 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Do you remember when I was first hot chocolate? When I decided this was who I was?
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Posted on December 7, 2007 5:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I assumed this would be a study of the libido of such astounding creatures.
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Posted on December 7, 2007 1:15 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science."
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Posted on December 7, 2007 7:30 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It begins: "It has been observed at least since the time of Aristotle that people cannot tickle themselves, but the reason remains elusive." What we have here is a research paper (by CHRISTINE R. HARRIS and NICHOLAS CHRISTENFELD) that looks...
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Posted on August 20, 2007 11:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What reasons beyond fuel use/CO2 emissions when making better food choices?
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Posted on August 10, 2007 9:30 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Getting leading-edge scientific work to small farms or undermining knowledge transfer models
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Posted on August 9, 2007 12:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Talk about both, today at noon
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Posted on August 9, 2007 8:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
People seem generally interested in books and discussions about food, but less interested in books and discussions about how food is made. Of course, this is changing in recent years, perhaps because the visibility of sustainable practices, GMOs, and other...
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Posted on August 4, 2007 2:07 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Overtures to certainty in science and engineering paired with uncertainty in fiction.
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Posted on August 2, 2007 2:33 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Reasons to have sex, reasons not to...a most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation.
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Posted on August 2, 2007 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On the complexity of natural and human-made systems, and the flows from both.
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Posted on July 19, 2007 8:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Last week's events in [country in the news] were truly historic"
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Posted on July 13, 2007 9:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Now he's a captive dolphin rescuer speaking about those training Navy dolphins to find enemy mines. Or was in 2003 at least. This is another from the vault, and like the last, another from someone else's vault. Brent Hoff interviews...
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Posted on July 11, 2007 9:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's one from the vault. But not our vault. It's an all-time favorite of mine, from McSweeney's a few years ago, written by Joshua Tyree: "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." Lets file it under physics. For...
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Posted on July 8, 2007 9:00 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Can PR barrage outpace environmental problems? The race is on.
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Posted on July 5, 2007 10:37 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On the the burgeoning commoditization of the environmental movement.
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Posted on July 3, 2007 11:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When your grandchildren ask the inevitable question -- "Was Dick Cheney real?" -- you would do well to pull out this week's four-part series in The Washington Post to verify that he truly existed. Today's feature, the fourth part, addresses...
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Posted on June 27, 2007 1:07 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
And, we'd need 10 dumps the size of Yucca Mountain "to store the extra generated waste by the needed nuclear generation boom." (Full story through Reuters here.) This from a new report commissioned by the non-profit Keystone Center (whose website...
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Posted on June 20, 2007 8:20 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A timely add-on to our recent Science and Society discussion with historian Michael Egan about his book on Barry Commoner, Science, and Environmentalism (Part I, Part II) is an article in today's New York Times about and with Commoner. And...
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Posted on June 19, 2007 1:44 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, has died at the age of 75. I saw news of this via Arts and Letters Daily, which linked to a brief notice in Telos (a journal of political and social thought)....
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Posted on June 10, 2007 1:59 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Lots of Rachel Carson links of late, and understandably so, as it would've been her 100th birthday this Sunday. Elizabeth Kolbert makes her the Talk of the Town this week....
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Posted on May 24, 2007 6:50 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On "man's carelessness, shortsightedness, and arrogance." A small topic, of course.
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Posted on May 22, 2007 1:04 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Why is Sean Hannity so noxious? A better question would be 'In what ways is he not?'"
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Posted on May 14, 2007 1:49 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The June issue Harper's features Seed's (our) own Chris Mooney. In a series of short commentaries about "Undoing Bush," Chris contributes some thoughts on science. The 11 contributors all ponder "How to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect."...
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Posted on May 11, 2007 10:14 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
'cept these folks...
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Posted on May 4, 2007 3:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Just dosing a little bit of wildife science on the blog-o-sphere.
Posted on May 4, 2007 2:56 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is an essay I wrote about my former life at Virginia Tech and Blacksburg.
Posted on April 24, 2007 9:32 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Professor at Duke, argues so. John Dupre, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, isn't buying it. I'm not either, ever averse to such reductionisms.* Here is Dupre's review of Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism: Or,...
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Posted on April 10, 2007 8:46 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
More attention to the dangers of gung ho ethanolism.
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Posted on April 5, 2007 3:16 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"By relying on a single species for pollination, US agriculture has put itself in a precarious position"
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Posted on April 5, 2007 10:24 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, fan of Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, despiser of global warming rhetoric. Speaking to U.S. Congresspeople last week, he offered a few nuggets to chew on (but didn't mix metaphors like that). The Inter Press...
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Posted on April 3, 2007 3:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sherley lasted 12 days, lost 20 pounds, got some press, and still the issue isn't clear to me.
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Posted on February 18, 2007 2:56 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's an update from a previous post about James Sherley, at MIT, who'd threatened late last year to go on a hunger strike to protest not getting tenure....
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Posted on February 6, 2007 8:53 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The New Yorker has an intruiging review of the life and legacy of Alfred Russell Wallace. Since 2000, there have been at least five noteworthy biographies of Wallace, bringing greater historical and public attention to "Darwin's neglected double."...
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Posted on February 6, 2007 8:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"...nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science...takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."
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Posted on January 30, 2007 3:32 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When it isn't a matter of science or not. It's
whose science that's the issue...
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Posted on January 30, 2007 12:05 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"God reveals himself to humanity in two books - nature and scripture."
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Posted on January 5, 2007 2:47 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Race, science, an elite instutution, power structures, stem cell research, ethics everywhere...
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Posted on December 28, 2006 12:23 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Props to Mel Gibson, a note on Mayan and Aztec culture, and the city as observatory...
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Posted on December 18, 2006 6:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Katherine and Sarah have posted a conversation Janet and I had about Sir Karl Popper. It's "inside the Seed mothership" over at Page 3.14. Run, don't walk, to check it out. But then walk, and be careful, it's getting icy,...
Posted on December 7, 2006 10:29 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Troposphere, whatever," Justice Scalia said. "I told you before I'm not a scientist."
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Posted on December 6, 2006 8:39 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
That's right, a 17th century chemistry table and a snippet of alchemy talk
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Posted on December 5, 2006 7:53 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"Scientists say the global energy crisis can be solved by using the desert sun"
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Posted on November 29, 2006 5:08 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
"The Key to Modern Life is Strategic Ignorance." That's a quote from Joel Achenbach's story, "Another Way," in the Washington Post this weekend about an off-the-grid eco-settlement in North Carolina. (Some good pictures here.) He writes about Earthaven, an eco-village,...
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Posted on November 20, 2006 9:27 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A story in the Post yesterday, "Think Tank Will Promote Thinking: Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy," begins this way: Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House,...
David Ng is Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia - this is a just a fancier way of calling himself a science teacher. 
Benjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff. 
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