cmooney
Posts by this author
February 24, 2009
I kinda suspected--but didn't bother to prove--that George Will was recycling parts of his anti-global warming balderdashery, particularly his strained paragraph about global cooling in the 1970s, replete with misleading references.
Well, Brad Johnson has done the work: It appears Will has a…
February 23, 2009
My post last week about the death knell of science journalism prompted some incredible responses. Here's Larry Moran, putting it more bluntly than I expected, and enunciating an opinion we'd better hope does not prevail:
Seriously, most of what passes for science journalism is so bad we will be…
February 20, 2009
Over at Wonk Room, Brad Johnson is trying to get responses from the Post about why George Will is allowed to ignore fact and reality, and why the Post won't run a correction of his errors. It's pretty pathetic. The great conservative "intellectual"--Will--is apparently unaccountable.
And you wonder…
February 19, 2009
Man, Copernicus has been kicking my butt. All the star tables, geometry, etc were turning me in to a pumpkin. So I pulled down a secondary source--Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution--and night became day. I honestly think one of the reasons that Kuhn's later and more famous book, The Structure of…
February 18, 2009
There is this strange idea out there that George Will is a smart person's conservative. Maybe it's the bow-tie.
But if you read his latest, scandalously hackish global warming column, you realize that nothing could be further from the truth. Any person who respects thought, ideas, knowledge, or the…
February 18, 2009
I've been thrilled at the comments I'm getting in response to my posts on Nicholaus Copernicus. See for example here. So I've thought of a plan to invite blog readers to join me throughout the next several months as I push through a large number of other texts like De revolutionibus.
For the…
February 17, 2009
[Copernicus: Yet Another Pluto Hater?!?]
In my last post, I talked about the "radically strange" in Copernicus; today, let's go on to catalogue the "strangely modern" aspects of the work:
Strangely modern: The idea that the heavens are immense compared to the puny little Earth. Copernicus put it…
February 16, 2009
CJR has the latest, from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Now Peter Dykstra, long at CNN, is writing for an environmental website; and now Seth Borenstein, long at AP, acknowledges that we're in a science journalism crisis (he was at time past a skeptic of this notion).
Meanwhile I sometimes worry that…
February 16, 2009
In my last post I remarked on how "radically strange--and yet strangely modern" I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the "scientific revolution" to be. Now that I've read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right.
This is the first of several posts about my…
February 14, 2009
Sane people right now are celebrating Valentine's Day.
I am holed up trying to read Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium). Having been an official student of the history of science for two weeks now, and not feeling particularly…
February 13, 2009
Folks, it has been a really rough time for Sheril--she may or may not tell the full story herself, but suffice it to say that she has been hospitalized for several days and has only recently been allowed to come home, and this unfortunate turn of events has prevented her from attending the AAAS…
February 13, 2009
Science Debate has done a great analysis of the science funding that has emerged from the House-Senate reconciliation process on the stimulus bill. For the most part, science funding was restored through the reconciliation process: $ 3 billion for NSF; $ 2 billion for DOE Science; $ 5.4 million for…
February 12, 2009
Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day.
The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should…
February 11, 2009
This is a post simply to ask for comment on my last three (here, here, here) as a kind of genre exercise. Each post has been about my new foray into studying the history of science here at Princeton and testing out what it's like to be a student again. (The most insane kind of culture shock, is the…
February 11, 2009
I'm posting this on Sheril's behalf, as she is in the hospital right now:
Dear readers and friends in and out of the blogosphere,
I am extremely appreciative for so many emails during the past week. Thanks for offering your guestrooms, travel recommendations, and road trip advice. Thank you for…
February 11, 2009
We're pleased to repost the latest email from ScienceDebate:
Dear Friend,
Last Friday you and others in the science community took action and helped to restore $3.1 billion in cuts to science that had been planned in the Senate compromise version of the stimulus bill. That was a good victory for U…
February 10, 2009
In the last post, I introduced Francis Bacon--chiefly via the New Atlantis--and described a very interesting, if ultimately perhaps too strong, feminist reaction. But it's as though some feminists are Bacon's only enemies.
Neoconservative bioethicists, for example, see Bacon as the place where it…
February 10, 2009
Male chauvinist pig? Or worse?
I haven't even read Copernicus yet, and probably won't at least until this weekend. As far as my reading goes, the scientific revolution hasn't yet started and I'm still stuck with Ptolemaic glasses on.
History 293, though, is churning away, and yesterday we did our…
February 9, 2009
So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few;…
February 5, 2009
My latest Science Progress column takes on those, like right wing columnist Deroy Murdock or Lou Dobbs, who persist in trying to claim that winter weather refutes global warming. There are so, so, so many reasons this argument is dumb; and yet at the same time, who can dispute that the prevailing…
February 3, 2009
The American Physical Society is asking folks to email Congress in support of the science parts of the stimulus package. The House version of the bill was very generous to science, but there's a concern about what the Senate version and the reconciliation process will end up with. So weigh in now;…
February 3, 2009
If the president is going to restore science to its "rightful place," he's going to have to do something serious about the Food and Drug Administration. Not only was it the site of many Bush-era science related scandals, over matters like the over-the-counter availability of emergency contraception…
February 2, 2009
So...how cool is this?
I'm 31 years old. I graduated from college in 1999. Since then I've been a journalist--for ten years.
But now, at this very minute, I'm finishing my first reading assignment for Princeton's History 293, "Science in a Global Context," taught by D. Graham Burnett. Today is the…
January 30, 2009
I know, the Bush administration is history. So, I've argued, is the "Republican war on science."
But if you never yet got a copy of the book of the same name, now's the time--Amazon is selling the paperback, new, for $ 4.99.
I don't usually hawk my wares like this, but that's damn cheap.
January 30, 2009
Maybe teenage geeks and fantasy-loving atheists have a shared faith after all? As Dylan Otto Krider reports over at the Colorado Daily, a University of Colorado postgraduate named Theo Zijderveld is making a serious argument to this effect:
For the paper, Zijderveld applied the French sociologist…
January 30, 2009
Thanks for Eric Roston for being tech savvy enough to capture this.
January 29, 2009
My latest Science Progress column is up: It makes the case that Stephen Colbert is the heir to Johnny Carson in terms of talk show promotion of science.
It also includes various lame and stupid talking points that I made up and didn't use on the show, such as the following hypothetical Q&A…
January 29, 2009
So...I have a new home.
Just two days ago now, I arrived in Princeton, New Jersey and occupied a new apartment here, along with the fiance and the puppy. Los Angeles was a blast, and it's somewhere I think everyone ought to try to live--but I wanted to get back to the hoary old east coast.
I also…
January 28, 2009
Here it is:
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The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Obama's New Science Policy - Chris Mooney
Colbert Report Full EpisodesColbert Report Tickets
Paul McCartney AppearanceMore Funny Videos
I'll have more to say about the whole experience in my next column....thanks to everyone…
January 27, 2009
You can watch it here. Tons of funny stuff in Colbert's segment on science, which starts roughly at 6:15 and runs to roughly 10:45. I was on for about three minutes, and was instructed: "No monkey business. No evolution."
Of course, even though Colbert plays a rightwinger who thinks with his gut…