cmooney
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DarkSyde, doing wonders for the scientific blogosphere as always, has an interview today with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book The Swamp, a history of the Everglades. I just picked up a copy and am hoping to start reading it this weekend--it looks fascinating. Hopefully the book will serve…
Best sci-fi television drama ever, or damn near to it: Firefly. I have a confession to make: I have recently become one of the many obsessive fans of this prematurely-killed Fox series, probably the only unsuccessful television show ever to be reincarnated as a big time movie (the recently released…
I'm really proud of two of my old high school classmates who still live in New Orleans, Cory Morton and Hal Braden. Not only did they get in Sports Illustrated recently--they did so for a good cause.
Here's the story: These guys are big basketball fans, and have season's tickets to see the New…
My last post was about whistleblower Susan Wood, and her apparent reluctance to explain why access to Plan B emergency contraception is being held up within the administrative bowels of the Food and Drug Administration. Wood seemed hesitant to offer a political explanation for what is, unmistakably…
FDA whistleblower Susan Wood, with whom I've appeared publicly in the past, has a nice op-ed in the Post today about her former agency's continuing intransigence on the issue of Plan B contraception. I was a tad disappointed, though, by Wood's agnosticism about what's causing the continual delays…
Back when I was first on my learning curve about climate science, I remember always being confused about the date for each report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The official publication date would be in one year, but as soon as you did any background research, you would learn…
Yesterday Tim did a very nice blog post in which he took apart a Michael Fumento column attacking scientific journals. I contributed a smidgeon to the debunking in the comments section. I was very proud of myself.
But little did I know (mainly because I didn't read to the end of Tim's post) that…
Without holding anything back, I've tried to be respectful in my criticisms of Bush science adviser John Marburger. He's a well regarded scientist, after all. And I doubt he's responsible for any of the troublesome behavior of the administration.
But Marburger's defenses of the administration are…
Talk about a perfect combination of topics that are of interest to Science Blogs readers. I just came across this starred review in Publisher's Weekly:
January 30, 2006
Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks Lyanda Lynn…
Without a doubt, 2005 was the year that ignited a fierce and lasting debate over the extent to which global warming might be increasing the strength of hurricanes. That's largely thanks to two back-to-back scientific papers, published in the leading journals Nature and in Science, which provided…
I frequently get asked how I plan on following up The Republican War on Science, a book that received a considerable amount of attention (and that will probably continue to do so, since there's still a paperback to look forward to). This is a subject to which I've devoted a lot of thought--probably…
Hey, maybe when they're done with the rather inappropriate Mardi Gras celebration this year, they can gather up all the trash left on the street and use *that* to plug holes in the levees. Or better yet, how about asking all the tourists who come down to spend half a day cleaning up the mess left…
I often get asked my opinion about who's "worse" when it comes to manipulating and undermining scientific information: corporate America, or the Christian right. My usual answer is the Christian right, because its attacks on science are far more sweeping in their implications, and have the…
It wasn't much publicized, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently adopted a statement in reaction to the latest allegations of scientific censorship in our government. You can read it here. According to AAAS:
...censorship, intimidation, or other restriction on the…
A while back I appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS, and pretty much everyone who saw said it went very well. But little did I know, at least until now, that there's an official transcript of the show available. You can check it out here. Meanwhile, you can also listen here.
PZ and Jason Rosenhouse are blogging about this testy email exchange between two of evolution's top defenders, Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett. I don't fully grasp how or why these emails got out--it doesn't seem like something that should have happened (although frankly, they're not actually all…
A new documentary, Flock of Dodos, is now out. The auteur, Randy Olson, is an "evolutionary ecologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University." But he's also from Kansas originally, and he has made a film that apparently heaps a fair amount of scorn on both sides of the evolution debate:
"Flock of…
If San Francisco really gets municipal wireless, I am moving there out of sheer principle....
I didn't mean to launch a name game yesterday with my remarks about Daniel Dennett and the "brights" label, but that's what seems to have happened. More than fifty comments came in, many of them suggesting various ways in which atheists ought to be relabled: "humanist," "freethinker," and many…
Everyone has been buzzing lately about Leon Wieseltier's nasty review of Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I haven't read Dennett's new book yet, but having read and been impressed by his previous book Darwin's Dangerous Idea--and, furthermore, finding…
Brian Montopoli, of CBS's "Public Eye," talked with Scott Pelley recently about his "60 Minutes" global warming special. Pelley explains that he deliberately did not talk to those voices who remain skeptical of the science: "It would be irresponsible of us to go find some scientist somewhere who is…
State of Fear is back in the top 100 books on Amazon.com, presumably thanks to the news that Bush read it. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh, who's probably driving plenty of those sales, has this to say about Crichton's book:
If you haven't read State of Fear you ought to get it and you ought to read it,…
Why is it that all birdwatching trips seem to end up the same way: You trudge along lengthy forest trails and freeze your ass off, only to find at the very end that the bird you were searching for was sitting in the parking lot the whole time? Such was my experience this weekend.
On Sunday we went…
A week ago, I quipped that some reporter should ask Scott McClellan about Bush's reported meeting with Michael Crichton during the press gaggle. Well, it happened today. Here's the relevant exchange, which took place aboard Air Force One:
MR. McCLELLAN: The United States is leading the way in…
As it's President's Day and I plan on seizing the opportunity to get some writing done, I won't be blogging much. But I will leave you with something very worth of contemplation on the subject of how scientists can sucessfully combat attacks on their expertise and various assorted misinformation…
Finally, the major media pick up the story I've been flogging all week. The Times piece is relatively bare-bones, but it does contain something revealing. You see, the paper asked the White House to comment on the Bush-meets-Crichton story. And not only was the Crichton meeting confirmed; Bush was…
As many bloggers have noticed, with the latest revelations about NASA and other agencies, the Republican war on science continues apace. But what's driving it? Clearly, the acts of scientific censorship that have made so much news lately have been coming from political appointees in press or public…
Over at Real Climate, Raypierre has an exceedingly enlightening post about the similarities and differences between attacks on evolution and attacks on global warming. As someone who has explored both areas extensively--and who has also found striking similarities, if also some differences--I think…
When I'm speaking about how to fix the politics-of-science problem, I often target the media for special criticism. I point out that if journalists weren't so addicted to the norm of fify-fifty "balance," they wouldn't be so vulnerable to the machinations of science abusers who attempt to create…
My copy of Rebel-in-Chief just arrived, and I can now quote you exactly what the book says about Bush's views on global warming, and his meeting with Michael Crichton. From p. 22-23:
The president later provoked worldwide protests when he formally withdrew the United States from the Kyoto global…