cmooney | February 25, 2009My Science Progress column is now up: I try to set the George Will scandal in the broader context of what's happening in the media:
We often hear that "technology" is what's killing newspapers--innovations like Craig's List have destroyed the in-print classified advertising market; people have stopped reading physical papers and turned to online headlines from news aggregators or blogs; and so on. But there are also matters of substance and standards, and if the Post editorial page can't even print correct facts about global warming (or correct already printed errors), then how to make the…
sheril | February 24, 2009
The United States faces enormous challenges in a troubled climate, but I think we just witnessed President Barack Obama officially usher in a new golden age for American politics.
sheril | February 24, 2009Former Representative Florence Dwyer (R-NJ, 1957-1973) once explained:
"A Congresswoman must look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, speak on any given subject with authority and most of all work like a dog."
I've written about sex in Congress before because it's a subject where the percentages could probably benefit from a bit of adjusting. By no means do I imply any candidate should be chosen based on number of X chromosomes, but as I've explained in the past, it's important for women to be a larger part of the decision making process given we represent about 50% of the…
sheril | February 24, 2009I'll admit PZ's post yesterday featuring a cosmic cephalopod sleeping overhead in the Carina Nebula was both daunting and impressive... but never fear friends, a heroic starry sea cucumber keeps vigilant in the Crab Pulsar and continues to protect us from its merciless tentacles.
cmooney | February 24, 2009I 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 rotating (and very limited) set of global warming talking points that date back to 1992. Once in a while, he simply rejiggers the column. Wow.
The George Will scandal grows larger now. Not only is he not constrained by, or answerable to, facts; but for a national columnist, such recycling is pretty…
sheril | February 23, 2009
According to CNN, former Governor Gary Locke (D-WA) is likely to be nominated by President Obama as our next Secretary of Commerce.
Given NOAA accounts for up to 65% of the Commerce Department budget, you bet I'm eager to learn more. Among many duties, the incoming Secretary of Commerce faces enormous ocean related challenges so I will be following this story with interest.
sheril | February 23, 2009In lieu of blasting the Washington Post again over their recent faux pas, I'm interested in finding out whether you're as intrigued as I am lately over LOST...
During my recovery, I've been catching up on past episodes and this season includes a lot of 'science' in the script as the island jumps through time and space. And what is the DHARMA Initiative? Presently, we've got a physicist wandering through the jungle, years that span days, and the occasional troublesome nosebleed. All of which has inspired wide speculation about what's really going on.
Regular Intersection readers know this…
cmooney | February 23, 2009My 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 better of without it.
Maybe the general public would have been more interested in science if science journalists hadn't been writing so much hype about "breakthroughs" for the past twenty years. Maybe the public would have been more interested in science if so-called "science" journalists hadn't been…
sheril | February 22, 2009Having recently emerged from the hospital, I'm catching up on the news I've missed--beginning with the Washington Post nonsense Chris has covered here.
Apparently reporter George Will is about as informed on climate change as octuplet mom Nadya Suleman is on the fiscal responsibilities of raising children. There's not much I'll add that hasn't already been written, except given Will's influential position, his dishonesty is far more reprehensible.
cmooney | February 20, 2009Over 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 why newspapers are failing today.
I think we need them desperately--see this Paul Starr cover story of the latest New Republic--but when the Washington Post acts in such a boneheaded manner in defending one of its columnists' egregious errors, it's hard to feel too bad for them.
sheril | February 19, 2009
Listen to NPR's News & Notes today for our friend Al Teich--the Director of Science and Policy Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science--will discuss science under the Obama Administration, the stimulus package, and more.
Find your local station or listen to the podcast here.
cmooney | February 19, 2009Man, 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 Scientific Revolutions, had such a dramatic impact is that the author wrote and expounded so clearly.
I don't know what I was expecting from Copernicus, but Kuhn's book (so far) helpfully explains the relationship between the highly technical and the broad and general in the Copernican Revolution. As…
cmooney | February 18, 2009There 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 contemplative life--any person, in short, who deserves to be called an "intellectual"--could not write such a column; because any such person would have undertaken to learn something real about climate science before writing about it.
Yet this Will manifestly has not done, or he could not make the…
sheril | February 18, 2009You've likely already seen this story all over the news:
Chimp's owner calls vicious mauling 'freak thing'
STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) -- The owner of a 200-pound chimpanzee that viciously mauled a Stamford woman calls the incident "a freak thing," but says her pet was not a "horrible" animal.
Sandra Herold told NBC's "Today Show" in an interview aired Wednesday that Travis, her 14-year-old chimpanzee, was like a son to her.
Herold tried to save her friend by stabbing the chimp with a butcher knife and bludgeoning it with a shovel.
I have extremely strong emotions concerning this particular issue…
cmooney | February 18, 2009I'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 remainder of this week, the primary reading will be Copernicus. (I still have a ways to go to finish.) Secondary readings will be Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read and Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution.
After that, here's the schedule I'm working from, and will strive to keep to--with Amazon…
sheril | February 17, 2009Over at Genetic Future, Daniel is asking whether scientists should study race and IQ. The topic is taken on in the most recent issue of Nature here and here and it's a conversation that resurfaces now and then among various colleagues in genetics: If there might be associations between gender or race and intelligence, should scientists look for them?
But before delving into ethics, I expect it would be extremely challenging to 1. define all of the above 2. extricate societal, financial, and environmental influences 3. account for even subconscious observer bias. So what are we really after…
sheril | February 17, 2009Yesterday, C-SPAN released the Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. Below are the results based on ten attributes of leadership. [Click here to compare this list with scores from 2000].
I'm interested to find out whether readers agree with these rankings, and if not, who would you move and why?
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Harry S. Truman
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. Dwight D. Eisenhower
9. Woodrow Wilson
10. Ronald Reagan
11. Lyndon B. Johnson
12. James K. Polk
13. Andrew Jackson
14. James Monroe
15. Bill…
cmooney | 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 this way:
I also say that the sun remains forever immobile and that whatever apparent movement belongs to it can be verified of the mobility of the Earth; that the magnitude of the world is such that, although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you…
cmooney | February 16, 2009CJR 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 the science blogosphere--supposedly centrally involved in and concerned with science communication--doesn't grasp what is happening. Take this post from Jason Rosenhouse--and it's just one recent example. It's entitled "The Trouble with Science Journalism," and critiques something New Scientist put…
cmooney | 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 experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found "radically strange" about the work, with the "strangely modern" to come in the next post:
Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations,…