cmooney | January 30, 2008I'm in New Orleans at the moment for this talk at Tulane University, so I can't blog much. But I wanted to note some more awesome developments as we continue to strengthen our SD08 coalition, in anticipation of finally inviting the remaining candidates after Super Tuesday.
The biggest news is this: The Council on Competitiveness, a coalition of CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders, is now officially our co-sponsor.
Meanwhile, while I no longer try to keep perfect track of all our individual endorsers, let me note a few more very important ones:
Richard Meserve, President, The…
sheril | January 30, 2008Wander into the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History and surely every child will be gazing up in wonder at the life size blue whale. Most adults will too for that matter. There's something mystical about a world within our own--different from all we know yet exploding with with biodiversity stranger than anything we might imagine.
And yet despite a collective appreciation of marine mammals, we continue go about harming them in a myriad of ways from destructive fishing practices to industrial pollutants and beyond. In fact, twenty-five marine mammal populations in the…
cmooney | January 30, 2008 The winner of the Florida Republican primary has been the farthest thing from a straight talker lately.... but still, over at DeSmogBlog I argue that we should credit his record and realize that, while he's more moderate than the Dems, he definitely wants mandatory action to happen--and that's what centrally counts. To wit:
There seem to me to be two fundamental points. One: Anyone who cares about global warming should want McCain to vanquish his Republican opponents in the primaries. If we get McCain versus one of the Democrats in the general election, we'll have two candidates who want…
sheril | January 29, 2008How's that for role reversal on Science Blogs?
Well, leave it to the good folks at Carnegie Mellon...
Scientists have long studied how information, influence or physical items move through networks. But by combining that field of research with how to optimally detect the flow in a cost-effective way, the Carnegie Mellon researchers have devised a formula, or algorithm, that could lead to dramatically improved sensor networks, whether geared toward political blogs or posture.
But how would this cascade be modeled? What sensors, or blogs in this case, should be tapped to maximize the…
sheril | January 29, 2008From the NYTimes:
The secret messages hidden in scientist J. Craig Venter's synthetic bacterial genome have now been revealed. They are -- his name, and that of his research institute and co-workers.
cmooney | January 28, 2008
In his most prominent opportunities to speak to the nation over the past near-decade, our president hasn't exactly highlighted matters relating to science (or his administration's various assaults thereupon).
I wouldn't expect much of a change tonight, either.
Still, to prepare yourself to be disappointed, check out this contribution from the Science Progress blog. The little gnomes over there have scanned the texts from Bush's past six speeches for science buzzwords. The results?
While I don't want to give them all away, this is noteworthy: Bush has never yet said the word "stem cell"…
cmooney | January 28, 2008
I was pleased to learn that our North Carolina session has been by far the most watched online--see here--so I decided to post the video.
In addition, the chair of our session, the able Abel Pharmboy, has a long post summarizing what went down, which in turn prompted lots of follow up comments.
If you haven't read that yet, definitely check it out.
cmooney | January 28, 2008Folks: This is the first in a series of posts in which I am going to be republishing, to this blog, old articles of mine that I think are pretty good but that are no longer available online. I want to have a record of my work here, and this seems a reasonable way to do it. So, enjoy.
The Ring and the Cross
How J.R.R. Tolkien became a Christian Writer
Originally published in The Boston Globe, Ideas Section
December 29, 2002
By Chris Mooney
From their mastery Middle-earth geography to their occasional fluency in Elvish, fans of the "Lord of the Rings'' books tend to be a pretty knowledgeable…
sheril | January 28, 2008Craig McClain--scibling, intrepid deep sea explorer, and all around cool guy over at Deep Sea News has provided a great reminder of how vast oceans are...
Randomly place a point on our planet and it would be deep sea. In our daily activities so far removed from this environment, we begin to think all the earth is like our tiny, little corner. We begin to think this is all there is.
By volume, land makes up only 0.5% of the earth and the shallow seas 21%. The deep is 78.5%. That thin, little red strip at 0.5% represents the part we've explored. Every day will yield something new as we…
cmooney | January 25, 2008So: I don't know if I said that I'm in New Orleans at the moment. Being busy and traveling, it has been hard to blog, as always.
I am here for the American Meteorological Society meeting, where on Wednesday I spoke on this panel about science communication. Audio should be available at some point. I'll link it.
And I'm sticking around until next week, when I do a Storm World speech at Tulane University. More info on that here.
But I'm also hanging out with the hometown crowd, and in that context, I recently went to a New Orleans Hornets game. Fun stuff, and the Hornets beat the Blazers, 96-…
sheril | January 25, 2008A Leopard in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, South Africa. The region is a spectacular desert landscape comprised of scrublands and red dunes. The park supports herds of blue wildebeest, leopard, gemsbok, springbok, black mane lions, raptors, and more.
~ Nicolas Devos, Biologist and Wildlife Photographer
cmooney | January 24, 2008
My latest Science Progress column is now up. It's about, well...big stuff. Science, the humanities, their failure to intersect, how to save the world....
All I can say is that it starts like this:
Nearly ten years ago, to get myself officially clear of college, I wrote a senior English essay about parallels between the work of Charles Darwin and the writings of several Victorian novelists. I singled out Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and George Eliot's Middlemarch in particular. It seemed to me that the scientist and the novelists alike sought to address a particularly prevalent human…
sheril | January 24, 2008It should be no surprise to readers that I'm a huge fan of marine scientist, scibling, and friend Jennifer Jacquet. In many ways, I consider her my scienceblogging counterpart on the west coast. Last Saturday, we shared the Framing Science panel with Chris and even managed to have some fun in Durham over the weekend too.
So naturally I read Shifting Baselines and couldn't help but notice her post yesterday on the the slimy hagfishery off the coast of Maine. You see, the last talk I gave during graduate school was at an emerging fisheries meetup in Halifax, Nova Scotia where there were lots…
cmooney | January 24, 2008
[Hurricane Felix near peak intensity in early September.]
So finally, the National Hurricane Center has released its definitive report (PDF) on 2007's Hurricane Felix. Definitive reports on Hurricane Dean and Tropical Storm Erin still await. However, the news from the Felix report is quite significant--Felix has been bumped up in intensity, making it the strongest storm recorded in 2007, with 150 knot maximum sustained winds (more than 170 miles per hour).
I did my latest Daily Green item about this. As I wrote:
Why was Felix upgraded? Some of you may recall that the aircraft reconnaissance…
sheril | January 23, 2008The Science Times is finding creative ways to compare complex social networks thoughout the animal kingdom to politics as usual.
Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately uncovered evidence that the creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung…
cmooney | January 23, 2008If we can get the world of science to speak with one voice on the matter, it will become harder and harder for politicians to resist the call for a presidential science debate.
Today, that moves much closer to reality with the official news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society, will support and endorse ScienceDebate2008. AAAS CEO Alan Leshner has also joined our bipartisan steering committee (which both Sheril and myself sit on).
You can read the full news release here. And for those who keep asking what is next for…
cmooney | January 22, 2008I'm pleased to say that my Columbia Journalism Review piece has started to make some ripples. It was discussed on Slashdot, which is always a big deal. And it was discussed by Andrew Sullivan, which is also always important.
I've also gotten some very thoughtful emails, too--although, alas, I feel like this idea is still a bit too radical for people. Which is unfortunate. What do folks think I ought to do at this point to make more bloggers wake up and act in their own self-interests?
sheril | January 22, 2008
I enjoy receiving email and appreciate all of the feedback, links, and comments that have hit my inbox since Saturday's panel with Jennifer and Chris on Framing Science. While the focus of my portion highlighted ScienceDebate2008, several readers have written with specific questions on Framing itself--and you bet I have some strong opinions!
So it's a good time to round up some of ye ol' posts from my first week at The Intersection and revisit these ideas eight months later. I'm interested to hear how readers feel about the way we convey science to those residing both in and outside of…
cmooney | January 20, 2008So...Sheril and I had a long day yesterday at the N.C. Science Blogging Conference, the highlight of which--at least for us, given how much we practiced for it--was our panel (with Jennifer) on the framing and communication of science.
There have been a lot of reactions to the panel...for a sampling see Jennifer Ouellette, Josh Rosenau, Jonathan Tarr, Sun Addict, and Rick MacPherson. For a total rundown of posts on the Science Blogging Conference, see Bora's handy compilation.
In essence, Jennifer talked more about framing than we did. She made many resonant points, perhaps the most central…
sheril | January 18, 2008
Yup, we had a slumber party prior to the conference...aren't we, like, the perfect dental ad?