Links for 2009-12-07

The controversy just never ends...

How the Milky Way looks at a variety of different wavelengths.

"There's no particular reason to think parapsychologists are doing anything other than what scientists would do; their experiments are similar to those of scientists, they use statistics in similar ways, and there's no reason to think they falsify data any more than any other group. Yet despite the fact that their null hypotheses are always true, parapsychologists get positive results.

This is disturbing, and must lead us to wonder how many positive results in real science are actually wrong."

"There are a couple of logistical reasons that may help explain why the mainstream press has not exactly risen to the occasion. The first problem for reporters was the sheer size of the cache--I doubt that many journalists had time to comb through all of the e-mails.... The second major problem is that there are quite a few controversial lines. Figuring out and explaining each and every one of them in a single article is damn near impossible.

However, that is exactly what's called for--over the course of the coverage, at least--and the press still hasn't lived up to its responsibilities. With national and international policy on the line, this story deserves more and better coverage. To assess what it has done well and poorly so far, it's useful to group criticism of the e-mails into two categories: what they say about the science of climate science, and what they say about the politics of climate science."

"As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I've also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I've discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world's strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability."

"I think that the lines between self-publishing and vanity publishing have become so hopelessly blurred, both by custom and ideology, that crafting an authoritative set of definitions is impossible (not to mention, no matter what one comes up with, someone is always bound to disagree). I think it makes more sense to see fee-based publishing as a continuum, with true self-publishing and full-on vanity publishing as the extremes, and many variations in between."

"We recently got a delivery of some electronics (OK, it was a bunch of lasers. You can't build a death ray without lasers. Oh, wait, did I say death ray? Forget that. I meant clock), and the packaging for each had both a shock sensor and a freeze sensor.

Naturally, I had to take the freeze sensor apart."

Any celebrities who are planning a meltdown, please contact me to receive a free book to leave in your wrecked car...