Links for 2010-10-18

"Scientists won't talk to journalists; they don't want to waste their time "dumbing it down"; they don't see it as "making us smarter." So many of the good stories in science don't get covered at all. Or the stories get covered only for an already science-literate audience - explored in publications like Discover or Science News - rather than for that far larger group, the science disenfranchised.

Last week's editorial by Royce Murray, the editor of Analytical Chemistry, "Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor" brought home the point that while the medium may change, the dilemma remains the same."

"Their most recent project was far bigger: they took a representative sample of 582 people from 4 cities in the US, and invited them in to read a newspaper and website as they normally would, wearing the eyetracking equipment, over 5 days in 2006, for 15 minutes each. This yielded a dataset of more than 102,000 eye stops.
This is what they found: by the time you get to a story length of 8 to 11 paragraphs, on average, your readers read only half the story. A minority will make it to paragraph number 19, where, on this occasion, a fraction of the readers of the Daily Mail would have discovered that the central premise of the news story - that a new trial had found a 40% reduction in cancer through intermittent dieting - was false."

"If you're holding your breath for the day MTV starts playing music videos, let it go. It's never going to happen, not while the dreaded Snooki-beast is running around, trying to mount Eric Cartman.

But who needs MTV in the digital age? We're here, the time's right, and the videos are waiting for us. So set the way-way-back machine for 1985, strap on your shoulder pads, poof up that hair and layer those jackets. It's time to rock."

"[G]etting direct pictures of planets is really hard. A typical star is roughly a billion times brighter than a planet! And from our great distance, the planet and star are so close together that the former is lost in the latter's glare.
But a new breakthrough has just been announced by astronomers at the University of Arizona -- known for their ability to push the frontiers of what's possible observationally. What they've done is complex, but basically, it reduces the glare from a star, allowing the fainter planet to be more easily detected."

A seemingly innocuous little function that does some amazingly weird things.

You can find anything on the Internet, if you search for it.

"But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."

In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama's opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president's -- Democrat or Republican -- since the mid-1960s. "If you're looking at the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein, "you really don't have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson -- and that includes Ronald Reagan.""