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Who Is the Erdos of Physics?

Physics Buzz has a nice article about Paul Erdos and the Erdos Number Project (mine is 6), which ends with a good question: I for one, am wondering: who would be the Paul ErdÅs of the physics world? It's a tough question, complicated further by the existence of really gigantic collaborations in experimental high-energy physics, where author lists can run to hundreds of people. The 511 collaborators that Erdos can boast is more impressive in math than in some fields of physics. For something really equivalent in spirit to Erdos, you would need to look for a physicist who had a long and…

War on Easter!

Echidne has a great suggestion: a War on Easter! After all, our godless War on Christmas almost gave Bill O'Reilly a stroke, so maybe if we take a shot at him twice a year we'll finally see his head explode on television. Echidne is taking a hard line against little yellow chicks, which is a fine start, but I can think of a few others. The date is ridiculous, changing from year to year and calculated by some absurd algorithm based on phases of the moon or something. It's on 16 April this year. I suggest that we fix it to 10 April every year: it's somewhat arbitrary, but it is Max Von Sydow's…

Links for 2009-08-15

Making Light: Panels and parlor games "So all you lucky devils went to Worldcon and I didn't. And now I get to read panel reports, which are always both fun and tantalizingly vague. So let's have a game of it. What fictional characters would you put on a panel, what would you have them talk about, and how would the panel go, do you think?" (tags: SF conventions games blogs making-light) Alternate history | Books | A.V. Club "British essayist William Hazlitt once observed that only mankind is capable of noticing the difference between how things are and how they might have been. It's both…

Book Promotion Ideas

Tom Levenson has another post up in his ongoing series about the writing and publishing process of his new book, this one about generating publicity. At this point, he's gone past what I've experienced so far, but this is fortuitously timed, as I got a note from my editor yesterday saying that the bound galleys are in. Woo-hoo! There will be pictures and so on when I get my copies (probably next week). This seems kind of early-- the book itself won't be out for another six months-- but I assume that the folks at Scribner know what they're doing. Anyway, I eagerly await Tom's next installment…

This Day Needs a Reboot

Kate and SteelyKid have colds (well, they're sharing the same cold), so SteelyKid is waking up a lot during the night. Since Kate needs rest as well, she put earplugs in last night (she's a much lighter sleeper than I am), and I took baby-soothing duty. So I was up half the night. I come in for my 9:15 class, turn on the projector so I can project my slides, and the projector is dead. A bunch of fiddling with it reveals that it's not just a blown bulb (which happened Monday morning), but a broken projector. So, no lecture slides. "All right," I say, "I'll just do a chalk-talk using my…

Links for 2010-12-15

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Cost-Effectiveness, or Cost? "The goal of the study -- which is entirely to the good -- is to encourage colleges to base resource allocation decisions on actual effectiveness, rather than on what sounds good or what has usually been done. The authors break out two-year and four-year sectors -- thank you -- and actually define their variables. (Notably, the productivity decline over the past forty years has been far more dramatic in the four-year sector than in the two-year sector.) Even better, they acknowledge that most of the research done on…

Links for 2010-09-18

Rally to Restore Sanity "We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles. Are you one of those people? Excellent. Then we'd like you to join us in Washington, DC on October 30 -- a date of no significance whatsoever -- at the Daily Show's "Rally to Restore Sanity." Ours is a rally for the…

Physics Quiz: Accelerated Twins

Just about everybody has heard of the Twin Paradox in relativity: one twin becomes as astronaut and sets off for Alpha Centauri, the other remains on Earth at mission control. Thanks to time dilation, the two age at different rates, and the one who made the trip out and back ends up younger than the one who stayed behind. Of course, the paradox is not that the two twins have different ages-- rather, it's that from a simple approach to special relativity, you would think that each twin should see the other's clock running slow, since it seems like getting into a rocket and flying off into…

I guess it's not just deranged protestant fundamentalists

Pope Ratzi confirms the bankruptcy of religion for me once again. Benedict told a gathering of Catholic pharmacists that conscientious objection was a right that must be recognized by the pharmaceutical profession. "Pharmacists must seek to raise people's awareness so that all human beings are protected from conception to natural death, and so that medicines truly play a therapeutic role," Benedict said. Benedict said conscientious objector status would "enable them not to collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes such as, for example,…

You Don't Really Understand a Subject Until You Teach It To Your Dog

I'm typing this from the local Barnes and Noble, waiting for the dealership next door to finish changing my oil and inspecting my car. Sadly, they don't have How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the shelves in their (rather small) science section. Grump, grump, grump. The disappointment at not immediately finding it on the shelves is tempered a bit by seeing it featured in The Big Idea at Scalzi's blog: Want a Big Idea that's about a really big idea? Well, this week's book is about quantum physics, and it doesn't get much bigger than that (well, given the scale quantum physics works on, it…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Is Out Today!

Today is the official publication date for How to Teach Physics to your Dog! I've got another reason or two why dogs should love quantum physics that I'll probably post later, but if the ones posted so far haven't sold you on the book, how about a really nice review from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy,…

Links for 2009-11-29

For a Budding Fan, Basketball The Way It Ought to Be - NYTimes.com "My older son, Gabe, turned 3 in May, and I knew this would be the season I would finally take him to his first basketball game. I wanted the experience to be fun, the start of what I hoped would be a lifetime of basketball fandom. " (tags: sports basketball essay) Revisiting The Einstein-Bohr Dialogue (Part 1 of 3) "A well-entrenched narrative tells the story of the Einstein-Bohr debate as one in which Einstein's tries, from 1927 through 1930, to prove the quantum theory incorrect via thought experiments exhibiting in-…

Links for 2008-11-23

Seeing Laser Beams : Built on Facts "I have to say it's a nice job perk that I can see old science fiction tropes come to life pretty much every day." (tags: science physics optics blogs built-on-facts lasers) blarg? » A Note To Maya "So according to the old joke, a fed-up student asks the physics prof who's going over kinetics in protracted detail, what good is all this? What will I ever use this for? To which the professor, not even looking up from where he's writing on the board, says "This stuff saves lives." The student balks for a second and then gets belligerent, demanding to know…

Where Were You When...?

I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant…

Links for 2009-11-02

Boo! The optics behind "ghost" imaging « Skulls in the Stars "Ghost imaging is in fact a fascinating and relatively new technique in which a detector can produce an image of an object that it cannot see! The physics behind this effect is somewhat subtle, and resulted in at least one minor controversy since its introduction. Let's take a look at it..." (tags: science physics optics blogs skulls-in-stars) nanoscale views: The unreasonable effectiveness of a toy model "As I've mentioned before, often theoretical physicists like to use "toy models" - mathematical representations of…

Adventures in OA

The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field-- something like a laser, which behaves very much as if it were a smoothly oscillating electromagnetic field with a well-defined frequency and phase. Mathematically, one of the important features of a coherent state is that it is unchanged by the photon annihilation operator (in formal terms, it's an "…

Links for 2009-10-07

Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education "Beam makes light of Adler's inflexibility, but he does not entirely embrace the by-now clichéd disdain for the Great Books, because they represent something admirable that, perhaps, should be revived in our culture: "The animating idea behind publishing the Great Books, aside from making money for Britannica and the University of Chicago," Beam observes, "was populism, not elitism." The books were household gods. They shared the living room with the television, and they made you feel guilty…

Links for 2009-09-23

Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Summer's End Roundtable, Part I "How about that ending, huh? " (tags: books literature blogs infinite-summer) US LHC Blog » Relationships in Physics Graduate School "Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following: * Atomic Physics: 5/10 grad students are married (2 of those have kids) * Particle Physics (CMS group): 1/10 grad students are married (none of those have kids)" (tags: science physics atoms particles silly academia) Physics Buzz: Is a Nobel laureate smarter than a fifth grader? "George Smoot, a UC…

links for 2009-03-19

Idle Question of the Day "Exactly what bad consequences would follow if laws were passed by the relevant countries rendering credit default swap contracts void henceforth? (That is, canceling all the outstanding wagers because the bookies went bust.) " (tags: blogs politics economics social-science business) Basketball news: No, I don't think that it's better to be down by one point than up by one point at halftime. Or, to put it in statistical terms, 1.3% (with a standard error of 2%) is not the same as 7.7% - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Soci A little more detail on why…

links for 2009-02-12

Different Cliffs, Different Bottoms, Different Parachutes « Easily Distracted "If one of the goals of stimulus is to get American consumers shopping again, then I think itâs going to take some substantial changes to the entire retail landscape for that to be more than a momentary upward blip in a relentlessly downward spiral. And at least some of those changes will involve rethinking the size, scale and ubiquity of retailing." (tags: blogs economics society culture internet business) Are College Athletes Psyching Themselves Out? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News,…

The Frakes Story

Back in the 25 things post, I alluded to a long-ago encounter with Jonathan Frakes in Williamstown. This has led to a number of requests for the full story, which I will put below the fold, for those who care: I stayed on campus for the summers when I was in college, doing research and hanging out with friends. This involved some small amount of drinking, as you might imagine. Anyway, one summer-- 1992, I think, but I'm not sure-- I was headed home from some sort of party (somebody's birthday, I think) with a couple other people rather late one night. We had been on Meadow Street for some…

Standards Are the Enemy of Achievement

The US Chamber of Commerce has a education website, which provides "grades" for states based on various measures of their educational performance. One category is "Academic Achievement," based on the percentages of students scoring at or above grade level on the NAEP test. Another is "Rigor of Standards," which is a little fuzzier, but is based on official standards for graduation in that state-- state curricula, exit exams, and that sort of thing. What's interesting about this is their correlation: if you click back and forth between the two, looking at their spiffy map, you can watch the…

Christmas Songs That Don't Suck, 2008

I'm beat, and I have a ton of stuff to do today, so here's some seasonally-appropriate filler. I spent a while in a big chain bookstore's cafe area yesterday, doing some edits on the book-in-progress (I can't do this effectively anywhere where I have Internet access), and was stuck listening to some sort of "quirky" piped-in Christmas music-- "O Holy Night" played on a banjo, or some such. So, here, as a palette cleanser of sorts, is the official list of Christmas songs that don't suck, as determined by me. These are the four- and five-star rated songs from my iTunes Christmas playlist (there…

Don't Go to Grad School (in the Humanities)

Matt at Built On Facts spots an Inside Higher Ed article that I missed, showing that grad students at South Carolina get $9,500 a year, and uses it as a starting point to comment about grad school salaries: The difficulty of living as a graduate student varies heavily on what you're studying. Take at the law school model, for instance: you don't get paid at all, and tuition is very expensive and not waived. But the upside to that is that you're not in school very long, you can live comfortably on loans, and once out you can probably get a high-paying job which can pay down your debt fairly…

On the Bitterness of Academics

Jake Young points to a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote (link is a leap of faith-- the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of John Yoo. I found this somewhat annoying, for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I just don't like videoblogging very much. I could read a transcript of this conversation in about a fifth of the time that it takes to watch it, and that would also enable me to quote it accurately. As it is…

Political Songs That Don't Suck?

I picked up the new Rustic Overtones album a week or two ago, partly on the strength of this review at 75 or Less, but mostly because I really liked "Hardest Way Possible" off Viva Nueva, and can't understand why it wasn't a huge hit. (The self-cover on this album probably indicates that the band doesn't understand it, either. Alas, like all self-covers, it's nowhere near as good as the original). The record as a whole is pretty good, though I'm not as enthusiatic as Tom D. "Rock Like War," "Oxygen," and "Carsick" are really good songs, and most of the rest is solid. Unfortunately, it also…

Web Design Is Stupid

The College maintain an "OnCampus" page, intended to serve as a clearinghouse for electronic resources on campus. I have it set as the home page for all my campus computers, because it lets me access a lot of stuff very quickly-- Blackboard, course rosters, academic calendars, etc. This page has always consisted of two bands of pictures on the left and right edges, with the center of the page being a two-column list of links in a very large font. The links were grouped into ares primarily of interest to students, primarily of interest to faculty, and a third category whose name escapes me.…

More About the EPA's Malfeasance

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post.  Yesterday, I pointed out that the EPA ignored the advice of its own scientists in developing new rules for fine particulate matter pollution.  Now, we hear what some of those experts have to say.  Furthermore, they point out that the EPA not only ignored expert advice, it did not even follow the Clean Air Act. Medpage Today has a href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/EnvironmentalHealth/tb/4158">scathing article about the response of the medical community to the new EPA standards for PM2.5.   NEW YORK, Sept. 22 -- The…

Heisenberg's Social Uncertainty Principle: Manipulation, Deliberate or Otherwise

Coturnix href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/07/the_perils_of_polls.php">picked up on an href="http://www.newsobserver.com/662/story/462624.html">interesting study, which shows that "Simply asking college students who are inclined to take drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may increase the behavior."  It is a finding that makes researchers nervous, presumably because they do not want to encourage such behavior. It turns out that the effect was only seen in those persons who already were inclined to use drugs.  It seems doubtful that participating in the survey…

Ritualized child abuse: circumcision

Want to spend an hour cringing and twitching? This is the abridged version of "Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision", and you will suffer if you watch it. It is a wasteful, terrible thing to do to a child. One rabbi interviewed is at least honest about circumcision: "It's painful, it's abusive, it's traumatic, and if anybody does it who isn't in a covenant ought to be put in prison…I do abusive things because I'm in covenant with god." What nonsense. What a wretched excuse for abusing children. (Warning: lots of shots of babies getting chopped, as well as closeups of adult penises…

Answer to the Monday Mystery

At the time I photographed this little scene (at Bell Smith Springs, Illinois) I was myself unsure of the drama playing out on the oak gall. I sent pictures to wasp expert Hege VÃ¥rdal to see if my preliminary guess of a pair of gall parasites was worth anything. Her reply: I believe that you are on the correct track concerning the specimens. It is probably an inquiline and a parasitoid trying to reach the gall chamber. It looks like a unilocular (one-chambered) gall. Often the inquiline female kills the gall wasp larva when ovipositing in the gall or alternatively the inquiline larva kills…

SLR vs microscope for imaging museum specimens

A few years ago I needed to image some ants for a short taxonomic paper.  Lacking a decent specimen imaging system (like Entovision), I decided to snap the photos at home using my standard macro gear: a dSLR with the Canon MP-E lens.  The images turned out fine and were published in Zootaxa with the paper. Later, the Antweb team imaged the same species using their standard set-up: a high-res video camera on a Leica microscope, focus-stacking the images with specialized software.  I decided to compare the two.  Here they are (click on each to view the uncompressed file): Pachycondyla…

How ants acheive "balance"?

From an interview with E. O. Wilson: [Q:]Are ants better at anything than humans? [Wilson:] Human beings have not yet made an accommodation with the rest of lifeâwhereas ants, whose history dates back more than 100 million years, have achieved that balance, mostly by specializing among the 14,000 known species in terms of where they live, what they eat, and how they relate to other species. Each, for the most part, has acquired a balance with prey, food, and space, halting population growth before it crashes. Ants have reached some degree of sustainability, while humans have not. We're not…

Hello, Madam President!

In early February, I received a letter from my university president. A hand-signed letter, addressed to me. In it, she reported how she had been reading this blog and my personal work website. (!) She was very complimentary of this blog, and SW and my contributions to engaging more women in STEM fields. I confess I was rather gobsmacked, verklempt, overwhelmed by the letter. I've scanned it to my computer so I can keep a copy of it, and put the paper copy in my "good things" file that currently remains rather thin. I wrote it up a bit in my P&T file (that was due at the beginning…

Doping Grandpa?: Performance Enhancing Drugs for the Senior Set

I'm not a competitive athlete but there are just some drugs I *must* take because of my asthma. I expect that as I continue to age, I will have to take more drugs. But what if I were an elite master's track & field athlete? John Leland takes on this topic in yesterday's New York Times: Mr. Levine, who is 95 and has had operations on both knees, in June set the American record in the 400-meter dash for men ages 95 to 99, only to see it broken at the U.S.A. Masters Outdoor Track & Field Championships a few weeks later. "Nothing counts unless you're first," he said. Mr. Levine belongs…

Fullsteam Brewery founder and local-ag guru, Sean Wilson, to appear on WUNC-FM's The State of Things

The local food movement is not local here in the sprawling US. Hence why am posting this note here. North Carolina beer saint and local-ag brewer, Sean Lily Wilson, will be on the radio in about an hour. We featured Sean back in January when the state's flagship newspaper named him Tar Heel of the Week for his efforts to modify our draconian beer laws to allow high-gravity beers, especially many of our European favorites, to be sold statewide. Sean's a good man, a great dad, and epitomizes community on so many levels. If you're not local, you can listen to him together with two other…

Happy Birthday, PharmSis!

And happy 3rd blogoversary to Terra Sigillata. Must be some sort of blogging stimulatory hormone in the water each December since both Orac and Greg Laden also celebrated a few days ago the anniversary of their respective blog launches. But the reason I picked 15 December to launch Terra Sig with, "A Humble PharmBoy Begins to Sow," was because it was PharmSis' birthday and I knew I'd never forget that. We won't mention what birthday this is for the ever-devoted little sister of mine (*cough*), but I just wanted to send best wishes out to her when she should be here in Key West with us. Turns…

Hourglass call for entries: carnival on the biology of aging

I just received a lovely e-mail from Dr Chris Patil, blogger at Ouroboros and postdoc fellow in the lab of the well-known aging researcher, Dr Judith Campisi at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Chris dialed me up to submit one of my posts to Hourglass, a monthly blog carnival he launched in July that focuses on the field of biogerontology. Chris used the celebration of his second blogiversary to establish the carnival. Hourglass goes up on the 2nd Tuesday of each month and the next installment will be hosted on 9 September by Alvaro Fernandez over at SharpBrains. I told Chris that I'd…

NIDA job opportunity for molecular neurobiologist

This just in tonight from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse for those looking for a Ph.D.-level position outside of the laboratory: NIDA seeks Molecular Biologist to Direct NIDA Program in Molecular Neurobiology: Under Represented Minorities Are Encouraged to Apply. The DHHS and NIH is an Equal Opportunity Employer Health Scientist Administrator, GS-601-13/14 NIDA Salary Range: $82,961.00 -$127,442.00 USD per year Location: Rockville, MD 20892 Open Period: Thursday, February 14, 2008 to Sunday, March 23, 2008 Job Announcements: NIDA-08-237161-MP and NIDA-08-237161-DE Major Duties:…

Congratulations, Terra Sig Readers!

Okay, here's one final update on our drive to raise DonorsChoose.org funds for K-12 teachers to conduct projects in their classrooms. An e-mail came in today from Charles Best, the Bronx schoolteacher who established DonorsChoose: Thanks in great part to the attention ScienceBlogs generated, we made Internet history! During the month of October, readers of more than a hundred blogs gave $420,000 to classroom projects on DonorsChoose.org, benefiting 75,000 students. To put that in perspective, it took four months for the hugely successful Facebook causes application--with millions of users--…

UK's "Sense About Science" Questions Quackery

Here's a quick note that might belong best in Orac's weekly feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. The Scientist reports today on a report released by the UK-based group of scientists called Sense About Science. The group has been challenging dietary supplement manufacturers about their scientific-sounding advertising claims by calling the companies up and questioning their "science." Their statement of intent stays away from the fact that companies are making money on these products but, instead, focuses on the two standards for science that seem to operate in our societies: We are fed up with…

Six Apart Supports K-12 Education Through DonorsChoose

The company whose Movable Type (MT) software powers us at ScienceBlogs, Six Apart, is doing a great thing by supporting one of our favorite charities, DonorChoose.org. Between now and noon Monday you can request a code that will give you $30 to donate to any DonorsChoose project you'd like. What is DonorsChoose, you ask? Donors Choose is a brilliant non-profit organization lets you support schools and education directly and personally, by choosing projects that excite you, and then making it easy to donate to them. Every project listed on the site is a personal request from a public school…

Sharks don't get cancer but do they get Salmonella poisoning???

Actually, sharks do get cancer but a 15-year-old book by William Lane led people to think otherwise, launching investigation of shark cartilage as a source of antiangiogenic, anticancer compounds. While there is one promising shark cartilage extract (Neovastat) in clinical trials for multiple myeloma, most oral preparations on health food store shelves aren't stabilized and characterized well-enough to guarantee stability of antiangiogenic compounds. But it gets worse with this news today from FDA's MedWatch program that illustrates once again the safety problems of some dietary supplements…

Mother's Day reflections

My Mom did all the great 'Mom' things and was also instrumental in my career choice. After I started grade school, she started feeling out a career in nursing by working as a secretary in the emergency room department of a local hospital. She decided to go to nursing school when I was between 9 and 11 and I remember that her medical books - texts on physiology and pharmacology - began to pique my interest in this field. Her dinnertime recollections of the previous night's ER happenings engrossed me, but simply grossed out my father. As I grew to have a family of my own, I became even more…

Support for the Dunford family and all the troops

Despite living in a state with a heavy military economy, the closest I've come to knowing the sacrifices of Iraq War service personnel is through my ScienceBlogs colleague, Mike Dunford, of The Questionable Authority. While his wife is delpoyed in Iraq, Mike is in grad school looking after their two kids. The latest slap in the face to my friend was his learning about the three-month extension of his wife's deployment...not through the unit Family Readiness Group...but on CNN streaming in his campus center. Mike has posted a letter to his congressional representatives thanking them for…

Everything you wanted to know about clean energy revolution

Not everyone here at ScienceBlogs is happy about a new project appearing here, under the auspices of SEED, and underwritten by none other than Shell. Yes, that's right, the big bad petro products transnational. "The Next Generation of Energy Ideas" is another blog collective, featuring some ScienceBloggers (including me) and a couple of others, most notably Joe Romm of Climate Progress. We'll be tackling a different question, put to us by a SEED editor, each week, and taking turns spewing forth. In return we will be paid for each post. My contributions appear Monday. How do I justify taking…

Philadelphia's shame

I lived in Philadelphia for seven years — it's a great city, and it's also an amazing ethnic patchwork. The residents are proud of the fact that the city's neighborhoods have so much character, although it also means that there is a bit more racial tension lurking in the city, and there are also extremes of poverty and wealth. One other thing you notice living there is that some neighborhoods are extraordinarily Catholic, and that Catholicism just soaks into the area. I imagine that there's some deep anxiety in those neighborhoods right now: the Catholic church has just announced the…

Lucky seven silliness

I don' t know and I don't much care why the number 7 is considered lucky. But I do know that people who hold to such nonsense seem incapable of making sense even of their own superstitions. Consider this pitch from the marketing department of mydomains.com: 7-7-07 is your lucky day at MyDomain.com! The 7th day, of the 7th month of the 7th year happens only once per millennia. We're celebrating this rare day with a group of incredible weekend specials. First of all, while it is true that the 7th day, of the 7th month of the 7th year of each of millennium only happens once every millennium, a…

Must read: Ignorance rising

Today's must read, from the Washington Post: The U.S. government is cutting back on environmental science. The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded. The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans…

Creationists who love science

Can one reject the single most important idea in biology and yet still embrace science? Ronald Numbers, a former Seventh-day Adventist turned historian of creationism, says lots of people do. John Wilkins jumped on the Salon interview with Numbers first. But here's my money quote: Well, most people who reject evolution do not see themselves as being anti-scientific in any way. They love science. They love what science has produced. It's allowed the conservative Christians to go on the airwaves, to fly to mission fields. They're not against science at all. But they don't believe evolution is…