Search Content

Displaying results 83001 - 83050 of 87950

Computer science: Exclusive club or open to all?

This year, our department (finally! finally! after years of wheedling/wishing/hoping/pleading) is seriously discussing issues of retention, recruitment, and climate. I'll have much more to say on this later. But for now, I want to focus on an interesting side discussion that's come up: Should computer science, as a major and a field, be an exclusive club, or be open to all comers? There is a very real divide among my colleagues on this issue. Those who subscribe to the "exclusive club" mentality, if I understand their arguments correctly, say that computer science is Hard! and…

Is computer science a science? (part 1)

There's an old saying that my friends in other fields love to bring up from time to time: any discipline that has science in its name, probably isn't a science. Are they right? Is there some truth in that statement? When I started to think about this question, I thought I could get it all into a single post. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how complex this question really is. So this will be the first post in a series exploring whether (or under what circumstances) computer science can be considered a science. First, some background. Why am I interested in this…

Andy Freeman vs Random House Dictionary

Andy Freeman said: The Random House Dictionary is wrong on this one. They often lack the technical knowledge to "define" terms and go with something that sounds good, but is wrong or basically meaningless. If Andy had claimed that the Earth was flat and standard references on the subject and most other people were wrong, it is conceivable, if unlikely, that he could be correct. However, when he tells us that the dictionary and everyone else is wrong about the meaning of the term "Saturday Night Special" he cannot possibly be correct. Usage defines meaning. That's an interesting leap by…

The Politics of Human Nature: Thomas Hobbes

English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) is widely held as the "father of political science." His 1651 book Leviathan makes the case for why monarchy is the only political system that is consistent with human nature. He bases his argument on the following assumption about humans in "the state of nature" (what we would now call indigenous peoples): Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other . . . Whatsoever therefore…

Neuroskeptic: Trauma Alters Brain Function... So What?

The ever-valuable Neuroskeptic, channeling Stanley Kowalski ("I knew a girl once said she was the glamorous type. She said to me, 'I am the glamourous type.' I said, 'So what?'"), asks just WTH it means to show that brain scans of earthquake survivors show that "trauma alters brain function." The authors link their findings to previous work with frankly vague statements such as "The increased regional activity and reduced functional connectivity in frontolimbic and striatal regions occurred in areas known to be important for emotion processing". But anatomically speaking, most of the brain…

The Shifting U.S. Military

I am nearing the end of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I was at first reluctant to read. Though I found the topic compelling (and thoroughly admired No Logo), I had heard Klein speak on the subject at Seattle's Town Hall and found her disappointingly short on information (very unlike her book). (A friend and I played Buzzword BINGO during the event, as Klein repeated the words: exodus, dystopia, dictatorship, shock and awe, agenda, Chicago, revolutionary, Haliburton, terror, and torture.) But I picked up a copy of the book (gave it a few curls; it's heavy) and haven't put it down. I…

Damn, I guess I have to get my hands dirty.

I, like many of my fellow SciBlings, am less than ecstatic that PepsiCo now has a blog here at ScienceBlogs. It needs to have the Pepsi logo on it. It needs to be 100% clear that the content may be shameless advertising for a major corporation. Right now. But what ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? I'm not talking about Pepsi or its products, which have been shown time and again to be general detriments to health. I'm talking about this new blog. People are accusing them of all kinds of things including compromising the content here - but they haven't written a single post. Yes,…

Breaking Up Is Hard: An Open Letter To Discovery Communications

Dear Discovery, This is really hard for me to say. We've been so close for such a long time, and I feel like there was something real between us. Sure, there have been some rough times, like when you decided deforestation was worth televising. We've had our fights about silly things like how you perpetuate a negative stereotype through shark week and whether ghost hunting is valid programing for a science-oriented network. I've cheated on you with National Geographic a few times, and yet you forgave me. In spite of all our troubles, I still love you, mostly because of Mike Rowe, Dave Salmoni…

Exploring Oahu: Makapu'u

On the easternmost end of Oahu there is a fun, 2-mile hike to the top of Makapu'u point, where there sits a cool little lighthouse that was built in the 1900s. The way is steep at times, but it's nicely paved, and it's an excursion just about anyone can enjoy. Once at the top, you get a stunning view of the windward side of the island. The first time I hiked it, the day was almost perfect. It was stunningly sunny and clear, and the views were truly breathtaking:But there were two things wrong with an almost-perfect day: first off, it was summer, and one of the main reasons to hike up to the…

A Better Mood Broadens Your Field Of Vision

You often hear that happy people see the world differently. They look through 'rose colored glasses' or 'on the bright side.' There are a lot of phrases that connect mood and sight. Those less optimistic, as well, claim to 'see things as they are.' It's no surprise, then, that new research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, has found that mood really does change how we see the world. Though the pessimists "realists" might claim to be the ones who are most in touch with actuality, its the optimists that actually see more of the world around them. That's because, as researchers from…

Science + Technology F*ing Rocks!

First, the visual: image creditOk. Now to explain.Scientists from the University of Bristol Woodland Road wanted to learn more about rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis). Specifically, they had noticed that the ants seem to be able to pick out the best possible nest sites when they decide to move. As a collective group, the entire colony chooses where to settle in, though scouts fan out and look around to see what's available. At first, they thought that the ants just directly compared options. But ants that never see the worse sites still help the colony decide on the better one - and…

Enjoying Florida: Manasota Beach

You know you've been infected with nerdiness when you're on vacation and you decide that, rather than sleeping in and relaxing like a normal person, you're going to get up at 5 am to hit Manasota Beach at low tide. For the record, it's DARK at 5am. There isn't a hint of light yet. And since my car is in the shop *long string of cuss words in the Elantra's general diretion*, we decided to take Barry's motorcycle for the 45 minute trek down to Manasota Beach. The air was beautiful this morning. The night blooming flowers made it thick with perfume. It was a nice ride. Anyhow, we get to the…

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite

There's something about brain-altering parasites that is just creepy. This is doubly true when the parasite makes the host attempt suicide - which is just what Spinochordodes tellinii, the hairworm, is best at. Hairworms are free-living aquatic organisms as adults, who, as nematodes, eek out an existence in the mud. As a larvae, however, they're nasty little buggers. Hairworms infect Orthopteran insects (aka grasshoppers and crickets). The adults reproduce in the water, and produce little larvae which are eaten by their unlucky hosts. By the time the little sucker is full grown, it can be…

A real histone deacetylase inhibitor finally approved for cancer

SAHA, or suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid, was recently granted orphan drug approval by the US FDA for skin lesions resulting from cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. SAHA (vorinostat, Zolinza) will be marketed by Merck as they acquired in 2004 Aton Pharma, who had been developing the compound. (This free Nature Biotechnology article, while dated, gives background on the acquisition and the then-development of other similar compounds.) Merck's press release is farily detailed and available in PDF format. I'm somewhat surprised that more has not been made of this approval since histone deacetylase…

Wow!!! Thank you generous donors!

Much to my amazement, over $500 has been donated to fully fund the first of my three pet projects in North Carolina. What is even more amazing is that these donations came from a total of two individuals: one is a blogger and the other is unknown to me, I think, but DonorsChoose does not list the amount for each donor. So thank you to you both and a very special BIG thank you if one of you donated the bulk or if both of you donated in the ballpark of $250 each. Why I am even more touched by your generosity is that the funded project, Big Books for Little Readers in Science and Social…

Silence is the Enemy.

It's easy, as Nicholas Kristof points out, to think and talk about international affairs in abstract terms. Most of us are living comfortable lives in comfortable countries. We have the luxury of being able to afford to think about things that are happening beyond our own borders, even when they're unlikely to affect us directly. We can talk and think about what's happened or what is happening in Bosnia, in Darfur, in Cambodia, in the Sudan. We can think and talk about things we can do to make things better in those places, and sometimes we can carry through with our plans. It's not as…

Four White Flowers

It's spring, and everything looks great in the garden right now. Well, except for those pervasive Star of Bethlehem invaders that have to be pulled out by the dozens. Star of Bethlehem is a non-native, very invasive plant that can take over your flower bed almost overnight. I spent about an hour or more yesterday pulling it out of my flowerbeds. Its flowers are white, but it's not one of the four white flowers of the post title. The four white flowers would be: tree peony, woodland phlox, chokeberry tree blossoms, and foam flower. I am not what you would call a photographer - I take…

This is the time to speak.

Today, in Virginia, there was a massive tragedy. Dozens of promising lives have come to an abrupt and unnecessary end. Dozens - hundreds - more lives have been changed forever. All of this has happened because of a single person and his weapons. There are those in this country who believe that we need to do more to keep weapons out of the wrong hands. Some have chosen to speak up now. There are those in this country who believe that we must be careful not to allow our emotions, after an event like this, to lead us to restrict the basic rights of Americans. Some have chosen to speak up now…

Drosophila in the field 1

When people hear the word Drosophila, the image that pops most readily to mind (for those who know what Drosophila are) almost certainly involves scientists working in the lab. There's good reason for that, of course. Lots of Drosophila are used in the lab. Go to any university in the world that has a research program in the life sciences, and you will probably find at least one lab that works with these cute little dipterans. In the last year alone, xx papers have been indexed in PubMed with the word Drosophila in the title. Given that, it can be easy to forget that Drosophila might have an…

Quote of the Day - 29 December 2006

On the First Day of Christmas, I did the "Yes, Virginia" quote. On the Third Day of Christmas, I did Terry Pratchett's take on the same question. Today is the Fifth Day of Christmas, and it's always been my favorite (mostly because of childhood memories of Miss Piggy adding the "BA DOMP BOMP BOMP's" to the song). Hopefully, the quote for the Fifth Day will tie the last two quotes together. This bit's from Hogfather, too. "Thank you. Now . . . tell me . . ." WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN"T SAVED HIM? "Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?" NO. "Oh, come on. You can't expect…

Running to support those left behind

This Thanksgiving, there's a lot that I am thankful for. There's also a fair amount that I'm not all that thankful for. I'm thankful that as of the email I got from her last night, my wife is still in good health. I'm not all that thankful that she is in good health on a base in Iraq. I'm also not very thankful that there are a lot of other families this year who have not been as lucky as we have in this regard. For far too many people, supporting the troops begins and ends with the $1.93 spent on the magnetic ribbon. For many of those whose support extends a bit further, the support ends,…

Atheists and Politics

Over at Uncommon Descent, DaveScot says something stupid about atheism and science. (In other news, Dog Bites Man, Pope Still Catholic, Bear Arrested for Indecent Exposure in National Forest, and Ocean Wet and Salty.) At the end of a passage in his new book (The God Delusion) that discusses the relative frequency of "avowed atheists" in the National Academy of Sciences (~93%) and the United States Congress (~0%), Dawkins wrote, "What is going on here? I think we all know." DaveScot responded with this: Yeah, I think we all DO know, Richard. The National Academy membership is a self-elected…

April Fool's Day Sermon

There will no doubt be many April Fool's gags and hoaxes tomorrow. None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society. But there is a hoax doing the rounds that, while not an April Fool's gag, is a gag about April the 1st. The story is this: Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination…

Gender Disparity in Academia Destined for Reversal

I have talked repeatedly here about how I don't think that genetics provide an adequate explanation of the gender disparity in science. I haven't mentioned that this gender disparity does not overly disturb me, primarily because I think that some time in the next 10 years this is going to get fixed in profound way. Here is some demographic evidence why women will soon surpass men in science and more generally in academia: Girls have long gotten better grades than boys in all levels of school. But while at one time few women used those academic skills to get degrees, new research suggests…

Proposal: Position of "Public Woman of Loose Morals" to be an Elected Office, Paris Hilton to be First

I actually care little about Paris Hilton's antics. I find it difficult to become interested in someone's career when the origins of that career are based on a sex tape that shows that she performs oral sex poorly. There I said it. I have seen that tape, and Paris Hilton is not gifted. Not that anyone was describing Paris Hilton as gifted in any regard. In my opinion, the only reason she isn't riding the short bus is that Daddy has a bagillion dollars. However, I did not bring you together today to talk about Paris's limited mental acumen. Rather I have a more productive proposal. In…

More on the Feasibility of Biofuels

A study in the newest PNAS seeks to quantify the efficiency and resource utilization for various types of biofuels: The first comprehensive analysis of the full life cycles of soybean biodiesel and corn grain ethanol shows that biodiesel has much less of an impact on the environment and a much higher net energy benefit than corn ethanol, but that neither can do much to meet U.S. energy demand. The study will be published in the July 11 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers tracked all the energy used for growing corn and soybeans and converting the crops into…

I did not post this because I wanted to post a picture of Lindsay Lohan...

...I am just concerned that she needs to stay out of the sun because being a redhead she is at high risk for skin cancer: Fair-skinned redheads are known to have increased risk of developing melanoma. Now researchers may have pinpointed one of the reasons: variations in a gene called MC1R. This gene assists in producing melanin pigment to help protect the skin against the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays (UV). However, some variations (variants) of MC1R are less protective than others. Two recent studies, from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and Western General Hospital in England,…

Tetrapods, species selection, and extinction

Just a couple of days ago I mentioned the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. They must have heard me because today I get my email notification that they have published this year's volume. I'd like to mention three papers of interest to me. Alas, children, if you don't have a library subscription (or a personal one), you won't be able to access these papers directly... To start with the last one first, here's a paper (Coates et al.) that discusses the history and biology of the relationships of early tetrapods - organisms with four limbs, backbones, and bony skeletons. We…

How to hijack a thread

From Almost Diamonds, by Stephanie Zvan, comes a description of many of my favourite trolls, including the one who won't take "you're banned" as an answer. This is why he's banned. Or, A Primer in Antisocial Attention-Seeking Lay your groundwork. Watch the group interaction. Make yourself known to the community. Engage on a topic or two. Piss a few people off so they'll react to you reliably later. Watch for your chance. If the blog is any good, the host and/or community practices some sort of moderation, active or passive. You'll have to catch them on a busy day or heated topic to get them…

Five-fiftysix meme

New: Solutions listed Mike Dunford, who is still trying to get me to pay for that time he put me up in Hawaii when his wife was on active service in Iraq (if I knew what I'd have to pay, both in climbing horrific rainforested slopes to release wallabies, and this meme, I'd never have gone) has tagged me, the bastard. It's a meme created by Henry Gee (I'll get even with him later, too). Find ten books, the first ones you see, go to page 56, sentence five and transcribe it. You readers are supposed to guess what they are. [I better keep a note or I'll be screwed later...] Below the fold…

Basic Concepts: Physics and Astronomy, Geology, and Chemistry

SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you. This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask. To subscribe to updates, use the RSS feed in the address bar of the complete post. Physics and Astronomy…

Alternative medicine in Journal of Clinical Oncology

I finally just got around to reading the 1 Dec issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and was struck by two, back-to-back articles that address two interesting aspects of alternative medicine in cancer treatment. Mind you, I'm a basic scientist but I find the struggles that oncologists face to be quite interesting in this regard. First is an article (free full text here) from a feature called, The Art of Oncology: When the Tumor is not the Target. The title alludes to some high-profile legal cases that arose over the summer, but does not discuss specifically the Cherrix case: Do…

Thumbnail book review: Storm World

I've just finished reading fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney's new book Storm World, and I highly recommend it -- not only to people interested in hurricanes and global climate change, but also to fans of cognitive psychology. Why psychology? Because the book offers an excellent case study of how scientific research becomes part of the popular consciousness. Hurricane Katrina was a devastating storm, and its repercussions are still being felt. There's also little doubt that global warming is occurring. While there's a great deal of scientific uncertainty about the precise relationship…

Trying to lose weight? Try staring at randomly changing squares

This article was originally posted on May 10, 2006 Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings…

Subliminal advertising works. How scared should we be?

The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a particular store or drink a certain brand of beer. Overhyped as these claims may be, there is a grain of truth in them -- as a recent post in Neuromarketing points out, subliminal images really can affect our preferences: In Your Money and Your Brain, Philip Zweig describes a study conducted by psychologist Robert Zajonc almost forty years ago. Zajonc exposed a two…

Why grown-ups are better than kids at recognizing faces

Take a look at this animation. One face will flash; then it will be followed by another face. Are the two faces the same or different? The change between faces could be a small one. Did you notice a change? (You can repeat the movie once if you're not sure.) Let's make this one a poll: Now try another animation: Again, were the faces the same or different? Most people are much better at identifying different human faces than identifying animal faces, which makes sense, since most people have more experience with other people than with animals. Most adults are also better at distinguishing…

Smells Like Clean Spirit

Occasionally you read a journal article so well-titled, you have to steal it for your blog post title. "Smells Like Clean Spirit" is a report by Rob Holland, Merel Hendricks, and Henk Aarts, in which they use smells to unconsciously modify their victims' participants' behavior. In some ways, this research is nothing new. As the researchers point out, if we smell chocolate chip cookies, we may decide to eat; if we smell a garbage truck, we may walk faster down the street. We might associate pine scent with Christmas, or pheromones with sex. But most of these associations involve people being…

Implicit attitudes: Are we biased about the foods we buy?

We've discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before, but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the following lists. Use your mouse to click on items which are either pleasant or related to Genetically Modified foods (GM foods). (Clicking won't actually do anything, it's just a way of self-monitoring your progress) Horrible Good Transgenic Nasty Crops Wonderful dislike GE livestock Now with this next list, do the same task, only click on items which are either unpleasant or related…

If you thought the Stroop Effect was cool, have I got an effect for you!

We've had plenty of discussion of the Stroop Effect on Cognitive Daily, and a cool effect it is -- but it's not the only effect with a catchy name. How about the spatial numerical association of response codes effect? Not catchy enough for you? The scholars researching the effect have taken to calling it the SNARC Effect. Now if that isn't an effect named to win a blogger's heart, I don't know what is. First identified by Dehaene, Bossini, and Giraux in 1993, the SNARC Effect suggests that people represent numbers in the form of an imaginary number line. When asked to indicate if a digit is…

Trying to lose weight? Try staring at randomly changing squares

Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings. I've attempted to reproduce the type of display…

Casual Fridays: Are good email manners possible?

Last week we asked readers to answer some questions about how they managed their email. The results are in, and boy are they ... confusing. We're having trouble identifying any clear patterns at all in email management. First of all, let's get a sense of the scale of the problem. Here's how respondents' email use broke down: Most respondents send and receive between 11 and 50 emails a day, and the vast majority -- 84 percent of respondents -- have non-spam email traffic of less than 50 per day. One respondent of the 251 who answered actually claims to send and receive over 1000 emails a…

Do babies know if hidden objects are still there?

One of Jean Piaget's most famous observations is the phenomenon of "object permanence"—the idea that babies younger than eight months old have no conception of an object once it's hidden from view. It's easy to see how he came to this conclusion. Click on the picture of my daughter Nora at six months of age to see a video of her spectacularly failing the object permanence test. Once the object is hidden under a napkin, she seems to lose all interest in it. But does she really not understand that the object is still there, or is she simply interested in other things? A team of researchers…

Music and IQ

Though you'll never hear her tell you, Greta is an excellent musician. She's a brilliant English horn and oboe player, and she can also handle the piano keyboard. When a nonmusician hears her play, they'll often tell her how they wished their parents had made them practice when they were younger (unfortunately, our kids Jim and Nora don't seem to appreciate this logic when we tell them it's time to practice!). Everyone appreciates a good musician, but if the responses of our own children are any indication, few of us are willing to put in the practice it takes to learn to perform well. We all…

Marshall McLuhan redeemed—sort of

A couple weeks back on my personal blog, I posted a rant about Marshall McLuhan. Basically I was arguing that while the medium may be the message, the medium isn't the only message. There was a fair bit of commentary on my post, both there at Word Munger and around the blogosphere. As expected, I don't think I changed many minds—"believing" McLuhan's argument seems to be more a matter of faith than anything else. It turns out, psychologists have something to say about all this. There is plenty of psychological research on art, but as you might expect, most of this work is done in labs, not…

Darwin Day Twofer: An Interview with "Darwin's Dangerous Descendent," and Why Darwin Shouldn't be an Icon of Science-Religion Conflict

Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day. The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should be considered an icon of conflict between science and religion. In fact, we call that idea "a hackneyed story, lacking in historical nuance and ultimately running counter to the project of drawing helpful lessons from the life of one of history's greatest scientists." A brief excerpt: ...Science-…

Three Years After Katrina, We Remember. But Have We Learned?

In January of 2003, I sat in Joe Kelley's seminar at the University of Maine as he foretold the devastation that was to come to New Orleans. I'd never heard this chilling story before and listened intently as he explained that as far back as when The Big Easy flooded in the 1920's, scientists realized that the Mississippi Delta would continue to change its course (rivers have a habit of doing that you see). I began to understand that over time, the already vulnerable city faced increasing threat and felt dizzy amid the whirlwind of so many alarming facts and figures. The levees are…

Off to Princeton to "Frame" Science; On to Georgia Tech to Defend It; The Two Are Hardly Incompatible

I'm hitting the road this morning for a week-long, three stop trip that takes me first to Princeton, New Jersey; second to Georgia Tech; and third to D.C. The first two stops are for talks, the last is for R&R, reconnecting with old friends, and meeting up with Sheril to work on a new project we've come up with (of which much more soon). In light of all the controversy of late, though, I must say I find it rather symbolic how the two major talks that I'm giving break down. First, with Nisbet, I'll be speaking in the Princeton/Woodrow Wilson School Science, Technology, and Environmental…

A Consensus on Framing?

You probably aren't going to believe this. But not only was the battle at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis last night pretty un-warlike; the participants actually seemed to find plenty of common ground. Both Greg Laden and, yes, even PZ Myers agreed that the framing of science can be a useful tool sometimes--perhaps even a good idea sometimes. Yeah, I know. Pretty shocking. Let me explain what happened. The Chris and Matt team went into this debate with a clear strategy: Try not to fight too much over science and religion; and do not fall prey to the tyranny of small differences when…

The 'F' Word Offends Again!

Science Blogs are abuzz since PZ, Rob, James, John, and Skatje Myers have reopened the Pandora's box on matters of Faith. As I've stated before, I feel strongly that Science need not become universally synonymous with Godlessness because that certainly doesn't win any converts. Any breed of fundamentalism (atheism included) usually results in alienating good folks and losing credibility among everyone who thinks or believes differently. Granted, I'm green in the blogosphere, but the topic is one that really gets under my skin because it pits two fundamentally different levels of argument…

Crazy to Worry, or Crazy Not To?

I'm a worst-case scenario kind of thinker. My May 2005 article about the destruction of New Orleans by a Category 5 hurricane--an article published about 100 days before Katrina--certainly demonstrated as much. I think it's rational to worry about extreme scenarios in direct proportion to how bad they would be if they actually happened--not to simply dismiss them because they're "unlikely" at any given moment or in any given year. So perhaps that's why it is that lately, I find myself thinking a lot about the possibility of nuclear terrorism in a major U.S. city. How many people, when they…