Search Content

Displaying results 16051 - 16100 of 87950

Praxis

Open Access and the divide between 'mainstream' and 'peripheral' science (also available here and here) by Jean-Claude Guédon is a Must Read of the day. Anyone have his contact info so I can see if he would come to ScienceOnline'10? There is a whole bunch of articles about science publication metrics in the latest ESEP THEME SECTION - The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance. Well worth studying. On article-level metrics, there are some interesting reactions in the blogosphere, by Deepak Singh, Bjoern Brembs, Duncan Hull, Bill Hooker and Abhishek Tiwari…

Department of cluelessness

Clear off a space on the floor near you, because soon you'll be rolling around laughing on it. You may recall that John A. Davison, infamous advocate of Intelligent Design, started a blog of his own, titled Prescribed Evolution, back in November of 2005. It generated a lot of hilarity because it consisted of one post. This is it. I have my own blog now, only because I have been banned from just about all the others. Since I am computer illiterate, don't expect very much from me. I welcome any comments about my published papers including my unpublished "An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New…

Foodblogging and the post-foodblogging science-blogging dinner

The three-day Foodblogging event has started, with a reading/booksigning by Michael Ruhlman at the Regulator bookshop in Durham. Among those in the audience were Reynolds Price, local bloggers Anton Zuiker and Brian Russell, as well as Anna Kushnir, foodblogger who drove all the way from Boston (OK, via Virginia) to attend the event. I bought The Reach of a Chef and asked him what is the best way to get a kid/teenager who is interested in cooking started. He said that hands-on experience is essential and that one should carefully pick a course that focuses on basics and not on fancy gimmicks…

Dawn of a New Year

Anticrepuscular Rays Over Florida What's happening over the horizon? Although the scene may appear somehow supernatural, nothing more unusual is occurring than a setting Sun and some well placed clouds. Strangely, the actual sunset was occurring in the opposite direction from where the camera was pointing. Pictured above are anticrepuscular rays. To understand them, start by picturing common crepuscular rays that are seen any time that sunlight pours though scattered clouds. Now although sunlight indeed travels along straight lines, the projections of these lines onto the spherical sky are…

Music Mondays: Five songs I love

Another list of songs I really love, this time leaning a bit on the heavy side. I by Black Sabbath (performed by Heaven & Hell). This is one of my favourite Dio-era Sabbath songs, from the underrated Dehumanizer album (Dio/Sabb box set). This sizzling live version is performed by the reformed Dio-era version of the band which is playing and recording under the name Heaven & Hell. 30 Days in the Hole by Gov't Mule. An old Humble Pie song, I like the Gov't Mule version an awful lot, especially the live version on their Live...With a Little Help from Our Friends CD. Dreaming Neon…

New Neil deGrasse Tyson Book Out Now

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by NdGT is now available. What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson. But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day. While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or…

That Famous DI Statement

The DI's famous list of "dissenting scientists" who "doubt Darwin" has gone over 500 names and they are crowing. Their press release is reprinted almost word for word in the Worldnutdaily and they've even launched a website about this list called dissentfromdarwin.org. But as I've said a thousand times, the statement that they claim shows "dissent" from "Darwinism" is a sham. Here's the statement that the 500 scientists agreed to: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for…

Major Coup for U of M Law School

My buddy Dan just emailed me about this, having read about it on Brian Leiter's law school blog. The University of Michigan Law School has scored a major coup by hiring Doug Laycock away from the University of Texas. Prof. Laycock is one of the leading constitutional scholars in the nation, particularly on church/state issues. The last decade has seen U of M lose many prominent legal scholars to other schools, so it's a very big deal for them to reverse that trend and attract a scholar of this importance from another school. As is common these days, luring him away was a package deal. His…

Where is the cosmic microwave background?

“We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won’t need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don’t fire cannons to call attention to their shining- they just shine.” -Dwight L. Moody The farther away in space we look, the farther back in time we’re seeing. Light arriving from a star ten light years away is ten years old; light that took a billion-year journey from a distant galaxy is a billion years old. If we look out today at the most distant light we can see, we discover that it originates from the Big Bang itself: the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. The timeline of our…

How NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Will Answer Astronomy's Biggest Questions (Synopsis)

"The [James Webb] telescope is basically designed to answer the big questions in astronomy, the questions Hubble can't answer." -Amber Straughn Have you ever asked the biggest questions in the Universe? Questions like how the Universe came to be the way it is today? How the first stars and galaxies -- the first light -- came to be in the Universe? Whether Earth-sized worlds around red dwarf stars have atmospheres, possibly with signatures of life? And what the Universe was like when the first stars were just forming? The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to answer these questions and…

The Typhoon Haiyan Storm Surge on Video

Storm surges are amazing. I've never seen one happen but I've seen the aftermath. A video has surfaced of a storm surge hitting Hernani in Eastern Samar, shot from the second floor of a house that was a few hundred meters from the coast. A storm surge is a mound of water caused by the wind of a hurricane (or other storm) pushing the water ahead of it, and further heightened by the low pressure system of the storm. In a given major storm there can be many, but there seems to be one big one most of the time. If the surge happens at high tide it is worse. If it happens at spring high tide…

Yet more blogging?

Tim Lambert notes that Science advocates blogging (and since they mention RC and scienceblogs, who can disagree?). They also mention James A; he raises the interesting point about blogs being tolerated rather than encouraged. Certainly I get no work-credit at all for this (not that I was expecting any) but its a fun thing to talk about at conference dinners. James points out Bryan Lawrences blog (which I had on my mustelid blogroll and have just added here) and how nice it is to see someone senior (albeit a bit techy :-) blogging. Another example of someone senior "blogging" is Scientist on…

DI Lying About Dover

The Discovery Institute really is frantic about the Dover case and it's making them tell some real whoppers. The latest one is from DI director John West: Dr. John West of the Discovery Institute, which sponsors research on intelligent design, said the case displayed the ACLU's "Orwellian" effort to stifle scientific discourse and objected to the issue being decided in court. "It's a disturbing prospect that the outcome of this lawsuit could be that the court will try to tell scientists what is legitimate scientific inquiry and what is not," West said. "That is a flagrant assault on free…

Pulsars: How The First 'False Alien' Signal Opened Up A New World In Astronomy (Synopsis)

"Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right." -Jocelyn Bell-Burnell Observations that surprise us, of a phenomenon we weren’t expecting and don’t have an explanation for, are some of the most exciting things we can encounter in astronomy. In 1967, regularly pulsing radio sources, discovered without any expectation, provided exactly that. It wasn’t noise; it was definitely a robust, repeatable observation; so what was it? The data from the first pulsar ever found…

Ten ways 'Proxima b' is different from Earth

"I have lost tolerance for things without meaning. There is no time for them. Does that make sense?" -Sara Seager The discovery of a potentially habitable planet around the nearest star to our own -- Proxima Centauri -- has brought up the tantalizing possibility that this might be closest Earth-like world ever found. But it’s important to realize that as much as we’d love to find a world humans could inhabit and colonize beyond our Solar System, there’s a big difference between calling something “Earth-like” and having it actually be like Earth. An artist’s rendition of Proxima Centauri as…

Could Dark Energy Be Caused By Frozen Neutrinos? (Synopsis)

"If you're puzzled by what dark energy is, you're in good company." -Saul Perlmutter The accelerated expansion of our Universe was one of the biggest surprise discoveries of all-time, and something that still lacks a good physical explanation. While many models of dark energy exist, it remains a completely phenomenological study: everything appears consistent with a cosmological constant, but nothing appears to be a good motivator for why the Universe should have one. How energy density changes over time in a Universe dominated by matter (top), radiation (middle), and a cosmological constant…

Physics "News": Bio and Astro

I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post lumps together some results from biophysics and astrophysics that didn't make it into the previous posts: GZK cutoff confirmed: from Backreaction, a report on new observations of highly energetic cosmic rays. These are subatomic particles with energy roughly equaly to the kinetic energy of a tennis ball on a volley that hit the upper…

The Rich Get Richer, Internet Edition

Via FriendFeed, an interesting analysis of Internet traffic at compete.com. They set out to test the assertion that the "Long Tail" of low-traffic sites account for more traffic than they used to, and found exactly the opposite-- the share of all pageviews for the top ten domains increased from 29% to 40% between 2001 and 2008. What's really interesting is the reason why: The driver of this Top Domain growth can be summed up in two words "social networks". If you were to remove MySpace and Facebook from consideration in 2006 (also removing their pageviews from the total) top domains would…

Random Quotes

Since everyone else is doing it, I'll go along with the game, and post five random quotes that "reflect who you are or what you believe," chosen from the randomizer at quotationspage.com. This actually took a while, because I'm not wild about most of what they throw out. I'll throw in a bonus sixth quote, though, because this one: "Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm." --John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963) is pretty lightweight, but accurate. More serious quotes after the cut. "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." --Ralph…

Anti-gay mayor faces federal criminal charges

On Monday, Birmingham mayor Larry Langford was busted by the feds for bribery and fraud in connection with a multibillion-dollar sewer bonding that has caused the county in which Birmingham is seated to end up in near bankruptcy. Langford, Montgomery investment banker Bill Blount and lobbyist Al LaPierre were charged in the 101-count indictment. The charges also include money laundering and filing false tax returns. Langford is accused of receiving $230,000 in bribes from Blount, some of them routed through LaPierre, to influence the bond deals while Langford was president of the Jefferson…

Norm Coleman is Going to Hell

Well, ok, there is no Hell. So we're just going to tell Norm the truth and he's going to think it's hell..... This item, from Tangled Up in Blue Guy (see THIS for more commentary) is absolutely outrageous. Unbelievable. Watch this piece of video from a Norm Coleman ad showing how Al Franken can get out of control angry: Now, in case you did not know it, let me tell you something: Paul Wellstone was our senator from Minnesota, widely respected and loved by all. He was one of the best senators that ever, ever graced the US Capitol. But he was killed in a tragic plane crash during is…

Links for 2010-12-05

YouTube - MST3K - Patrick Swayze Christmas A carol to move the hardest of hearts... (tags: silly music movies television youtube video) Not Even Not Even Wrong - Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design : Built on Facts "Isaac Newton, when he wasn't revolutionizing mathematics and almost single-handedly inventing physics as a systematic discipline, wrote some really ridiculous stuff. Alchemy, occult esoterica, you name it. In his defense, it was the 1600s. He didn't have a whole lot of prior scientific understanding to help him sort the wheat from the chaff. Until he reached the age at which…

Links for 2010-02-05

Failure rate for AP tests climbing - USATODAY.com "The newspaper's analysis finds that more than two in five students (41.5%) earned a failing score of 1 or 2, up from 36.5% in 1999. In the South, a Census-defined region that spans from Texas to Delaware, nearly half of all tests -- 48.4% -- earned a 1 or 2, a failure rate up 7 percentage points from a decade prior and a statistically significant difference from the rest of the country." (tags: academia education class-war us statistics) Physics Buzz: Study Physics - It's the Whole Enchilada "If you're gonna study something, you might as…

The Confusing Display of Quantitative Information

Nobody is ever going to mistake me for Edward Tufte, but whenever I run across a chart like this one: (from Matt Yglesias, who got it from Justin Fox where it was merely one of many equally horrible plots), I find myself distracted from the actual point of the graph by the awfulness of the presentation. I mean, look at this thing. The numerical labels for the horizontal axis are up at the top, rather than at the bottom where they usually go. The label that states what's actually plotted on that axis is down at the bottom of the graph, where it appears to be just a stray bit of text labelling…

It's good to know how much we're loved

Why, oh why, did you have to disillusion me, Ebonmuse? And to slap me upside the face with a study from my own university, no less. From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry. Oh. Well. That explains the tears and yelling from the in-laws-to-be 26 years ago last week. Knowing how most Americans…

Quick reads: Dr Marjorie Lee Brown

I'll be a little light on blogging this week so I'll mostly be sharing a couple of quick reads I've stumbled upon recently. This one is presented in light of my post last week on National HBCU Week and the accompanying post from my colleague, DrugMonkey (whose referral generated even more discussion). This tidbit is from the journalism and news production students of James Logan High School in Union City, CA: "I always, always, always like mathematics." Marjorie Lee Browne. Marjorie Lee Browne (9 Sept 1914-19 Oct 1979) was a notable mathematics educator, the second African-American woman to…

David Foster Wallace article

The cruise-ship piece ["A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"] ran in [Harper's in] January 1996, a month before [Infinite Jest] was published. People photocopied it, faxed it to each other, read it over the phone. When people tell you they're fans of David Foster Wallace, what they're often telling you is that they've read the cruise-ship piece... It's heartbreaking, this lengthy article in Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace. Reading the tributes and memories of DFW over at McSweeney's, you can't get away from the impression that he was just a regular guy who, oh, happened to be…

Expelled exposed for copyright infringement

Regular readers will remember law professor Peter Irons for his epic legal takedown of Stuart Pivar. Well he’s gone and done it again and this time he has been involved with a letter from XVIVO correctly accusing Premise Media (makers of Expelled!) of copyright infringement. Here’s the gist: We have obtained promotional material for the "Expelled" film, presented on a DVD, that clearly shows in the "cell segment" the virtually identical depiction of material from the "Inner Life" video. We particularly refer to the segment of the "Expelled" film purporting to show the "walking" models of…

A Look Across Continents at the Public & Plant Biotech

Oxford University Press has published a new edited volume featuring research on public opinion and media coverage of the plant biotech debate in the US, Europe, Africa, India,and Brazil. The volume is edited by Dominique Brossard and James Shanahan, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cornell University respectively, along with Clint Nesbitt, a scientist at USDA. Below is a table of contents. I contributed the chapter on "Where Do Science Debates Come From?," co-authored with Mike Huge, a graduate student I worked with at Ohio State. Table of Contents -Perspectives on…

Squealing and Blinking: An Analog Artificial Neural Network as Art

Phil Stearns has constructed a 45 "neuron" network of electronic parts which responds to lights and tones with a (rather cute) squealing sound. A picture of the components for this strange device: Each "neuron" consisted of analog electronics corresponding to each of 6 functions: Input, Summing, Threshold, "Offset," "Output," and "Structure" (not sure about those latter three). The connectivity was determined by hand. Phil states that the sculpture is not intelligent, but rather "some kind of squid baby." Neural networks have great potential for contributing to the arts. For example, JP…

Pale Blue Dot

To aid in the gestation of a new project, I've been watching a whole lot of Carl Sagan programs. Namely, the 13-part epic of Cosmos, which remains, to me, the most comprehensive survey of the Universe and our place within it ever presented to the lay public. Sagan's devastating empathy, his respect of the viewer's intelligence, as well as his often outrageously optimistic sense of human community, have never been replicated in television. He shifts deftly from dallies in human history to well-diagrammed explanations of evolution, stressing the clarity and self-evidence of science and…

New species of "glass frogs" discovered in Peru

Researchers in Peru have discovered four new species of tiny so-called "glass frogs" (family: Centrolenidae). Centrolene charapita: with the yellow splotches on its back, this species was aptly named after little yellow chili peppers. Their hindlegs also had fleshy little zigzag-like protuberances whose purpose is unknown. Figure 4 from Twomey et al. Zootaxa, 2014. Cochranella guayasamini: This species is mostly green with yellow encircling its eyes. Interestingly, the tadpoles begin as a reddish pink color. Since they live in streambeds that are low in oxygen, this coloration may reflect…

First John Lott, now Ann Coulter?

Last month I detailed how Lott posted at least six and probably ten five-star reviews of his books to Amazon.com. Well, it may be that Lott isn't the only conservative author who does this. Someone posting as "A reader from New York, NY" (which is where Coulter lives), has posted many five-star reviews of Ann Coulter's books at Amazon.com. Each of these reviews is actually a detailed response to points raised in negative reviews. The writing style is similar to Coulter's and the reviewer seems to have an uncanny insight into Coulter's thought processes…

Get Involved in Tracking Sharks

Dr. Barbara Block from Stanford University, a well-known comparative physiologist and member of The American Physiological Society, has been in the news recently for her work tracking sharks. She has spent her career studying the physiology and migratory habits of ocean wildlife. In a prior blog, I talked about her work tracking bluefin tuna and posted an audio clip of an interview with her talking about how she measures their body temperature, heart rate, etc, using sophisticated tracking devices. Now you can become part of her exciting ongoing research on shark behaviors through Shark Net,…

Inseparable in Sex (a.k.a Dogs copulating)

It emerged from behind the overflowing garbage bin at the street corner: a two-headed eight-legged mammalian apparition. It hobbled clumsily into the middle of the street: Evolution's artless rendering of two naked dogs copulating; Fluffy's underprevileged brother. "Why are they joined at the hip?", the shopkeeper across the street wondered. "Why can't the erection happen outside, like in humans. Why does his penis enlarge after entering?", the bitch had its own questions. A kid came on an errand to the shop, saw the dogs and picked up a small concrete piece from the chipped pavement. "It…

What is self

An Edge essay by V S Ramachandran on What is self? It has recently been shown that if a conscious awake human patient has his parietal lobe stimulated during neurosurgery, he will sometimes have an "out of body" experience -- as if he was a detached entity watching his own body from up near the ceiling. I suggest that this arises because of a dysfunction in the mirror neuron system in the parieto-occipital junction caused by the stimulating electrode. These neurons are ordinarily activated when we temporarily "adopt" another's view of our body and mind (as outlined earlier in this essay).…

Our DonorsChoose Challenge and the Haiku Phylogeny Project

As a Director of a science teaching facility, who sees maybe close to 2000 high schoolers in my lab each year, I'm hoping we can have a good showing in this great DonorsChoose challenge that Janet set up. There's certainly a lot of incentive, ranging from the simple act of promoting science within the school setting, to the prizes and offer of matching funds from Seed Headquarters. From our end, to sweeten the pot even more, we would like to let you know that donations, $10 or higher, placed via our World's Fair + Science Creative Quarterly challenge, will immediately entitle the donor to…

Best Paper Ever: Diplomatic Parking Ticket Edition

I think this paper sounds fascinating but we don't have access to NBER papers here. Anyway, check out this abstract: Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats from around the world in New York City. Diplomatic immunity means there was essentially zero legal enforcement of…

Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America

It should be no surprise to readers that birds are among my very favorite critters. Aside from occasional blogger Sparticus Maximus The Great, I also reside with a pair of recessive pied budgies named Nemo and Che (who are real proud to be descendants of dinos). So naturally, I said I'd be delighted to review the new Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd, the editor of Birding Magazine. While I've long been fascinated with Aves, I became far more interested in birding while in Africa last summer with the Pimm group, which happens to be full of expert birders…

Impacts from Gonu: Damages, Deaths

We're starting to get some sense of what Cyclone Gonu did to Oman. The early reports seem to suggest that there were effective evacuations and thus relatively few fatalities (around 25 with a similar number missing). However, the capital city of Oman was swamped by water, as this AP report details: - People dragged soaked bedding and carpets from homes Thursday after Cyclone Gonu's winds blew down trees and power lines and its rains sent torrents of water and mud surging through Oman's seaside capital, a city often called the Arab world's tidiest. ....Cleanup crews fanned out across Muscat.…

I Heart Whistleblowers (Or, Our First Scientific Integrity Reform Passes the House)

I just got the press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a whistleblower bill (H.R. 985; PDF) that lays out explicit protections for scientists in government who expose abuses. The UCS release (for which I do not have a link) notes some interesting details when it comes to how people voted and how this debate went down on the floor: The bill passed by a 331 to 94 vote, with 229 Democrats and 102 Republicans voting in favor. Hmm...partisanship on this issue clearly remains a significant factor, although the picture is not…

Freeman Dyson: "Dawkins is doing a lot of damage...global warming is grossly exaggerated"

Below are a few quotes from this interview with theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, whose new book, A Many-colored Glass, is about to be published. On science, religion and Richard Dawkins: I think it's only a small fraction of people who think that [science and religion are at odds]. Perhaps they have louder voices than the others. I think Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of damage. I disagree very strongly with the way he's going about it. I don't deny his right to be an atheist, but I think he does a great deal of harm when he publicly says that in order to be a scientist, you have to…

iPods and Thunderstorms Don't Mix

The popular press loves to harp on iPods, and their potential to cause hearing loss due to loud music pumped through embedded earbuds. Looks like there's something else, a little more drastic and a lot less common to worry about in regards to your hearing: getting struck by lightning while wearing an iPod. A middle-aged man was jogging in a thunderstorm (ok, not the smartest move, but hey) when a tree he was standing next to was struck by lightning, which threw him 8 feet from the tree. At the ER, he was treated for burns which extended from his chest up his neck and sides of his face and…

Repost: How To Make Your Own Sparklers

Happy 4th of July, however you'll be spending it. I'll be watching the hotdog-eating contest on TV, going to get a couple Coney dogs myself, and then fireworks of course! I gotta say that the hot dog eating contest just won't be the same without Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi, who is suffering from jaw arthritis. Maybe its all a ploy to think he's not gonna show. Edit: Kobeyashi *did* show but came in a close second to Joey Chestnut. So, in honor of doing crazy stuffs, I think I may try my hand at making some homemade sparklers. I posted this how-to last year but never got around to trying it…

Friday Sprog Blogging: science in pictures and words.

The Free-Ride offspring have been wary of extended conversations with me lately (maybe since most of them eventually come around to, "Surely you'd like to help your mother grade these papers!"). However, I was able to extract some pictorial evidence that each of them has been thinking about science. From the younger Free-Ride offspring, some basic things you ought to know about phases of matter: Also worthy of note: vocabulary from the most recent science unit was included with this week's spelling words. (Hurray for viscosity!) Sure, we haven't yet integrated the discussion about…

Friday Sprog Blogging: bad dreams.

The Free-Ride offspring have been enjoying their Spring Break visiting with the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment. The night before they left, however, the younger Free-Ride offspring awoke in the wee hours because of a bad dream. As we all know from the peer reviewed literature on the subject, the best treatment for that is to climb into bed with one's mother, stealing all the covers as one falls back asleep. Before all the covers were stolen, the younger Free-Ride offspring generated a list of questions for further research: After I wake up from a bad dream, I'm afraid to fall…

Ghostly Ring Found in Outer Space

This just in from NASA: This image shows a ghostly ring extending seven light-years across around the corpse of a massive star. The collapsed star, called a magnetar, is located at the exact center of this image. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope imaged the mysterious ring around magnetar SGR 1900+14 in infrared light. The magnetar itself is not visible in this image, as it has not been detected at infrared wavelengths (it has been seen in X-ray light). Personally, I think what we've got here is one of these: But NASA says different. Their story: Magnetars are formed when a giant star ends…

Dawkins New Book

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins is now in pre-release state ... so you can order it with a discount from Amazon. Publisher's description: Boasting almost one hundred pieces, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a breathtaking celebration of the finest writing by scientists--the best such collection in print--packed with scintillating essays on everything from "the discovery of Lucy" to "the terror and vastness of the universe." Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together…

The Australian's War on Science 41

Despite her training in law, Janet Albrechtsen was not able to figure out that the Copenhagen treaty wasn't going to impose a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT, so you just know that she has no chance in hell of understanding a scientific question. Albrechtsen claims that it is a "fact" that "Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years". Study the graph below from the CSIRO to see that measurements from tide gauges and satellites contradict this claim. So how did Albrechtsen get it so completely wrong? Well, her authority, Nils Axel-Morner, completely ignored all direct measurements…

Tornadoes

I had planned on posting about this last night, but a late night in the O.R. kept me from it. Consequently, Chad beat me to it, but better late than never, I say. I join Chad in apologizing to my readers for the tornado ad that started running on ScienceBlogs earlier this week and includes a Flash animated tornado that flies over the page. I don't mind advertising. Really, I don't. After all, something has to pay for ScienceBlogs, and, as much as I like to think my writing is good, I doubt that many people would pay Seed for the privilege of reading it. However, I detest web ads that…