communicating science
laelaps | January 17, 2008Darren has announced that there will soon be a conference over in the UK called "Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective," and it sounds like it'll be one of the most fantastic meetings to take place in paleontology this year. I can't go (have debt, won't travel), but if you can I would highly encourage you to do so, especially if you've got something you can submit for the conference. The deadline for abstracts is January 28th, though, so you'll need to get working if you've got something to submit, but it sounds like just the sort of thing I'd love to contribute to if I had the chance (see…
laelaps | January 16, 2008
Dinner inside the belly of Iguanodon.
My fellow scibling Jonah Lehrer has a new piece in SEED extending the argument from the end of his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist called "The Future of Science... Is Art?" It's pretty interesting, exploring the relation between physics and neuroscience to art, but biology (outside of the biology of the brain) is left out. I can't speak about fields like genetics and microbiology, areas where I lack expertise and a sense of history for the discipline, but as far of my own interests (particularly zoology and paleontology) art has often been essential…
pharyngula | January 15, 2008It's a good thing that Minnesota Atheists are making an effort to get on the radio. Have you ever looked at the Christian talk radio programming in your area? It's like a black hole of rampaging stupid, so awfully banal and inane that it's terrifying. I was just sent the program guide for our major Minneapolis Christian talk station — KKMS, AM980 — and it offers a rather creepy view of their perspective. There are some surprises, though. Guess what venue the big time Intelligent Design creationists use to spread their ideas?
Tuesday
3:00 Hour - "The KKMS Ministry of the Month" - Dr. John…
laelaps | January 14, 2008
The trailer for the film The Land That Time Forgot.
My first impression of what a dinosaur was conjured up images of creatures impossibly big and toothy, real-life monsters with names that sounded like they could very well have been out of mythology rather than science. I didn't know that they weren't supposed to drag their tails or that they had been moved out of the swamp by the Dinosaur Renaissance; all I needed to know was that they were creatures that lived and died a long, long time before I was born, even though my imagination didn't let them rest soundly. I know a lot more about…
laelaps | January 2, 2008A few months ago I reported on the delightful time I had at a Science Communication Consortium discussion held in New York (where I also got to meet Kate of the sadly departed Anterior Commissure), but for those of you in the area there's going to be another meeting coming up on January 31st. The panel discussion is going to be all about emerging outlets for science communication (including blogging!), and the panel will feature science journalist Christie Nicholson, president of ScienCentral, Inc. Eliene Augernbraun, "Immune Attack" project coordinator Eitan Glinert, science writer Karen…
laelaps | December 14, 2007Michael Lemonick hates science bloggers, or actually is maybe just a little jealous of how awesome we are. In the past, great popular science communicators like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan brought science to the public in an understandable (and perhaps more importantly, enjoyable) way, but with the growing popularity and profusion of blogs more and more scientists are taking on the mantle of "popularizer" and bringing science to whomever has an interest. Indeed, there is something of a vicious myth that scientists are inherently bad communicators, but the existence of so many growing…
laelaps | December 10, 2007America is a strange country indeed; we want to know about what our future leaders are going to do about the economy, terrorism, and various social issues, but we don't ask that they be scientifically literate. In the ever-growing mass of debates held this year, it was even revealed that a number of republican candidates do not accept one of the most fundamental concepts in biology, and while liberal candidates often pay lip service to the threat of global climate change (and potential partial solutions in alternative energy sources), they have not demonstrated a firm grasp on science to date…
pharyngula | November 28, 2007Has everyone else heard of the Secret Science Club, though? It sounds a bit like Cafe Scientififique, but with a New York attitude — you lucky New Yorkers ought to go (it's a bit far for this lucky Minnesotan to make the commute).
It's got a good writeup in the Gothamist, too. And a nice logo.
pharyngula | November 18, 2007People had some peculiar ideas in 1932. Try reading this wonderfully detailed diagram of evolution (if you've got the bandwidth, download the 3212x8748 pixel version).
The vertical axis makes sense: it's a logarithmic scale of geologic time. It's not quite right, since it has life arising about 1.6 billion years ago, when we now have good evidence that that occurred more than twice that long ago. I'm not going to complain about that — science does march onwards, and it probably represents the best estimates of that time.
The horizontal scale is a real problem, and is revealing something about…
laelaps | November 16, 2007I'm sure other Gmail users have noticed how they modify the ads that show up based upon the content of your e-mails; a little creepy, but I can understand the logic of it. Still, discussing evolution in an e-mail exchange seems to only to attract creationist adverts, and I am sick and tired of seeing advertisements for Expelled and "refutations" of evolution from everystudent.com all over my inbox. I don't think I've ever seen an advert for something positive about evolution, and that's really a shame; if people are talking about evolution via e-mail they're only going to get links to…
laelaps | November 14, 2007I originally wrote this post off the top of my head, groping (somewhat unsuccessfully) to find the right words to express my enthrallment with natural history. I edited it substantially here without changing the main points of the argument, and I feel that while it could use some improvement it stands as a much better piece of writing as it is now.
Up to my ankles in marl, the July sun blazing overhead, the remnants of an epoch long vanished from this earth see the light of day again for the first time in over 65 million years. There is nothing particularly spectacular about the chocolate-…
laelaps | November 13, 2007
A female Lowland Gorilla at the Bronx Zoo in a familiar pose.
The other day I hyped the NOVA special "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," a documentary that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I visited the official website for the program to find that old "icons" die hard, the infamous "March of Progress" still firmly established in popular treatments of evolution.
It's strange how we pay lip service to great popular books about evolution yet often forget the lessons between the pages. Such is the case with Stephen Jay Gould's…
pharyngula | November 1, 2007While I'm here in San Diego, I'll also be giving a talk/hosting a discussion at the Scripps Institute on Friday at 3:00. The title is:
Sharing science: education, activism, and advocacy
I'm planning on telling the attendees the secret to getting a million visits per month to their blogs. No, actually — I'm going to discuss and justify diverse approaches to getting the public engaged in science issues, and I plan to mention both what I consider to be successes (but which may not change the wider conversations) and failures (which even so are of value). And it's open to the public! Come on down…
laelaps | November 1, 2007A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending one of the Science Communication Consortium's (SCC) panel discussions on communicating science (moderated by blogger Kate of The Anterior Commissure), and for those who missed the last one another discussion is fast approaching. On November 15th the SCC will host Dr. Lee Silver (Princeton - Molecular Biology), Dr. Gavin Schmidt (Goddard Institute for Space Studies - Climatology), and Dr. Wendy Chung (Columbia - Clinical and Molecular Genetics) at Rockefellar University in NYC to present their ideas on effectively communicating controversial…
pharyngula | October 30, 2007Tonight's the night for the inaugural meeting of Café Scientifique-Morris for the 2007-2008 school year. The topic is:
Food or Fuel? A simple multi-scale integrated analysis of agroecosystems
It will be presented by Abdullah Jaradat of the North Central Soil Conservation Research Lab; I suspect he'll be talking about their research into newer, better crops for the production of energy. It should be good, come on down to the Common Cup Coffeehouse at 6!
Unfortunately, this will be one I have to miss. I have to catch a plane to San Diego for the Beyond Belief conference (perhaps I shall be…
pharyngula | October 29, 2007Dave Munger has been spearheading a useful tool: Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research, an aggregator and set of icons to be used on blog posts that are summaries of actual, genuine, peer-reviewed research. Read the guidelines; the idea is that when you see the icon, you'll know that the blog article is something more than an opinion piece, but is specifically an attempt to explain some specific technical research papers for the general reader.
This is not just an effort for those of us at scienceblogs.com — if you are an unaffiliated science person who explains research to the citizenry, use…
pharyngula | October 23, 2007Florida Ciizens for Science reports that their brand new state science standards are available for comment. That means you can click over there and make suggestions, even if you aren't a Florida educator (they do ask for your connection, so don't worry that the creationist mob can just descend on this poor document and taint it). Make good, productive, constructive suggestions, and help the kids of Florida.
I haven't gone through it carefully yet, but my general impression is that the evolution standards are broad, but good; on the other hand, the organismal biology standards read like a med…
pharyngula | October 19, 2007I was just turned on to this recent issue of the McGill Journal of Education which has the theme of teaching evolution. It's a must-read for science educators, with articles by UM's own Randy Moore, Robert Pennock, Branch of the NCSE, and Eugenie Scott, and it's all good. I have to call particular attention the article by Massimo Pigliucci, "The evolution-creation wars: why teaching more science just is not enough", mainly because, as I was reading it, I was finding it a little freaky, like he's been reading my mind, or maybe I've been subconsciously catching Pigliucci's psychic emanations.…
laelaps | October 19, 2007While the a number of my classmates spent their evening at the football stadium I hopped the train to New York to attend the "How various media outlets are used to popularize, communicate, and promote science" panel discussion, part of a series in the Science Communication Consortium. Even though the discussion didn't necessarily answer the questions posed at the beginning of the seminar (namely where is science communication going, although Christopher Mims had a bit to say about this, as we'll see), there were some interesting points made all around.
Kitta MacPherson of the Newark Star…
pharyngula | October 18, 2007This is a little late for any Londoners out there, but Edge had a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery that debuted last weekend. It's a collection of scientists' and technologists' and artists' answers to the question, "What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?" All of the answers are on display at the site now, so have a browse. There's a little bit of everything, from obvious truisms (like mine) to detailed, specific formulae, to weird guesses, to stuff that is outright crazy, but nobody said exactly the same thing (which is probably a reasonable outcome from Pinker's…