Miscellaneous
cmooney | March 3, 2006DarkSyde, doing wonders for the scientific blogosphere as always, has an interview today with Michael Grunwald, author of the new book The Swamp, a history of the Everglades. I just picked up a copy and am hoping to start reading it this weekend--it looks fascinating. Hopefully the book will serve as a kind of guide for me when I go to the Everglades this April (figure I'd better catch them while they still exist!). I'll have more to say about it soon, but in the meantime, check out DarkSyde's interview....
cmooney | February 23, 2006If San Francisco really gets municipal wireless, I am moving there out of sheer principle....
cmooney | February 15, 2006Dr. Mark Siegel has a new book out, entitled Bird Flu, in which he apparently asserts that our fears are in overdrive when they probably shouldn't be. In a Washington Post interview, Siegel elaborates:
Bird flu is one in a long line of things we've been warned about, and for which we supposedly need some kind of "safe room" with an ample supply of food and water just in case. First it was anthrax, then West Nile virus, then smallpox, then SARS. In each case we were warned that we had no immunity and could be at great risk.
The national psyche has been damaged by all these false alarms. On…
cmooney | February 6, 2006Rightwing whining about "liberal" academia is nothing new. But I was particularly struck by this piece in Walker, Minnesota's Pilot Independent, which gripes about the fact that I was invited to speak at the University of Minnesota last October. My appearance is presented as stunning evidence of a liberal bias on campus. But the author fails to draw even the most elementary distinctions in order to support his argument. For example:
1. Invited campus speeches aren't the same thing as in-classroom teaching. Marked political bias in the former may simply reflect the political composition of a…
cmooney | January 25, 2006This post isn't about science, but it is about something close to my heart. For a long time, I've been outraged over the eternally-unresolved status of U.S. territorial possessions like Puerto Rico and Guam, and over the disenfranchisement of Americans right here in Washington, D.C., who aren't allowed to have voting representation in Congress.
Now, a cool website is using the Olympics to publicize D.C.'s status plight. The argument is that if DC isn't granted statehood, then like the other U.S. territories (read "colonies"), it ought to be allowed to have its own Olympic team. In essence,…