Rachel Carson
oracknows | February 21, 2016If there's one thing I've learned over the last decade-plus of blogging about medicine and alternative medicine, it's that any time there is an outbreak or pandemic of infectious disease, there will inevitably follow major conspiracy theories about it. It happened during the H1N1 pandemic in the 2009-2010 influenza season, the Ebola outbreak in late 2014, and the Disneyland measles outbreak last year, when cranks of many stripes claimed that either the outbreaks themselves were due to conspiracies (usually, but not limited to, conspiracies to promote the "depopulation" vaccination agenda of—…
oracknows | February 10, 2016Last week, I wrote about how conspiracy theories have been flowing fast and furious about the Zika virus and microcephaly. Even if you didn't see that post (perhaps instead having seen this one), you've probably seen the news reports describing how last fall the observation of a large number of cases of microcephaly, characterized by an abnormally small head and delayed brain development, in Brazil led researchers investigating the problem to suspect a link to a virus. That virus, the Zika virus, as you recall, is a mosquito-borne flavivirus related to dengue virus and transmitted primarily…
sastyk | September 24, 2012It is the nature of popular books to inspire people to wildly overstate their importance. The most stunning example is Abraham Lincoln's statement upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.” While _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was an incredibly important book, one that moved many people to shift their sympathies on the subject of slavery, this was, of course, the wildest hyperbole. So too are claims that _Diet For a Small Planet_ invented modern vegetarianism, that _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ started the local foods movement. …
cevans | March 31, 2012Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!
- Phillipe Diolé
I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.
When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."
The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw…
cevans | May 27, 2011
Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse than popping into the Festival and getting a load of panel discussions like The Dark Side of the Universe, or Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.
Science communication is difficult.
It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in…
pronald | December 13, 2010"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, amongst the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life".
Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, 1962
"We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game by taking sides. . . . No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers"
Jacob Bronowski, author of Science and Human Values, 1956
tlambert | November 4, 2010Andrew Bolt accepts the results of a study published in The Lancet that used random sampling to estimate deaths and came up with a figure of 200,000 per year, about ten times the number you get from a direct count. Actually, there are two studies that fit my description, one on deaths from malaria in India, and another on war-related deaths in Iraq and Bolt only accepts the one that suits his beliefs -- deaths from malaria, so he can falsely accuse Rachel Carson of causing them.
Now, the studies differed in several ways, so it's possible that someone could have good reasons to reject one and…
tlambert | October 9, 2009As part of its ongoing war on science, Quadrant Online as published a piece by J.F. Beck accusing Rachel Carson of constructing an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.
In his piece Beck is only able to come up with two alleged lies by Carson. First, Beck claims that Carson said that DDT was the product of World War II weapons research:
Carson's suggestion notwithstanding, DDT was not a product of World War II weapons research, having been first synthesised in 1874.
But Beck is lying. Here is what Carson actually wrote about the development of DDT:
DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-…
tlambert | August 19, 2009Ed Darrell comments on the latest attack on Rachel Carson in a war that has being going on since 1962:
"Not Evil, Just Wrong" is slated for release sometime on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington -- Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.
The film is both evil and wrong. ...
That's a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer -- the…