Science
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2009There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues of interest to women, Double X. It hit me that science journalism is not dying, it is having to adapt to a new business model.
Traditional media made its money from advertising and sales. It used a broadcast model of publishing - a single source (the printing presses or the transmitters) to many…
jrosenhouse | March 21, 2009For reasons that are obscure, George Will has a reputation for being the most intellectual of conservatives. Not for him the cheap theatrics of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. He's the thinking man's conservative, or so goes the CW.
On at least two recent issues, however, Will has shown himself to be just another delusional right-wing hack. In this essay he touts the standard revisionist nonsense about what a big failure the New Deal was. He bases his argument in part on the work of Amity Shlaes, whose work comes in for a well-deserved drubbing from Jonathan Chait in this excellent essay.…
thusspakezuska | March 21, 2009Over at Fairer Science, at the end of an excellent rant about the uselessness of one-shot workshops, Pat Campbell writes:
One other thing, if I see one more article about why there aren't more women in science that concludes "it's the children" I am going to run amuck. This one says "Women don't choose careers in math-intensive fields, such as computer science, physics, technology, engineering, chemistry, and higher mathematics, because they want the flexibility to raise children..."
Say what? Good to know that it's only the math intensive fields; so friends if you want a science career and a…
oracknows | March 21, 2009This is about as geeky as it gets, but since a couple of the genes I study are homeobox genes, one of which is a HOX gene, one of which is not, I found this hilarious:
There you go: All you need to know about homeobox genes if you're not an expert in them.
Hat tip to Bioephemera.
catdynamics | March 20, 2009I am in an all day meeting with bio/geo types, as one does, and as I sit here a random thought struck me, since us astronomers will insist on asteroids as the universal explanation for all things
we have a nice medium sized impact structure in Chesapeake Bay,
the ripples seem to have come as far as Pennsylvania, possibly responsible for the rather bothersome acid rock that almost ruined our most recent local attempts to stimulate through the I-99 construction
anyway, the Chesapeake Bay impact structure is about 35 Myrs old.
In fact, at a glance from an outsider, it seems to coincide within…
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
rallain | March 19, 2009I just got back from judging elementary level science fair (this is like kids in 6th grade or something). Here are some quick notes in no particular order.
Please, please do not have a 20 item list of supplies that you used on your board including things like thumb tacks, tape, paper and poster board. And then please do not read this list aloud during your presentation. I know you are nervous, I feel for you. Maybe you are trying to fill up time - maybe you think a long presentation is a good one. However, don't do it. Stick to the important stuff. If you need to fill up space on your…
ddobbs | March 19, 2009"Faith" is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see --
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)
via A Word a Day, 3/17/09
drorzel | March 19, 2009I'm giving an exam this morning, then taking the afternoon off for my annual hoops overdose, so there won't be much physics commentary here for the next few days. If you want hot physics news, though, there are a bunch of bloggers at the March Meeting, providing summaries on the Internet:
Doug Natelson has two reports, plus scattered other commentary.
His Holiness is putting everything in one post
Ian Durham has a summary of the first couple of days
Andre at BioCurious has highlights of the biophysics talks
If I'm missing anything, leave a link in the comments.
catdynamics | March 18, 2009there has been a lot going on in the world in recent year, and people are outraged,
sort of
actually, given the sheer outrageousness of the various finanicial and political misdeeds of the last few years, the level of outrage is surprisingly low
people are jaded, and this is reflected in many anecdotal interviews
why is that?
do the shenanigans at AIG leave a bad taste in your mouth?
do you feel nauseated by the bank bailout?
do you feel the bile rise when you read the headlines?
do you "taste a bit of vomit" when you read the latest breaking news?
well, you should: in a rather fascinating…
catdynamics | March 18, 2009A couple of years ago I received a copy of Chris Mooney's "Storm World" and packed it in my carry-on to read on travel.
This month I finally read it, and about time too.
Storm World
Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt Inc
ISBN 978-0-15-101287-9
Storm World follows Chris's debut work, The Republican War on Science, and was written in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season.
It is a timely, well written and very interesting book.
The approach is largely historical and from the perspective of following the…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph:
Explained by Wolfers thusly:
The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by…
bioephemera | March 18, 2009
Via Bora's blog, a delightfully cheesy1955 filmstrip about why science education is more important than anything else - even fishing. It starts out slow, but this Sputnik-era treasure turns into a veritable propagandafest about how science literacy is a civic duty. Plus, it raises vital questions like "Why do these kids have weird pseudo-Southern accents even though their parents don't?" and "How can science help Betty 'hook some guy'?"
Remember, women need to know as much about science as some men do! Are you going to be ready?
(Look how bored Betty looks by the end.)
Provenance:…
pharyngula | March 18, 2009
Several new and spectacular cephalopod fossils from 95 million years ago have been found in Lebanon. "Spectacular" is not hyperbole — these specimens have wonderfully well-preserved soft parts, mineralized in fine-grained calcium phosphate, and you can see…well, take a look.
(Click for larger image)Keuppia levante sp. nov. from the Upper Cenomanian (Metoicoceras geslinianum Zone) of Hâdjoula (Lebanon). A,
holotype, MSNM i26320a. B, sketch of the holotype.
The arms (all eight of them) are intact, right down to the suckers; muscles and gills are preserved; the animal has an ink sac; there is a…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports). This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen…
ddobbs | March 17, 2009
The stratosphere, as photographed by a group of four Spanish schoolboys, or their balloon, anyway.
Well, okay, maybe it's citizen space photography instead of citizen science. But still. Gotta love this. From the Telegraph:
Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.
Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February…
oracknows | March 17, 2009Yet another reason why I love The Onion:
Because giant, highly intelligent, acid-spitting crabs pose no danger to society.
Of course, certain antivaccine advocates seem to think that this parody has something to do with vaccines, which just goes to show how far down the rabbit hole they've gone when they think that a parody like this speaks to the truth of their cause. It also reveals a bit of their mentality in that they so easily liken life-saving vaccines to giant, acid-spitting, highly intelligent crabs.
catdynamics | March 17, 2009I now know who to blame for this science blogging thing
I was a little bit bemused when I arrived at KITP and was told, by the way, that the program needed an official blogger, and that I, for my sins and in recompense, was it.
It is all Jennifer's fault,
she thinks it is all parties and cocktails over there at twisted physics, but then someone else ends up doing the work... though I must say the wine the other night was rather excellent...
anyway, go read her rationale and general guide to physics blogging, combined with podcast and video - you might even start your own blog
actually, the…
drorzel | March 17, 2009Nobody 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…