music: Today’s podGoober Project Gem: “rock ‘n’ roll” tuba, from back in the days before Bruce bulked up. No doubt many “rock” songs over the years have featured a tuba, but Gary Tallent’s turn on the big brass in Wild Billy’s Circus Story is the only one that comes to mind. film: Netflixed An American …
From CBS news comes yet another explanation for the Loch Ness monster: frolicking circus elephants: “The reason why we see elephants in Loch Ness,” asserts Dr. Neil Clark, a paleontologist, “is that circuses used to go along the road to Inverness and have a little rest at the side of the loch, and allow the …
On hurricanes and drought (sub. req.): The same global forces that unleashed Katrina on New Orleans may be quietly sapping the West of its water. Drought and hurricanes seem to go hand-in-hand, said Julio Betancourt, a drought researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tucson. Betancourt is among a growing number of researchers pointing to …
Luboš Motl, late to the party but in fine form once he arrives, nails down the Motl-Connolley connection at seven degrees of separation, in the process reinforcing the wisdom of my previous use of him as the poster child for coarse discourse. I award extra bonus points for style of presentation.
An update on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (sub. req.): Josh Frieman’s cosmic vacuum cleaner seems to be working. Perched on a ridge in the mountains of southern New Mexico, the big Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope spends its nights sucking down big swaths of sky. In three months last fall, it found 142 Type …
Good story this morning (sub. req.) by Leslie Linthicum and Tania Soussan on fire danger in New Mexico: Fire experts predicted an early and furious fire season in New Mexico and, boy, were they on target. Already this season, a dozen big grass fires have burned more than 100,000 acres, including a scorcher in Colfax …
Steve Reuland provides useful context for Michael Fumento’s recent discussion of the liberalization of science. Reuland does by actually reading the study Fumento discusses, and finding (and this is not surprising) that it does not say what Fumento claims it says. The irony here is that Fumento accuses the study’s authors of slicing out data …
From Nora.
Good comments from James Annan that are both spot on and completely useless, I think, regarding what journalists should do with the latest hot results from Science and Nature: I think the golden rule to remember is that a new item of research, even if it’s appeared in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, is not in …
Apropos a long and predictably unproductive comment thread, a new study published on line by Science today: Using predicted precipitation changes, we calculate that decrease in perennial drainage will significantly affect present surface water access across 25% of Africa by the end of this century. I don’t want to make too big a deal of …