A friend sends along Jim Brady’s column from today’s Washington Post: For all the good things it has brought our society, the Web has also fostered ideological hermits, who only talk to folks who believe exactly what they do. This creates an echo chamber that only further convinces people that they are right, and everyone …
Dan Sarewitz is so predictably right that it’s become comical. “(S)cience,” Sarewitz argues, “supplies contesting parties with their own bodies of relevant, legitimated facts about nature, chosen in part because they help make sense of, and are made sensible by, particular interests and normative frameworks.” In the resulting hoohaws, Sarewitz argues, the debate happens on …
By coincidence, I’m drinking my morning coffee from this mug: It’s my favorite mug. Former quarterly (and printed on paper), the Bomb Town News Observer has gone 21st century: This morning my mate came across “Crazy Cat Man,” as we dubbed him, sitting out on the sidewalk in front of his house grinding corn with …
The Santa Ana winds are a fixture of my Southern California childhood – heavy, warm and dry with the hint of smoke and danger. I remember them as a fall phenomenon, though a more careful reading of the literature suggests they really spanned the winter and sometimes stretched into spring. According to Kit Stolz, they’re …
More than halfway through our winter precipitation season, the snowpack is pathetic and the runoff forecasts dismal. (courtesy Western Regional Climate Center) Tania Soussan has more in this morning’s Journal (sub. req.): Several places set new record lows for snowpack as of Feb. 1. The forecast calls for spring river flows to be 27 percent …
Johnny_Mango is on the beaver trail.
Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa have a new paleoclimate reconstruction coming out in tomorrow’s Science with a familiar shape but an interesting new twist:
The usual caveats apply: just a single number, more to understanding climate change than surface temp., etc. NASA’s GISS team has posted its global January number, with fodder for everyone to misinterpret. On one side, you could argue it’s cooling. (You’ve got to be careful in picking your starting year to make that case, but …
George Deutsch, the 24-year-old J-school political appointee working in NASA public affairs whose 15 minutes of fame included trying to explain the Big Bang “theory” to the space agency, never graduated from Texas A&M, as his resume had claimed, according to Andrew Revkin.
Here’s a result that runs counter to the conventional wisdom: The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect. Big study, therefore strong result. I love surprises.