Jon Carroll on the Galileo problem: My correspondents seem to be taken with the image of the lone scientist battling for truth against the bigwigs and their lackeys. “They laughed at Edison,” one told me. Maybe so. They also laughed at a lot of people who turned out to be laughable. Being laughed at is …
I knew my talk Friday worked when, during the Q and A at the end, one of the grad students asked for a show of hands. “How many of you believe humans are the primary cause of global warming?” Probably 90 percent or more of the hands in the room went up. “How many of …
news of the warm: Climate change and national security in the Times of New York paper of the day: Schenk and Lensink discuss the difficulties associated with public discussion of greenhouse gas emission scenarios word of the day: fruiterer – one who sells fruit (this would be a subset, apparently, of greengrocer, sans veggies) reading: …
Science has done a cool thing: resources for high school biology teachers, accompanying today’s monkey gene publication. Pass the word.
The vigorous discussion over the Nisbet-Mooney Science piece on science communication (too many to link, see Matt’s blog for a rundown) is a perfect setup for a talk I’m giving Friday at UNM: “Communicating Science: What the News Media Can Do, and What it Can’t”, or words to that effect. For the cognitive misers in …
Update: Oops, sorry Dr. Myers P.Z. Meyers Myers is one of the brightest and most interesting writers out there on the front lines of the evolution-creation wars. He’s obviously a very smart guy, who believes passionately that researchers have learned very important things that need to be incorporated into the way we, as a society, …
Dust BowlOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It’s reasonable to think that most of the folks in sub-Saharan Africa didn’t celebrate the release of the latest grim Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by heading out to the ballpark last night. But that’s what Lissa and I did, the beneficiary of a pair of free tickets to …
I love my scientist friends. They are endlessly generous with their time, patiently explaining to me the details of their work. But (can we talk frankly), they can be absolutely dense when it comes to understanding what happens at the interfaces between their words, my words, and the minds of readers. I am going to …
reading: Preparing for a talk at UNM in a couple of weeks, I’m rereading a couple of old sciency favorites: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Golem, by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. paper of the day: Abrupt changes in rainfall during the twentieth century, by some UW-Madison folks, offering a new and …
Radioactive Pencil Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. In July, 1921, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Walter Meyner, of New York City, a patent for the radioactive pencil. Meyner’s idea was to mix ordinary graphite with “self-luminous material of the type ordinarily employed in so-called `radium paints.’” The self-luminous pencil, or crayon, would be, …