John Quiggin threw down the gauntlet last week: Although both global warming denialists and moon landing denialists routinely accuse NASA scientists of fraud, the two groups appear not to have made common cause as yet (Please correct me if I’m wrong). Were that it were so, John. From someone called “gren” over at something called …
There’s been a great discussion over at Prometheus about a story last week in the New York Times by Bill Broad about atmospheric CO2 and paleoclimate. Given that it’s unlikely that very many people actually get 42 comments into a thread, I’ve pulled out my comment here so all three of Inkstain’s readers (hi Mom!) …
Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the …
Problems with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear stockpile surveillance program: Critical tests on eight of the nine weapons in the U.S. stockpile were not done in 2005, the investigators found. As a result, the nation’s military leadership “lacks vital information about the reliability of the stockpile,” the investigators found. “I begin to worry,” said …
If I had full academic library privileges, I’d be dropping everything I had planned this afternoon to read A Study of Odd- and Even-Number Cultures: Japanese prefer odd numbers, whereas Westerners emphasize even numbers, an observation that is clear from the distribution of number-related words in Japanese and English dictionaries. In this article, the author …
Al Zelicoff, on the Department of Energy’s decision to back away from screening polygraphs: First proposed in 1999 by Gov. Bill Richardson — then secretary of energy — during the uproar over alleged spying at the national labs, the lie detector policy elicited the derision of scientists everywhere. The American Psychological Association, the Federation of …
There is much to recommend the nuclear proliferation piece in this morning’s New York Times by Bill Broad and David Sanger. It’s an excellent overview of the situation – how we got here and what can usefully be said about what happens next. I single out the following not because I think it’s the most …
Looks like the National Phenology Network is chugging forward: Over the past two years, Julio Betancourt of the Desert Laboratory has been collaborating with Mark Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a group of scientists from various disciplines, federal agencies, academic institutions, and environmental networks to develop a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast phenology observation network for …
A friend sent along a link to Erika Niedowski’s piece in the Baltimore Sun over the weekend about a bunch of researchers studying extremophiles at the end of the Earth. No politics here, no big breakthroughs, just some delightful writing. As my friend said, “Sometimes a good science story is just a good science story.” …
In which a team of Australian researchers determines the half-life of the teaspoon. It would be easy to jump to conclusions here about the obvious policy responses this suggests, but I think it’s important to remember that science can do no more than inform the political/policy process. What society does with this information is as …