Geek Humor
Seen in a Sandia Labs parking lot, a bright red bumper sticker that read… If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast.
Archive of posts filed under the science category.
Trusting in Statistics
My friend Luis, who was smart before he started going to law school, has an interesting discussion of the expansion of the open source model: There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the …
The Public Scientist
I can humbly say “I knew Andrew Dessler before….” 🙂 I stumbled across him a few years back when he co-authored a paper with Ken Minschwaner, an atmospheric physics guy here in New Mexico, so the roots of our conversation predate my obsession with climate change. Now Andrew’s made the big time (“I define success …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On the grim science of counting Darfur’s dead.
A Seismic Curiosity
I don’t know this subject well, but I’m pretty sure this is unusual: A strong earthquake occurred about 250 miles (405 km) south-southwest of Apalachicola, Florida at 8:56 AM MDT, Sep 10, 2006 (10:56 AM EDT in Florida). The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available. This …
Consensus Science
I have tried several times, with varying degrees of success, to tackle the “consensus ain’t science” shibboleth. (See especially here and the comments here). Andrew Dessler recently took an excellent stab at this in a couple of posts: see here and here. Might a “consensus” position be wrong? Of course. All knowledge is provisional and …
When Katrina Hit California
A team led by Peter Gerstoft at UCSD just published a fun paper about seismic signals from Katrina picked up by a network of receivers in California. That’s a storm!
The Blogging/Scholarship/Media Interplay
This story got me thinking about what I think has become an increasingly interesting interplay between blogging scholars and journalists. It quotes Jeffrey Lewis, proprietor of the excellent Arms Control Wonk blog and manager of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center. Reporters depend on smart people willing and able to explain things. …
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Polling Data
An old evolution/ID/politics/craziness story of mine pops up on Panda’s Thumb.
On British Bees
Of possible interest to at least one Inkstain reader, there’s a paper in last week’s Science documenting the decline in bee diversity in Britain and the Netherlands. It’s of potential significance because of the importance of pollinators to our ability to grow food, though, as the authors note, “the evidence for such declines remains scanty.”