A nice review of Al Zelicoff and Michael Bellomo’s Microbe: Microbe is also a book designed to disrupt our sense of complacency about the public health system in the U.S. It challenges our assumption that the public health system works well, even in the face of widespread disease and even epidemics. The reader encounters example …
An exciting press release arrived at the office today about a subject I’d not been familiar with: the Expanding Earth (EE) hypothesis. Its chief proponent, or at least its most visible, seems to be comic book artist Neal Adams: THEY, the scientists of Earth have not faced the simple fact that the Earth is growing!…that …
Kevin’s mock interview with Hank Aaron: AARON: We could also do a multiple linear regression with all the other season-by-season records of all the pre-roids sluggers. Anyway, which ever technique is most appropriate, we extrapolate from ’98 to the ’06 season to get his expected totals. Then let’s see if his post-1998 totals match. Clearly …
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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.