blogroll update
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Archive of posts filed under the science category.
Plus, There’s This Hubble Thing
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The Death of Virginia
Consider this shocking statistic, courtesy of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies: Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Let’s think closely about that number. In their best year, terrorists killed 3,000 of us. It caused a national paroxysm that continues today. Surely the death …
Why Mars, Part III
My rather imprecise discussion earlier of space science left some people with the impression that I was speaking in support of President Bush’s Moon-Mars initiative. Nothing could be further from my feelings on this issue. First, there is, in fact, no Bush initiative. This is words, not deeds, and the deeds will be interesting and …
Hunger
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AIDS, Astronauts and Federal Science Spending
An astute reader, who I very much respect, called me out on the “why Mars” question. His question: “why this, over feeding the hungry, curing cancer, or stopping AIDS?” First, if his argument is to have any merit, it has to apply to all basic science. Astronomy, geology, archaeology, paleontology, etc., all have the same …
Continue reading ‘AIDS, Astronauts and Federal Science Spending’ »
Why Mars
I don’t have a lot of patience, frankly, with the “Why Mars” question. If someone doesn’t get it when you say, “because it’s cool”, then there’s little hope for a deeper conversation. “Because it’s cool” isn’t really the complete answer, of course, just a shorthand for the richness of of the human experience of gathering …
Living High
A team of Russian archaeologists has found a site in far northern Siberia that?s all kinds of interesting. For starters, there?s the age. Radiocarbon dating puts the age at about 30,000 years old. That?s Pleistocene, ice age times. That?s the oldest human occupations north of the Arctic Circle yet found. This is key, because for …
Global Warming
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Intelligence in Missouri?
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