My colleague Amy Miller had a hilarious (infuriating?) story in Saturday’s paper about young Zac Cornfield, a first-grader at Montezuma Elementary School who was not allowed to attend school with spiked blue hair.
Zac said he doesn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He only wanted to look like the punk rockers he idolizes.
Apparently, according to experts, punk died with The Clash, but whatever. I think Zac is onto something:
Go, Zac.
A newly issued NASA news media policy:
Effective Oct. 1, 2006, all news media entering the access controlled
area of the NASA headquarters building in Washington must be
escorted.News media accredited by the Office of Public Affairs and issued a
media badge do not need to sign in at the visitor’s desk, but they do
need to arrange an escort from the Office of Public Affairs.
Non-accredited media will be badged as visitors and escorted.News media will be escorted to their business appointments by a NASA
public affairs employee. Escorts will not be necessary for news media
attending events in the auditorium.Previously, news media representatives had unlimited access to the
NASA headquarters building. This policy change makes the security
procedures at headquarters consistent with those of NASA’s field
centers.
The rationale is amusing, in that it explains nothing. (They also, for example, could have made the procedures consistent by changing them at the field centers to match those at headquarters.)
I’d love to hear the story behind this one.
If media coverage is your measure, climate Scientist James Hansen scored big today with his paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy. Earth Headed for Warmest Temps in a Million Years was the ABC news headline. I love it that they called him “the U.S. government’s top climatologist.” And you’ve got to love a PNAS paper going out of its way to trash Michael Crichton, a trashing Crichton richly deserves. He’s been misrepresenting Hansen’s work, and there’s a bit of exquisite justice seeing him taken down in the peer-reviewed literature.
But the most interesting bit for me is the part of the paper that doesn’t seem to be getting much play – its discussion of El Niño.
I need a little (haha) help.
I’m working on a piece about nanotechnology, and I’m collecting uses of the “nano” prefix. Here’s my initial list:
Got any other examples?
My advance on Chris Mooney’s flash through town on his book tour:
Science policy is not the sort of thing that usually lands on the best-seller lists. But political fireworks is a different story, and Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science” has been a hit.
“We had no idea this was going to be as big a deal,” Mooney said in a phone interview from Bellingham, Wash., the latest stop in a tour to promote the release of an updated paperback edition of his book.
A comment worth highlighting in the thread on whether bike helmets are dangerous because cars pass more closely when a cyclist is helmetted:
The solution is invisible helmets. Duh.
Not exactly phenology (is there such a thing as “cultural phenology”?), but Nora Friday noted another sign of fall:
The mornings are getting brisker now; I need to wear my jacket when I walk to class in the mornings. Cold mornings mean hot air balloons, of course.
Luis suggests an approach to the spam problem:
[I]t really seems like it is a shame we probably couldn’t get away with killing a few spammers- because surely you wouldn’t need to do more than 1 or 2 before the point got across very clearly. To put it another way: I don’t think all spammers should die; I just think that enough spammers should die so that the rest stop doing it. 🙂 We’re clearly in a fairly interesting historical situation, where some of the things we all hate have no clear moral or legal antecedents, and the penalties we’ve set up so far are clearly not discouraging enough.
Worth noting in passing that Luis blogged earlier in the day about “the ethics (or lack thereof) in business school”. One wonders what the “kill the spammer” idea says about the corresponding ethics he’s getting in law school. 🙂
As of Friday, according to the CDC, 166 people had been sickened by eating spinach contaminated with E. coli since late August. Eighty-eight have been hospitalized. There is one confirmed death and two additional possible deaths.
Food-borne pathogens normally send 325,000 people to the hospital every year in this country, and cause 5,200 deaths, according to the CDC. In other words, one would expect that roughly 25,000-30,000 people have been hospitalized over the last month for eating tainted foods other than spinach, and more than 400 people died. Given those numbers, I’m puzzled as to why spinach has caused a national conniption.
While we’ve all been palavering about whether there’s a legitimate hurricane-global warming link, we’ve apparently missed the real story about the way humans are causing more powerful hurricanes (this is from last October – my humble apologies for missing this vital story for so long):
That, despite what experts tell us, the technlogy currently exists to actually control the weather — and specifically, nature’s most destructive type of storm: the hurricane itself.
And that “someone” has been using this technology this summer “in an undeclared, all-out ‘weather war’ against the United States” … with (after Katrina) disasterous results ….