Yesterday afternoon, Chris Mooney swung through town on a book tour visit, including a talk radio appearance. Today comes news that KAGM is being shut down, replaced with an all-Spanish music format of some kind.
It would be a mistake, of course, to confuse correlation with causation.
I go out for lunch, and within an hour there’s a picture of my pasta posted for the world to see.
Fears of a drought in Australia are pushing up wheat prices:
Wheat prices in Chicago rose to a nine-year high on speculation that drought will cut production by as much as half in Australia, the third-largest exporter of the grain behind the U.S. and Canada.
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.