From the “100 Years Ago” feature in today’s Nature:
It may interest some to know that radium destroys vegetable matter. I happened to replace the usual mica plates, used to keep in the small quantity of radium in its ebonite box, with a piece of cambric, so as to permit the whole of the emanations to pass out, mica stopping the gamma rays. In four days the cambric was rotted away. I have replaced it now several times with the same result.
Hmmm. A clue.
I had occasion, in reading background material for a story on which I’m working, to make the acquaintance this week of J.C.R Licklider’s remarkable 1960 essay Man-Computer Symbiosis. Given that he was peering out in our direction more than four decades ago, it is impressive to reflect today on how much he could see.
Continue reading ‘Licklider, Through a Glass, Darkly’ »
Chris Mooney was at yesterday’s Congressional hearing on what is now euphemistically being called in Washington “sound science”:
The House Committee on Resources’ “sound science” hearing I attended yesterday represented, in my view, a fairly stunning attempt by Republican legislators to cast themselves as the party of “science,” while pushing proposals that would actually deemphasize science conducted by federal agencies while privileging scientific claims coming from the private sector.
I’m looking for suggestions on a good statistics book.
Continue reading ‘Statistics’ »
I love it when the pundits are wrong:
Several reports these last few days have noted that Howard Dean had bagged about 8,000 absentee votes in New Mexico prior to his post-Iowa tailspin. This in itself should have made him competitive in New Mexico, since, as most of these reports went on to suggest, only about 50,000 people were expected to vote in today’s state-wide caucuses. In fact, combine the 15 percent of the likely vote Dean’s cache of absentee ballots gives him with the 15 percent support he garnered in the final New Mexico poll, and he’s basically in the same place, 30 percent, John Kerry is (at least according to the same poll).
But now come reports that there’s a major snow storm headed toward New Mexico (and the Albuquerque/Santa Fe population hub in particular) this evening. If the storm pushes turnout significantly lower than the expected 50,000, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to think Dean could actually carry the state by a relatively comfortable margin.
(Never mind that his arithmetic is flat wrong, that Dean’s alleged 8,000 absentee votes plus 15 percent of the number Scheiber uses above gives him must 23.5 percent of the vote. That really doesn’t matter. He could have just waited a couple of hours to see what actually happened, rather than predicting the future, badly. What’s the rush?)
My book review of 100 Suns.
That’s the “Mike” shot, the first hydrogen bomb – arguably a very important moment in history.
The L.A. Times’ David Shaw has one word for journalists tempted to predict the future – don’t:
When a political reporter is trying to analyze what happened and why and what it means in a caucus or a primary election, it can be difficult to resist the inclination to apply those lessons to the next primary and predict its outcome ? and to persuade oneself that this is what readers and viewers want. After all, astrology columns wouldn’t be so popular if readers weren’t interested in what some presumed expert thinks will happen next.
But journalists aren’t ? shouldn’t be ? astrologists. When political journalists predict the future, their predictions often seem to eclipse ? and at times substitute for ? the reporting they’re supposed to be based on. Worse, those predictions can become self-fulfilling prophesies.
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal:
The Bush administration asked Congress on Monday for the largest nuclear weapons budget in U.S. history.
The Bush administration’s request of $6.9 billion for nuclear weapons work is larger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the budget reached in 1985 during the peak of the Reagan administration Cold War. That was the previous largest U.S. nuclear weapons budget, according to a Brookings Institution study of U.S. nuclear weapons spending.
I received a piece of spam today from Carson Marks. At first I thought, “Wow, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, one of the designers of the first atomic bomb, is trying to sell me prescription medicine on line.” Then I realized the eminent theoretical physicist is J. Carson Mark, not Marks. Plus, the eminent theoretical physicist is dead, so how could he be hawking on-line drugs?
David over at Quark Soup yesterday linked to a fascinating excerpt from Lauren Slater’s new book Opening Skinner’s Box. Slater is the woman who wrote Prozac Diary. She’s a psychologist who has suffered mental illness herself. She’s also a terrific writer, her stuff so raw that at times it’s uncomfortable to read. In the piece excerpted in the Guardian, she talks about a famous 1972 experiment in which eight sane people feign mental illness to get themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Slater repeats the experiment. It’s riveting to see how the system handles her trickery today.