Mano Singham’s The New War Between Science and Religion published in CHE is an odd duck. Here’s a portion of the set-up The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the [...]
Roger Valdez of World Changing points to a study in JUPD on fundamental relationships: So while the study has its limits — it compares just two neighborhoods in a single city– it points, as other studies do, to the evidence that sprawl and car dependence are closely linked, and are responsible for a disproportionate share [...]
December 21, 2009 – 10:59 am
Alan Atkisson on Copenhagen The world will never be the same. But it’s the way that the world will never be the same that interests me, for the events of the past two weeks in Copenhagen signal not just a change in global climate politics, but a change in global politics, period. The primary outcome [...]
November 28, 2009 – 9:00 am
Real Climate has posted a page for those looking for climate data. Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond [...]
There’s a lot going on concerning George Will’s science writing. Two Letters to the Editor in the newspaper have responded by going to the source. RealClimate has a list of links that readers can follow. Much of this goes to citation technique and internal analysis of source material, much as we treat it in courses [...]
January 5, 2009 – 7:02 am
I’m deep into Maryanne Wolf at the moment. Her distillation of neuroscience and learning stages requires stepping back and pondering. I’ve been interested for many years in the physical/physiological apparatus of confusing, slippery things: memory, for example, consciousness. Much of memory is described in fiction and poetry, but what does the lamp inside the skull [...]
December 18, 2008 – 6:37 am
This is interesting news, sent on by our Librarian, Lisa Lavoie. From Nature: Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia. [...]
December 18, 2008 – 6:30 am
Physics humor from Randall Munroe
November 29, 2008 – 8:22 pm
This NYT article on a test for athletic ability caught my interest: In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child’s natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child’s cheek and along the gums to collect [...]
October 3, 2008 – 4:39 pm
I don’t know why, but I’ve found Importance of Achromatic Contrast in Short-Range Fruit Foraging of Primates strangely fascinating. Here’s a snip: Despite these findings, behavioral observation of wild primate populations has given a limited support for trichromat advantage. In a study of wild mixed-species troops of saddleback (Saguinus fuscicollis) and mustached (S. mystax) tamarins, [...]
September 24, 2008 – 6:21 pm
Hendree Milward, one of our wondeful math faculty has posted the escalator problem: Escalator Problem Adrian is at the top of descending escalator, and his son Brad is at the bottom. Adrian starts walking down the escalator, and counts 40 steps when he reaches the bottom. Brad starts running up the escalator, at three times [...]
September 9, 2008 – 7:28 pm
First beam tomorrow. This will be fun. I mean the science.
September 5, 2008 – 7:27 pm
From Ron Cowen and Science News Cosmologists are agog about the possibility that an orbiting observatory may have discovered particles of dark matter — the proposed, invisible material that researchers believe makes up most of the mass of the universe. At two meetings in August, researchers analyzing data from the Russian-European observatory PAMELA, short for [...]
Jacques Distler has numbers on political parties and fiscal reality.
Lots of writing on the subject of William F. Buckley Jr. As you’d expect. My first encounter came with Firing Line with Buckley and then Kinsley as moderator later. Then we went to Crossfire and then to Asshead and Shitmouth. Talk show evolution.
That Night I Wandered on my Homeward Way (DrunkenBoat 10)
100 Days: 100 Poems, Summer 2008
