Via Inside Higher Ed, the National Research Council (a part of the National Academy of Sciences) has released a new report calling for a renewed federal committment to AMO science. AMO here meaning “Atomic, Molecular, and Optical,” namely the sort of physics I do. The federal government should reinforce its commitment to research in atomic, […]
Month: July 2006
Useless Book Review
The New York Times offers a review of several books on science and religion today, including a new screed by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett’s book from a little while back, and several books attempting to find common ground between science and religion, by Francis Collins, Owen Gingerish, Joan Roughgarden, and E. O. Wilson. This is probably […]
Top 25 Answers
Twelve of the Top 25 Most Played songs were correctly identified over the weekend. Given the obscurity of some of these, that’s pretty impressive. I think there’s only one that should’ve been obvious that didn’t get guessed. Full answers are below the fold. (Edited to add: If you enjoy this sort of thing, here’s another […]
Classic Edition: Do the Pigeon Dance
As promised in the previous post, some thoughts on superstition in science. This was originally posted in October 2004, and astute readers may note that my opening comments about sports went horribly awry not long after. I take this as proof of my point: talking about these things only screws them up.
Different Kinds of Common Sense
One of the drawbacks of having the sort of day job that I do is that it’s hard to blog about interesting things in a timely manner. For example, Janet’s post on improving communication between scientists and non-scientists is a week old, now. That’s positively neolithic in blog terms. It’s well worth a look, though, […]
How Do You Put That On Your CV?
Via a comment by Anton Sherwood: Have you ever seen an episode of Star Trek with a particularly bad bit of technobabble, and said to yourself “You know, I’d be willing to fact-check their scripts for a few hundred bucks…” Well, Dave Krieger did just that, and it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. […]
Advantage: Blogosphere!
Today’s New York Times has an article on the loss of the middle class in major cities: The Brookings study, which defined moderate-income families as those with incomes between 80 and 120 percent of the median for each area, found that the percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in the 100 largest metropolitan areas had dropped to […]
Ask a ScienceBlogger: No Time Like…
This week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger question breaks a three-week string of topics I have no real opinion on: If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why? I have two answers to this question: the true answer, and the answer they’re looking for (below […]
Hybrids vs. Hummers
Via a mailing list, Reason magazine has an article claiming that SUV’s are better for the environment than hybrid cars: Spinella spent two years on the most comprehensive study to date – dubbed “Dust to Dust” — collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a car from the […]
Top 25 Lyrics
We haven’t done the guess-the-lyrics thing since I moved over to ScienceBlogs, and that seems like a good thing for a lazy Friday (I played soccer after work on Tuesday and Thursday, and basketball at lunch on Wednesday, so I’m pretty wiped. What a drag it is getting old.). A little variant on the “Random […]