I am a fan of the New York Giants. I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a… Continue reading Rationality Stops on Sunday
Category: Pop Culture
Stolen Question: Who’s Coming to Dinner?
I’m running way behind this morning for a variety of reasons, so I’m going to swipe another easy question and throw it back to the audience. this one’s from Eric Lund, who asked: If you could attend a dinner with any major political figure in the world, who would it be, and why? The answer… Continue reading Stolen Question: Who’s Coming to Dinner?
MJ, Fame, Writing, and More
If you’re desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It’s nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time… Continue reading MJ, Fame, Writing, and More
Infinite Recurrence
I’m something like 100 pages ahead of the Infinite Summer spoiler line (page 283 as of last night), meaning that a lot of the stuff I’d like to discuss or see discussed isn’t fair game yet. I’m still greatly enjoying the re-read of Infinite Jest, though. As I’ve said before, this is a dangerous book… Continue reading Infinite Recurrence
Wikis Are Not the Answer
Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday’s post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don’t get with a blog. I got distracted and didn’t reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I’ll promote it… Continue reading Wikis Are Not the Answer
Popularization Is Its Own Reward?
One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don’t align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded– with tenure, promotion, and salary increases– for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little… Continue reading Popularization Is Its Own Reward?
Why Traditional Publishing Is Better Than Blogging
There’s another round of “science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!” going on in connection with last week’s World Conference of Science Journalists— see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn’t be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one… Continue reading Why Traditional Publishing Is Better Than Blogging
Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I’d already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I… Continue reading Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Death to the Un-Noted Endnote
This is a rare weekend in which I’ve completed two serious books– the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They’re very different books, but both excellent in their own way. While they have very different subjects,… Continue reading Death to the Un-Noted Endnote
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson
I’ve been enjoying Tom Levenson’s “Diary of a Trade Book” series quite a bit (the latest post is on cover art), so when I say a stack of copies of Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist at the bookstore the other day, I snapped one up. As the… Continue reading Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson