As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson’s Sizzle was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It’s an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie. Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test […]
Category: Environment
Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, by Randy Olson
The forthcoming Sizzle, Randy Olson’s follow-up to the well-received A Flock of Dodos, is a movie that’s trying to do three things at the same time: 1) provide some information about global warming, 2) make a point about how scientific information is presented to the public, and 3) experiment with new ways of presenting scientific […]
College: Poisoning Young Minds Since Forever
Matt Nisbet points to a new Pew Survey about global warming showing very little change in public opinion on the subject in recent years. It seems that An Inconvenient Truth didn’t really cause a radical change in public opinion, after all. (Of course, it does appear to have brought climate change to the attention of […]
We’re All Gonna Freeze!!!
When I was talking to my parents on the phone last night, my father told me about a guest op-ed in the Press and Sun-Bulletin that might be of interest to some ScienceBlogs readers and bloggers: As if there aren’t enough problems in the world, we are now on the verge of a phenomenon that […]
Half-Remembered Factoids of Science: Transportation
Over at Arcane Gazebo, Travis talks about commuting, based on an Ezra Klein post: Longtime readers know my obsession with the way we overvalue positional goods like money, prestige, and real estate and undervalue non-positional goods like social connections, walking to work, and health. But the evidence really is clear that you need to make […]
Heating vs. Warming
Another tidbit from Boskone. At the Sunday afternoon panel on global warming, one of the panelists brought up the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that power generating systems always generate a great deal of waste heat. He wondered about how the waste heat released into the environment compares to the effects of […]
The Importance of Connotations in Headline Writing
The Washington Post has an article this morning headlined Navy Wins Exemption From Bush to Continue Sonar Exercises in Calif.: The White House has exempted the Navy from two major environmental laws in an effort to free the service from a federal court’s decision limiting the Navy’s use of sonar in training exercises. Environmentalists who […]
The Environmental Cost of Physics Research
I burned out some diode lasers a while back, and needed to buy replacements. Here’s one of the replacements on top of the tube containing the other, with a US quarter for scale: Here they are, with the box and packing material used to ship them to me:
Local Green Construction
We live just a few blocks away from the local high school, which has had some sort of massive construction project going on for a few months now. I’ve been wondering what created the giant pile of dirt to one side of the grounds, but haven’t been bothered enough to actually, you know, look it […]
Blogpost for Bangladesh
As you’re probably aware, a cyclone hit Bangladesh yesterday, and has wreaked a good deal of havoc on what is already a fairly fragile country. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have been all over this, and are urging people to contribute to relief efforts in both text and video. So, well, consider this an extra […]