The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I’ve mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter… Continue reading Science Is Not Irreducibly Complex
Links for 2010-12-02
NYU Carter Journalism Institute, ProPublica Team Up to Enhance an Essential Form of News Coverage– “The Explainer” “New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and ProPublica, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalism non-profit, have formed a joint project to enhance the genre of “The Explainer,” a form of journalism that provides essential background knowledge to follow… Continue reading Links for 2010-12-02
How to Sell Me a Picture Book
The JCC, where SteelyKid goes to day care, is having a book sale, so the lobby has been full of books for sale the last few days as we’ve headed out. Getting SteelyKid away from the books is pretty difficult, as you would expect from our daughter. We’ve mostly avoided getting anything, but yesterday, I… Continue reading How to Sell Me a Picture Book
Dance of the Photons by Anton Zeilinger
I hadn’t heard anything about Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation before it turned up in my mailbox, courtesy of some kind publicist at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, otherwise I would’ve been eagerly anticipating it. Anton Zeilinger is a name to conjure with in quantum optics, having built an impressive career out… Continue reading Dance of the Photons by Anton Zeilinger
Links for 2010-12-01
Slate’s 80 Over 80: The most influential octogenarians in America (2010). – – Slate Magazine “For the second year in a row, Mormon President Thomas S. Monson stands atop the list. As the divine prophet, seer, and revelator for 5.5 million Americans and more than 12 million people around the world, he’s the most powerful… Continue reading Links for 2010-12-01
Physics Is No Longer Exciting
At least, that’s the obvious conclusion from the Royal Society’s Science Sees Further page. The introduction touts it as “a series of articles on some of the most exciting areas of science today,” but what’s striking to me is that none of the twelve topic listed (Ageing Process, Biological Diversity, Cognition and Computation, Cultural Evolution,… Continue reading Physics Is No Longer Exciting
Definitions and Standards
Somebody asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site about the speed of light and the definition of the meter that touches on an issue I think is interesting enough to expand on a little here. The questioner notes that the speed of light is defined to be 299,792,458 m/s and the meter is… Continue reading Definitions and Standards
Links for 2010-11-30
What correlates with problem solving skill? | Casting Out Nines “About a year ago, I started partitioning up my Calculus tests into three sections: Concepts, Mechanics, and Problem Solving. The point values for each are 25, 25, and 50 respectively. […] I did this to stress to students that the main goal of taking a… Continue reading Links for 2010-11-30
Over-Ruled
I’m a big fan of (American) football, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that I never played organized football. It was largely a matter of timing– the coaches when I was in junior high were not people I’d’ve been interested in playing for, and when they hired a good guy to run… Continue reading Over-Ruled
Links for 2010-11-29
Our Boring Future | Mother Jones A variant on Joe Fitzsimon’s comment on Twitter: “How to be a futurist in 1 easy step: confuse logistic curves for unbounded exponential growth.” (tags: society social-science politics blogs kevin-drum) Making Light: “We live underground. We speak with our hands.” “Somewhere in our brave new century, somebody actually pays… Continue reading Links for 2010-11-29