Links for 2011-01-11

“I heard a NASCAR broadcaster make the following claim: “NASCAR offsets 100% of the carbon emissions from this race via their tree-planting program.”  Anytime someone says “100%” or “always” or “without exception”, my ears perk up.

[…]
But tree planting… beautiful PR idea.  Get your biggest stars out to dig the holes, put the trees at a local school or park.  Bingo.  So how many trees do we have to plant?

Some brilliant NASCAR PR person did major damage to the cause of logic and educating the public by deciding that they would plant ten trees for every “green” flag during a race.  Green flags wave at the start of the race, and after every caution, so the number of green flags depends on the number of accidents and amount of debris on the track. 

This is just wrong on so many, many levels, and it’s not like this is difficult science.”

“Did you, gender aside, know how to do all of that when starting your at first faculty job?  As I said, some men, find role models easliy in their departments, from the time of undergrad, but others don’t.  Some people had doctoral supervisors who couldn’t mentor anything. Who teaches those students?

At the three institutes I’ve been at over my journey, not a single one offered a comprehensive session on explaining to young scientists (as a whole) how to do any of the above five things, which we can all attest, would be wonderful life skills for them to have.  Two out of those three institutes did offer similar programs for female, minority, and disabled grad students, post docs, or junior faculty.  That’s great, but we’re actually letting a huge number of our students and colleagues down by just assuming that white men will figure it out along the way because traditionally, more of them have.”

“Thanks to the Tevatron Facebook account manager, R.M. (Ron, tell me if I can disclose your identity here), I can offer to you today an exceptional plot of historical significance.

Before I paste below the plot in question, let me discuss what it is about. The Tevatron collider has operated since October 1985 -about a couple of geological eras back, in particle physics terms. The W and Z bosons were newborn babies back then, the top quark was thought to have a mass in the 30-50 GeV ballpark, and, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, “Carlo Rubbia raged and the bodies stunk”.”

“Usually people blame the 2nd amendment for a mass shooting. This time they’re blaming the 1st. But why not all the others? Consider:”