Jared Diamond
sastyk | March 20, 2012If you are interested, check out my peak oil review commentary for this week, which explores what collapse really is - and what we might do about it. The main issue is that it is a heck of a lot more normal than most folks imagine. The piece is a shortened excerpt taken from my forthcoming book _Making Home_. Looking at the history of collapse is really important for us to gauge from history how likely it is - and what we find is that collapse - in the sense of a radical, long term and consequential step down in complexity and comfort - is part of the background of a lot of human lives.
I…
sastyk | September 23, 2010There are a lot of inherent contradictions in my life - and for the most part, I stand with Emerson and his claim that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Periodically someone throws at my claims that we're going to have to radically reduce our fossil fuel usage "but you are writing this on a computer" as though the fact that there's an underlying hypocrisy to this that undermines my claims. And there is a kind of hypocrisy, in the adolescent sense of the term - but the reality is that it is impossible to live in this world and the one that is coming without being a…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.
Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women.
The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care
Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not.
Jeff Jarvis…
jstemwedel | March 4, 2010Let's say you're a book review editor for a large circulation science periodical. You receive books from publishers and you look for scientists with the relevant expertise to write reviews that really engage the content of the books they are reviewing.
The thing with having the relevant expertise, though, is that it may put you right in the middle of a controversy that the book you've been asked to review is probing or advancing.
In other words, it may be tricky to find a reviewer who is conversant in the scientific issues the book raises and simultaneously reasonably objective about those…
sastyk | December 8, 2009Last year I was invited to speak at a Green Energy Event in the West. Most such events make their actual money from their vendor halls, and this one had as one of its focal events the premier of the new Ford Hybrid, which was just being released. Thus, there were many Ford executives at the event. I arrived early to the drinks-and-food-for-the-speakers-and-vendors bit the night before the event formally began, since I had been told it would take longer for me to walk there than it did, and the only other person present from the event was a Ford executive. We got to talking - he was a…
grrlscientist | July 29, 2009tags: TEDTalks, politics, society, Why Societies Collapse, Jared Diamond, streaming video
Why do societies fail? In this video, Jared Diamond uses lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana to talk about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it [22:42]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
bioephemera | May 25, 2009Just when I was wondering why there hasn't been more mainstream coverage of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker lawsuit I blogged about at the beginning of this month, Columbia Journalism Review has an update. And in a recent article in Science, Diamond commented, saying "The complaint has no merit at all."
Oddly, the Science article (which is unfortunately subscription-only) frames this whole situation as a conflict between different disciplines - mainly science and journalism.
Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science, specifically anthropology, which uses fieldwork and…