public
sastyk | May 10, 2011Whenever I talk about going to lower energy usage, a percentage of people shout out something like "But that would mean going back tothe stone age, to lepers walking the streets and people throwing their feces out the window on our heads!!!" I think it is fair to say that variations on the "without power, life would be intolerable" is a common assumption.
Part of the thing that bothers me about it is that I don't think it is true. I've spent a lot of time studying history, and I don't think the lives of all of those in human history who preceeded us were intolerable. I am extraordinarily…
bioephemera | May 29, 2009
Thank goodness Science has finally given us protection against. . . Kooties!
Kootie Killer promises to "kill 99.9% of germs & Kooties without water!" This claim is clearly rigorously lab-tested and evidence-based, but although I wouldn't dream of questioning its veracity, it does invite the question. . . what the heck is a Kootie?
Personally, I always thought cooties (with a "c") were symbiotic, invisible organisms that spontaneously accrued on children, causing healthy developmental conflict with members of the opposite sex. Shows you what I know. Apparently, the Kootie is a yellow-…
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
esiegel | March 11, 2008So I gave a public lecture last (Monday) night called, "Afraid of the Dark: How We Know What We Can't See" and videotaped it. Now, I'm pretty good at what I'm doing right now (research in theoretical cosmology), but I'm really good at public speaking and teaching, and here is me telling a public audience all about dark matter, how we know it exists, what makes it different from normal matter, and what I'm trying to do to find it/discover its nature for a good 40 minutes. (The intro and question/answers are cut out).
It was a lot of fun; the audience was wonderful, and actually kept me for…