War on Science
drorzel | February 21, 2006I really don't mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen's idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks...). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I'd like to address comes from Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, who asks about the student whose plight started this whole thing:Were there just so many kids to get through, and so little in the way of support (on the extra-help/shifting to a different course/evaluating for…
drorzel | February 17, 2006Another reminder that Republicans don't have a monopoly on offensive anti-science stupidity, from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who declares algebra useless in a column directed at a high-school drop-out. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.
(And again, I consider dusting off the Poetry for Physicists entry, and re-working it for the Chronicle of Higher Education or some such...)
I could spend a bunch of time ripping into Cohen…
drorzel | February 7, 2006There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn't mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things.
In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after the cut):
If you were wondering when to expect your pony, Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats has an exhaustive analysis of the budget requests of various science agencies (start with that link, and work your way up through the more recent posts). Verdict: no pony for you!
Former…
drorzel | February 5, 2006I've occasionally joked in the past that it's unfair that the biologists get all the attention from the religious wing nuts. I mean, modern cosmology ought to be just as big an affront to the young-earth creationist types as evolution, so what are we, chopped liver?
Of course, now that a story has come to light about a Bush appointee in the NASA press office (a 24-year-old former campaign intern) demanding that cosmology reports declare the Big Bang to be "just a theory," chooped liver doesn't look so bad. You can find the money quotes at any number of science blogs, and Sean provides an…
drorzel | February 1, 2006Though the tagline promises politics in addition to physics and pop culture, I try to keep the political content to a minimum. Not because I'm particularly worried about offending anyone, but because I don't particularly like the way I sound when I write about politics these days. I get very cranky, and even if I like the post when I put it up, a few days later I'm posting short filler entries just to move it off the front page faster, because reading it makes me cringe.
Of course, that's only part of the reason why I didn't watch the State of the Union address last night, despite having…
drorzel | January 31, 2006Via Kieran Healy an example of the happy coexistence of science and religion: The Vatican Observatory. I particularly like Kieran's comment regarding the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope: I think that's just fantastic--like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?
I was already aware of the Vatican Observatory, thanks to Brother Guy Consolmagno, planetary scientist, Jesuit, and SF…
drorzel | January 14, 2006The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that's slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make a black hole that will eat the whole New York metro area. This isn't my field (not by a long shot), but I think this is terrifically exciting work, not least because the observations that they've made confound existing theories-- the "plasma" acts more like a liquid…
drorzel | December 20, 2005I'm probably just about the last science blogger on Earth to note this, but the Dover Panda Trial decision was handed down today, and it's a doozy. I particularly like the summation:Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an…