Election Hangover

By: | November 7, 2012

Hello world. Yesterday was election day in America. One guy won and another guy lost. But the race was hard fought, and our already divided country remains as polarized as ever. Did you listen to the last episode of This American Life? We don’t just disagree, we barely see each other as human beings. And somehow that impartial lady we all love, Science, has been sucked into the partisan fray. Did you know that in America climate change is something you can choose to believe in — or not? It’s downright depressing.

So today, dear readers, I’m giving you a present. I’m giving you a break from thinking about all of this baloney. Because we all have election hangovers, especially my poor friends in Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Zombie Zeitgeist, Ham Radio, and the End of the World

By: | November 6, 2012

The end of the world has been preying on my mind lately. Not in a religious, horsemen-of-the-apocalypse way  ‒— but in a more surviving-the-failure-of-modern-amenities way.

One reason for this preoccupation is my generation’s fascination not only with zombie film and literature1 but with interactive zombie games, like elaborate tag variation humans vs zombies, races with zombie-infested obstacles, and training regimes that measure fitness by ability to outrun zombies. Another is the fact that the power has gone out in my northern Virginia townhouse for at least 24-hour intervals no less than three times in the last four months, once for nearly three days in the middle of a heat wave.

And then there’s the emails from the hams. Continue reading →

Jonah Lehrer, Scientists, and the Nature of Truth

By: | November 5, 2012

Last week the journalism world was buzzing about — guess who? — Jonah Lehrer. Yes, again. We knew about the science writer’s self-plagiarism and Bob-Dylan-quote fabrication. Last week a New York Magazine exposé by Boris Kachka claimed that Lehrer also deliberately misrepresented other people’s ideas.

Kachka’s piece led to some fascinating discussions about whether it’s possible to tell a science story that’s both riveting and fully accurate. Science journalist Carl Zimmer, for example, wrote a thoughtful, inspiring post about the messiness of science. All of the commentary left me wanting to hear more details from the scientists in Lehrer’s stories. Had they been misrepresented? If so, how? Were they upset? Did they complain?

Kachka and Zimmer zeroed in on a 2010 story about the scientific method that Lehrer wrote for the New Yorker. The story’s premise is clear from the title (“The Truth Wears Off”), the subtitle (“Is there something wrong with the scientific method?”), the nutgraf (“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.”), and the last few lines (“Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”). Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 3, 2012

Oct. 28 – Nov. 2

Could penises become obsolete? Sure. Christie has a few beers with friends and reviews a book.

Ann & Richard each won a Windsor chair. Ann talks about Windsor chairs. Richard talks about naked ladies.

What’s happening with old nuclear materials scattered around the Arctic? Nothing good, says Jessa.

Two pieces of controversial public art, two universities, two very different outcomes, and, says Michelle, the good one was not the University of Wyoming.

Guest Helen Fields does love natural history museums but has no illusions about their flaws:  take knitting, she advises.

TGIPF: The Dawn of the Deed Edition

By: | November 2, 2012

First, a disclaimer. This is the kind of discussion that happens when friends talk evolutionary biology over a bottle of wine. (Specifically, me, my husband Dave–whose knowledge of evolution comes from reading New Scientist magazine — and our friend Kevin.)

Christie: Penises make no sense. They’re floppy, vulnerable appendages and males spend an inordinate amount of their lives just seeking places to poke them.

Dave: You can’t pass judgement like that. They’ve obviously outcompeted other things.

Kevin: Hey — you’re dissing a man’s most important unit.

Christie: But imagine how much more productive humans could be if we didn’t have such an urgent and time-consuming urge to copulate.

Dave: You’re looking at it from a single point in time. We think of ourselves as the endpoint of evolution, but we’re not. We’re just an evolutionary snapshot.

Christie: So you’re saying that nature might find a better solution for human reproduction?

Dave: Yeah. Thanks to technology, men can already broadcast our sperm without engaging in sex.

Christie: Like those pinyon pines whose pollen make me sneeze all spring? But that takes all the fun out of it!

Kevin: Yeah, we can’t let evolution take away the act of sex. It’s what makes us human.

Dave: I’m certainly not giving up sex. But who knows where evolution might lead.

The genesis of our discussion? A review copy of The Dawn of the Deed that landed on my doorstep recently. Continue reading →

The Mystery of the Windsor Chair

By: | November 1, 2012

Ann and Richard were each pleased and proud that their books have won the same lovely prize, the American Institute of Physics’ Science Communication Award. The prize comes with money — always nice — and a Windsor chair that says American Institute of Physics on the front and has a formal citation inscribed on a large brass plate on the back. Ann received her chair in 2008. Richard’s will arrive some time following a ceremony at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach in January. They are honored and deeply grateful for the prize, but they wish to discuss this Windsor chair business. Continue reading →

Carbon (Spin) Cycle

By: | October 30, 2012

We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British landscape artist Chris Drury visited the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, he proposed to tell the forests’ story in an outdoor sculpture.

“Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around” was installed on the UW campus in late 2011. Funded by an anonymous donor and by the state Cultural Trust Fund, it consisted of a 36-foot-wide circle of logs from beetle-killed trees, arranged in a whirlpool pattern around a pile of coal. Drury hoped the sculpture would be left in place until it disintegrated, and the director of the campus art museum said there were “no plans to uninstall it.” It was, Drury said, intended to inspire a conversation.

In May 2012, however, just after most students left campus, Carbon Sink quietly disappeared. Continue reading →

Guest Post: How to Visit a Natural History Museum

By: | October 29, 2012

I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve learned.

1. Don’t try to see everything. Continue reading →