Apr 24 2009
Next week, I will be co-leading a team of physicists from the SLAC community to Washington D.C. As I remarked in my professional blog, the number of research physicists in Washington D.C. may spike next week in a historically unique way [1].
I haven’t done any audio projects in a while – “The Two Body Problem” [...]
Apr 12 2009
This last week’s episode of the TV show “Bones”, named “The Science in the Physicist”, featured the Large Hadron Collider. Specifically, a suspect in the murder of a theoretical physicist sent over a hundred death threats to the victim because he feared the end of the world when the LHC turned on. In the show, [...]
Apr 11 2009
Everybody needs a day that’s just about them. Birthdays don’t count – people see that coming. You need one of those great, unexpected my days, one that is delicious because you spring it on people.
OK, mine wasn’t all that spontaneous. I spent my Sunday afternoon two Sundays ago, and almost all of last weekend, helping [...]
Apr 05 2009
The weekly critical look at the media, NPR’s “On the Media”, did a piece on the changes to Texas science standards. It’s a good piece, and has the great quote from TEA Chairman McLeroy about “standing up to experts”. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/03/01
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Apr 05 2009
The House and Senate both passed their Budget Resolutions last week. These are not actual appropriations. Instead, they are guidance on how to budget money in this and coming years (up to 2014, in this case). The right way to think about the budget resolution is as a ceiling; you’ll probably never get to spend [...]
Apr 04 2009
Jodi runs a Stanford post-doc book club, and a few months ago the club’s book was “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. That book catapaulted Pollan into the public eye, making him a spokesperson for the food movement in this country. It’s not a wheatgrass and hemp-humping diatribe. It’s an honest appraisal of the U.S. [...]
Apr 03 2009
One of the funnier moments caught on video by NCSE during the TEA hearings [1] was when Chairman McLeroy misread seminal work by Stephen Jay Gould, and employed his misreading to justify teaching weaknesses of a scientific theory.
Gould was a critic of the viewpoint that gradual changes in species dominate the evolutionary landscape. He cited [...]
Apr 03 2009
The case of a fired Texas Education Agency science director raises an interesting new development in the struggle in education between the definition of science and non-scientific forces seeking their way into the classroom [1]. It’s been a while since I paid close attention to these state-by-state developments [2], but this one is of particular [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
