Yawn. I am BEAT. After my bout of insomnia the other night, I had a miserable day and then had to take a nightflight to Chicago for my Braidwood collaboration meeting. With only 3.5 hours to sleep on the red eye flight, I caught two more short hours after arriving […]
Science
449 posts
It’s been a while since I last put pen to paper and placed some thoughts in this blog. As is typical with most things at the bottom of the list, this gets shelved when I have more important things to do. These past few weeks have been full of such […]
The National Center for Science Education (“www.ncseweb.org”:http://www.ncseweb.org) is doing a nice job of tracking the case in Dover, PA, brought by parents against a schoolboard hell-bent on watering down the science curriculum. This week, the defense presents its case. Here, the defense is the school board, which tried to inject […]
WOW! I’m speechless. NOVA has outdone itself. My father e-mailed me excitedly earlier tonight to heap praise on “Einstein’s Big Idea”. It was really a remarkable combination of drama, history, and science. I’ve always liked “Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens” for that reason, but this takes the damn cake. What […]
The “National Center for Science Education”:http://www.ncseweb.org has excellent “ongoing coverage, including transcripts and podcasts, of the trial in PA brought by parents against the Dover School District”:http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/, which is trying to force non-science into the science classroom. I’m spending my evening working while listening to their podcasts.
The annual SLAC User’s Organization (SLUO) meeting is today. One of the talks was about the synchrotron light source science going on here at the laboratory. Included in that was rresearxh done to better understand the complex process of blood clotting. This is a topic embraced by Creationists and Intelligent […]
Today I had the *immense* pleasure of a day away from SLAC. Wait a second. That sounded all wrong. You see, the pleasure was not in the separation from my laboratory; the pleasure was the company I kept while away, and the work I got to do. I got into […]
If Katrina was any indication, then we can make some predictions about tropical storm Rita. This storm, headed to the Florida Keys, is aimed straight at the heart of the warm Guld of Mexico. Katrina, a storm which ravaged Florida before entering the Gulf, soaked energy from the waters west […]
Every year, scientists from all over the United States make personal visits to their elected representatives in Washington D.C. This ability to have an individual interaction to achieve collective action is a wonderous feature of our democratic society. When I first experienced this in 2003, I shared the optimisim of […]
Katrina is projected by some to cost the United States $200 billion. That’s basically the pricetag, as it stands now, of the war in Iraq. The irony here has not been overlooked, and the contradictions in a war to prevent terrorism being matched by a disaster we saw coming have […]
My dad is a high school chem teacher in CT, and has always been a huge influence on me as a scientist and educator. I was browsing his class notes from the first week of school, and ran across the “old standard” I love to see: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. I […]
This morning, I faxed to my elected officials letters discussing the importance of the method by which Congress reviews publicly funded science. This letter-writing campaign was kicked off by the singling out in June of three climate scientists by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which I’ve mentioned in previous […]