Because You Can Never Have Enough Pink Iguanas
I totally forgot last week to link to Troy’s great pink iguana video:
Archive of posts filed under the science category.
Quantifying and Thinking About Climate Risk
My friend Mark Boslough presented a fascinating analysis last month at AGU comparing the risks of climate change to big rocks from space hitting Earth: One objective way to compare the relative magnitude of the impact threat to that of anthropogenic climate change is to estimate the long-term worldwide fatality rate. For asteroids, the average …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Pink Iguanas Edition
(story ad gated, picture courtesy National Geographic, which also had a story)
Geology is Poetry if You Listen Carefully
From a new paper by David Montgomery et al. on the formation of the outflow channels Mars, a rich metaphor from our own desert Southwest. Stare through the classically turgid scientific prose. This is poetry: The Needles area of Canyonlands National Park, Utah, provides a terrestrial analog for the finer-scale extension parallel to the margins …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Armageddon Edition
On the horrifying simplicity of the H-bomb, and the possible unmasking of “Perseus”: Reed and Stillman suggest that the Soviets, desperate to solve the riddle of the H-bomb, returned to Perseus for one last favor in 1954. However they got the idea, by late 1955 the Soviets had built and tested their own H-bomb. h/t …
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Elephant Diaries: Science Journalism Edition
Chris Mooney had a nice piece this week on Science Progress about the decline in science specialist journalists at major mainstream media publications. I think Chris nails the problem squarely, but I’d like to elaborate on the implication, because it applies much more broadly. Here’s Chris’s key point: Science journalism, at its best, should also …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On being careful to distinguish what you know from what you don’t: Carl Caves (no one calls him “Carlton”) is the smartest person I know. My wife laughs when I say that, pointing out that I often describe someone as “the smartest person I know.” She is right. As the Journal’s science writer, I have …
Fame at Last!
Our BAMS paper made the front page of Daily Kos. Kinda reminds me of the olden days, when I used to write about climate. (h/t Matt)
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Don Hancock, the watchdog: Hancock is famously ascetic, receiving a salary of $9,000 a year for his work. He is a religious man, the son of a minister, and is active in the University Heights United Methodist Church, which is within walking distance of the modest university district apartment where he lives. “We’re all children …
Neutrinos are not a breakfast cereal
I still do write about science now and then: In an unused alcove at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Stanford physicist Giorgio Gratta and his colleagues have built a high-tech lab to try to measure the weight of what scientists call “the little neutral one,” one of the most mysterious of the tiny subatomic particles …