Back in the day, I loved to write about supercomputers – the fastest this, the latest that. Eventually it got old. How many stories can you do about another computer being faster than the last one? But I brought the old tool kit out of retirement yesterday to mark Roadrunner breaking the petaflop barrier. Because …
If you love science, have a subscription or library access to Science magazine, and happen to have a few minutes to spare, I can think of few better ways to spend it than with Kerry Emanuel’s obituary of Edward Lorenz: Chaos is not merely about the practical problem of prediction. Lorenz and others showed that …
Continue reading ‘A Good Use of a Few Minutes of Your Time’ »
Writing on drought, I have had many occasions to draw on the research done by Richard Seager’s North American Drought research group at Lamont-Doherty. While their work often merits a news release from Columbia’s press office (as with the Dust Bowl paper I’m currently writing about), Richard and the other members of his group also …
Say it, Kim: I do geology because it’s beautiful. I love being outside, scrambling through brush, and then looking up and seeing the mountain across the valley, or the potholes in a streambed, and feeling as though the breath has just been knocked out of me. I’m fascinated by the stories hidden in the textures …
Fun with illusions: Thomas explained the difference between science and the sort of pseudoscience frequently debunked by the group this way: Science, he said, looks at all of the available evidence and tries to come up with some sort of overarching explanation that explains it all. Scientists call them “theories,” but when they use the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Lake Monster Edition’ »
Andy Revkin, on his blog and in the newspaper, has another case study of the distorting effect of Nature and suchlike A-list scientific publications. Let’s say our study suggests climate change is driving some rare and charismatic toad to extinction. We’re in Nature! Journalists will write about us in the New York Times etc. The …
This Rutishauser and colleagues have been tracking the blooming of flowers in Switzerland (can you think of a more delightful job as a scientist?). In a paper just published in GRL, they concluded that 2007 was a remarkable spring: Anomalously high temperatures led to a very early onset of plant phenological spring phases, including 98 …
My homeys at New Mexicans for Science and Reason have a great radio show on Saturday afternoons (2 p.m., 1350 a.m. in Albuquerque). But the only place I have an am radio is in the car, and I’m almost never in my car at the right time. Now, thanks to the magic of PodGoobers, you …
On the pollen count: Unable to meet up in person, elm and juniper are among the many plants that have developed a decidedly unromantic reproductive strategy. They spew pollen into the air in search of a mate. A lot of pollen. “The pollen is basically sperm,” explained University of New Mexico biologist Felisa Smith. “The …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: plant sex edition’ »
Max and Jules Boykoff wrote a widely quoted paper back in 2004 that has been used as a cudgel to bludgeon the news media for providing a sort of false balance in coverage of climate change that amounts to a hidden bias. The argument is that mainstream U.S. media, in its instinctive search for “balance,” …