by Cheryl Rofer
They predicted a few showers for yesterday. The snow was pretty much continuous all day. As I post this, the clouds are dissolving into a light snow from an almost-blue sky.
Followup: I received an e-mail from Deborah Howell (or someone who answers the ombudsman e-mail at the Washington Post) saying she had read my blog post, and not much more.
Another Followup: The American Association of Petroleum Geologists held a symposium on the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia. (My most recent post here.) In an unusual move for a scientific meeting, the moderator asked for a vote of those attending as to whether the cause of the eruption was the nearby petroleum drilling or an earthquake. Of 74 scientists, 42 voted for the drilling, 3 for the earthquake, 13 for both factors, and the rest found the evidence inconclusive. The moderator reports here.
Chicago Boyz will be hosting a Clausewitz Roundtable in the new year. Contributors are listed here. I intend to read along and perhaps comment. The format will be commentary on one chapter of Clausewitz at a time. I would love to do the whole thing, but the way the fall has gone for me convinced me that I can’t commit to such a rigorous requirement. But it should be interesting.
Let’s hope that President Obama will put an end to the long-distance air strikes that cause so many civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This is appalling. Such practices may be accepted (or not disapproved of) by the medical research community, but they are unacceptable anywhere I’ve worked. I also find the broad-brush tarring of science, as a response to the article, appalling. My career was not in academia; I recognize that some professors take more credit than they may be due for their graduate students’ and postdocs’ work. But I don’t like the casual assumption that of course this is the way scientists do business, unlike the high-minded humanities people. Come to think of it, I recall a history-major friend in graduate school complaining about how his professors were stealing his work…
The same Science magazine (14 November) in which I found a report on the Lusi mud volcano also gave a link to the Linnean Society’s fish collection. I went to the site and found that they also have a herbarium and insect collection on line. The photos are wonderful, but they are arranged by scientific name. It would be lovely to be able to browse the photos, but a random set of clicks among the names brings up something worth seeing. And if you know what you’re looking for, so much the better. This one is Papilio agamemnon. You can get an enlargement at the site via a Flashplayer arrangement.
Science magazine now has a blog on science policy. I’m not crazy about blogs from people who already write to deadlines for a living. It seems like an extra burden on them, and I keep wondering why they would put anything good on the blog, when the motivation seems more to put it in their “official” writing. I don’t see anything striking here, but I’ll check it out for a while.
The News Hour has a web feature called "World View." Every time they mention it on the tv show, I think they're talking about us.