Archive for March, 2008
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Frame-job.
This weekend I decided to watch some of the billion shows I’d recorded on my DVR. One of them was called There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America, a two-hour panel discussion sponsored and televised by Link TV featuring linguist George Lakoff, pollster Frank Luntz, and Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University. The panel was held last November at the New York Public Library and was an attempt to examine modern political propaganda through the lens of cognitive psychology and see how it’s evolved since the time of George Orwell.
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
The LHC, the End of the World and Ironic Science
Talk about ironic science. In a page one (!!!!!!!!!) story in yesterday’s New York Times, Dennis Overbye reports on fears that the Large Hadron Collider, the gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland, due to fire up this summer, “might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the earth—and maybe the universe.” Two men [...]
15 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke, Killer Apes and the “Moral Equivalent of War”
Arthur C. Clarke, who died March 19, was an influential pop-culture war theorist. He helped write the famous opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001, in which an apeman clubs the leader of a rival troop to death with a big bone. The killer joyfully flings the bone into the air, and Kubrick segues [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Discover Publishes “Is War Inevitable?”*
*The April issue of Discover includes an article on war and human nature that I’ve been working on, it seems, forever. I hate to complain—oh, that’s bullshit, I love to complain. The article’s original title was “Is War Inevitable?”, which is precisely the question that the piece explores, by examining studies of violence among primates, [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Is Sleep Deprivation Making Us Fat?
On Sunday 60 Minutes broadcast “The Science of Sleep.” In one segment, Lesley Stahl reported that sleep deprivation leads quite quickly to increased appetite, weight gain and even diabetes; this effect may be contributing to our obesity epidemic. Naturally I had to solicit the opinion of Gary Taubes, who recently spoke at Stevens about his [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Why, When We All Go To Our Watery Graves Because of Global Warming, We Might Still Feel Good About Our Planet.
Last week, what I think is one of the most remarkable rescue efforts in recent history, took place on the coast of Mahia, New Zealand. There were two massive bodies stuck on the shore and a crowd of people around them. They’d all been there for over an hour and a half, trying to remedy the situation to no avail. The damn whales just wouldn’t go back to the ocean. The two whales–a mother pygmy sperm whale and her calf–were growing distressed and the people frustrated. The conservation officer sent to coax the whales back out to sea was about to give up, which meant that the bullets would soon come flying. And it was in this moment of despair that Moko, a resident bottle-nosed dolphin came to the rescue.
1 Comment » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
Cosmic Bullshit Session
On the latest Science Saturday show on Bloggingheads.tv, I talk to physics pundit Sean Carroll of Caltech. Our goal is to help viewers distinguish between what’s credible in cosmology—the effort to tell us how this universe came to be–and what’s bullshit. I thus ask Sean about the status of the basic big bang theory as [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
The End of Planetary Science
A science blogger named Brandon Keim recently gushed over a report by the National Academy of Sciences on big questions in planetary science, such as how, exactly, the earth and other planets formed, why the earth came to be dominated by tectonic plates, and how life began. Brandon enthuses:
“Seeing these questions arrayed in one place [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Yarn Reefs, Penguins and Science Journalism
When I’m telling my students why I love science journalism, I often emphasize that it can take you in weird and wonderful directions. Take, for example, the recent activities of two Friends of the CSW, Margaret Wertheim and Martin Redfern. Together with her twin sister Christine, Margaret has created the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, a [...]
No Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Did Rutherford Really Doubt Nukes?
Richard Reeves spoke yesterday at Stevens about A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford. At one point, Reeves discussed Rutherford’s well-known skepticism about the prospects for harnessing nuclear energy for power generation or blowing stuff up. Although his research laid the groundwork for fission-based reactors and bombs, Rutherford repeatedly cast doubt on [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Iraq’s Power Problems
If you want a respite from the Eliot Spitzer scandal, check out this oped essay on why Iraqis, after five years of U.S. occupation, still lack reliable electricity. “Keeping Iraqis in the Dark” is by Glenn Zorpette, executive editor of IEEE Spectrum, who wrote–and spoke at Stevens–about this same issue two years ago. (See his [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, March 10th, 2008
Was Rutherford As Important As Einstein?
One of my knocks against modern theoretical physics is that it’s ungrounded by experiment. Strings, landscape theory, chaotic inflation, the anthropic principle and other “ironic” propositions show what happens when big brains speculate sans empirical constraints. For the century or so preceding this period, theorists and experimentalists kept leapfrogging each other, with neither side ever [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, March 7th, 2008
Steve Wolfram: Crank or Visionary?
Bloggingheads.tv continues to offer fascinating chats on all manner of science-related topics, and not just when I’m involved. A few weeks ago, my buddy George Johnson took on the legendary physicist and computer-science entrepreneur (he invented and markets the popular software program Mathematica) Stephen Wolfram. A child prodigy who published a paper on particle physics [...]