Archive for November, 2008
Friday, November 28th, 2008
Weekly Whack: Fairytale Climate Change Solution Proposers
For many environmentalists and liberals it’s like a religious event: January 20, The Coming of Obama. With a thousand years of peace and prosperity obviously expected to follow. But there’s a problem. The president-elect doesn’t seem to be an ideologue. He’s a pragmatist. Personally, I think that’s both good and bad. It’s bad in areas [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Friday, November 21st, 2008
Weekly Whack: Has NPR Been Shilling for Big Pharma?
In my “Science and the Media” course, which I teach each spring, I tell students to follow the money when judging scientific “experts.” Do they have a financial interest in promoting a certain point of view? Nowhere is this question more urgent than in the case of the drug industry, which has corrupted not only [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
Global Warming for Kids
John and I have decided to try and branch out from our curmudgeony blog post roots and add more diverse content onto our site On that note, we’re going to try to post some interviews with various science and media personalities on a hopefully-somewhat-regular basis. The first is an email-interview I did with children’s book [...]
14 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Friday, November 14th, 2008
Weekly Whack: Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success
Eight years ago, the technology writer Ed Tenner (Why Things Bite Back, Our Own Devices) and I jointly reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point for the online magazine Slate. Tenner gave it a thumb sideways to three quarters down and I a thumb straight down. Readers of course ignored us and bought the book by [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Physics for Obama
It’s been barely over a week since Senator Obama became President-Elect Obama and yet it already seems like the weight of the world’s problems are on his shoulders. A failing economy, an energy crisis, two wars, the threat of terrorism, climate change… it’s all very daunting, and the president-elect has, in fact, made large efforts [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Friday, November 7th, 2008
Weekly Whack: ???
It’s Friday, time for the Scientific ’s Curmudgeon’s Weekly Whack, which denigrates some science-related person or thing, because getting rid of bad ideas is almost as useful—hell, more useful, sometimes, and certainly more fun—than propagating good new ones. You didn’t know about the Weekly Whack? Come on, pay attention, people! But today, there will be [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Are Singularitarians Austistic?
Determined not to obsess over the Big Election until polls start closing this evening. Hence this followup to my recent post on the October 25 Singularity Summit, which was a revival meeting for folks who believe–and hope!–that they’re going to turn into supersmart robots. That’s how I describe the Summit to my kids and others [...]
10 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Musicophilia with Oliver Saks
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The renowned author Dr. Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology and psychiatry and “Columbia Artist” at Columbia University, spoke about the mysteries of the brain and mind in a conversation with CSW Director John Horgan. Dr. Sacks’s many bestsellers include his case histories of patients with neurological syndromes, notably The Man Who [...]