Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a “you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut” sort of way. Obviously, she hasn’t read The Republican War on Science, or she’d understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically […]
Category: War On Science
Get Out the Vote in Ohio
Word has reached me[1] that, “me that the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election.” For the politically inclined out there, some information: The challenger is former Ohio congressman Tom Sawyer. She is asking for help from the other Citizens for […]
Relativity and Tiananmen Square
there’s a fascinating article in the TimeS this morning about Chinese physicist Xu Liangying, a man who has led an interesting life, to say the least: The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 27, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, […]
What’s (Still) the Matter With Kansas
Also in the Times today is an opinion piece by Lawrence Krauss on why the Kansas school board election isn’t the end of the fight. He quotes some damning things from the chairman of the school board, and then observes: A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams’s religious views have a place in […]
Physicists in the Culture War
This month’s Physics Today has an article by Murray Peshkin on “Addressing the Public About Science and Religion”, that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don’t do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not that he […]
Credo
A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science: You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn’t check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f “faith”, in […]
All Scientists Left Behind
Orac beats me to commenting on today’s depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict “No Child Left Behind” requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math: Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction […]
So Much for the Power of Ignorance
So, how’s my winning NCAA strategy going, you ask? Shut up, I reply. Well, OK. I’m currently in a four-way tie for tenth place in the ScienceBlogs pool (of 23) on Yahoo. Of course, unlike some gloating people, all four of my Final Four picks are still alive… I still don’t have much chance of […]
FEMA in Space
Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed– Gordon Watts serves as a nice example. Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about […]
Algebraic Intervention
I really don’t mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen’s idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks…). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I’d like to […]