Science & Society

I stayed up late (California) to watch the Higgs announcement and posted various thoughts of my own, and comments from the presentations, on my Twitter feed.  So I saw first hand a strange phenomenon take place; a whole bunch of people got a lot of it wrong. And these were not journalists or laypeople, it was (a) other physicists and (b) other scientists, who were caught up with enthusiasm and ignored the actual results.  When I watched the presentation, I saw a careful explanation of preliminary results but the heads of the Atlas and CMS experiments knew what people wanted to see;…

Are you bored of the Higgsteria yet? Well, here's another issue that needs your attention. The Giant’s causeway is one of the most beautiful examples of columnar jointing in the world, formed during the Tertiary igneous activity in the UK. It was formed during the Tertiary, and whilst there are a few ongoing questions about it’s tectonic history, generally it is held to be the prime example of it’s kind. Here is the problem. In response to pressure from the religious group the Caleb Foundation, the National Trust has included references to creationism in it’s information center at the Giant’…

You remember when temperatures became really moderate and every heat wave could no longer be called global warming because we were not warning.  We were enduring climate change instead. That makes some sense, instability is going to occur when things get weird in the atmosphere. Almost everyone thought global warming was a terrible term anyway, lacking any science justification, but global warming is a huge part of why science journalists lost the confidence of the public, and then their jobs because no one felt like journalists were trusted guides on the issue. When it was clear we were…

So, currently, the US is hosting the world's largest naval excercises from Hawaii (RIMPAC 2012). The New Zealand navy, amongst the other 22 nations participating, has been refused entry to Pearl Harbour, instead being made to moor its two participating vessels in the 'tourist' quarter of the harbour. How quaint! So what did we do for this dubious honour? Oh, that's it - we took a stand against insanity. A stand against Weapons of Mass Destruction, and said "not in our waters". I'm confused - I thought the US was a 'leader', not a 'follower'. For what is a policy of nuclear retaliation, other…

Greenpeace activists stuck in the 1970s, you need to take a lesson from Madonna; always be reinventing yourself. We don't hear much about 'Nuclear Winter' since the Soviet Union collapsed and sold their arsenal to terrorists (though Newt Gingrich did harken back to 1984 by quoting his friend Bill Forstchen saying that the East coast blackouts were like what an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) would cause so VOTE REPUBLICAN) and Greenpeace has moved on to claiming that corn that needs no pesticides will doom the world, but a group of academics have managed to Madonna up the old nuclear winter…

Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, nations committed to developing and implementing climate protection measures "appropriate for the specific conditions of each Party." In addition, industrialized ("Annex I") countries agreed to voluntarily reduce their Green House Gas(GHG) emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. The Convention entered into force in May 1994 and has been ratified by 186 countries including the United States. Very few industrialized countries, however, have met the voluntary target.  For instance, U.S.…

Biodiversity loss and deforestation in tropical climatic conditions is sustained by the natural regeneration process during monsoon rains but what I observed this Saturday is not permissible or sustainable.  I participated in the sad demise and funeral of our beloved grandmother in my extended family. I was deeply shocked to see that there was no wood available for making a funeral pyre.   It is a very touchy and emotional matter to discuss,  but what  I witnessed was the worst possible solution to this problem. Cow dung cakes were being used to make the funeral pyre.…

Sigmund Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" - he meant not everything was about sex, which must really frustrate evolutionary psychology grad students(1), being as he is the most famous psychiatrist ever and was wrong about almost everything else but correct on that point. But that also means a cigar isn't always just a cigar, even in the literal sense.  In an era where progressive busybodies have taken to micro-regulation of choice (grocery bags, Big Gulps, goldfish, Happy Meals, golf), it was only a matter of time before the…

Self-plagiariasm is big news these days.  A short while ago, former ACS president Ron Breslow had an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society pulled - not because he claimed dinosaurs might be ruling other planets, but because he re-used work from other articles he wrote without crediting himself. It happens outside science too.  Aaron Sorkin, no-longer BFF of Jeff Zuckerberg after penning "The Social Network" but still adored by fans for the liberal Fantasy Island called "The West Wing", is apparently so in love with his prose he uses it over and over again to make…

James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, Ph.D, aged 92, is a chemist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. He is called the 'Godfather of Global Warming'.  What he was, to most people, was an alarmist more on the order of President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, a doomsday zealot. And I don't mean 'alarmist' in the American political sense, i.e., anyone who accepts the science of climate change - I mean a real End Of The World Is Nigh prophet.  So silly even the hysterical poster child of Think Progress, Joe Romm, believed Lovelock was over the top. Now Lovelock believes he was over…