Science & Society

I forgot my phone charger for the conference I went to last week. If this was just a year ago then I would barely have noticed. Mostly because my trusty old Nokia that I had then would have lasted long enough (I mean, the conference was only 2 friggin days long), but also because now, I rely on my phone for everything. Not just making phone calls (which I routinely forget it can do) but reading feeds, checking Twitter, facebook, but most importantly, checking my email. Well, the upshot of this was that when I finally turned my phone on after being bereft of it for a sunny couple of days, I…

It seems like there's always something to be mad at or feel threatened over when it comes to autism-related reporting or blogging. Sometimes it's reasonable outrage, like an article on autism that doesn't involve autistic individual perspectives or an article on autism that goes to Jenny McCarthy for her thoughts. I mean, Jenny McCarthy? Surely we can find a better celebrity? No? Double-Ds are headline bringing? Sometimes what we feel isn't so much outrage as frustration. Frustration seems to be increasing (but who knows, as we haven't measured it, and I'm currently using availability…

Autism isn't a four letter word in our house. It's not something we treat with kid gloves, not something we see as a tragedy or, in our kids' case, in need of a cure. We see it as something to be worked with and around, but we don't talk much about it terms of being a negative thing. We try not to define it in terms of  core deficits, but in terms of how it makes socialization and language more challenging and different.  It is what it is and in all honesty, we don't TALK about autism much here as a family. Everybody has issues and strengths. No biggie. Imagine my surprise, then,…

"Contact", Carl Sagan's 1985 novel about man's contact with extraterrestrial life and where it takes us, was, like all good stories, modeled around real characters. The book was okay but the movie "Contact" had Jodie Foster, who I would contend had the most convincing portrayal of a scientist in film ever, and that made it special.  Where did she get her inspiration?  The same place Carl Sagan did; from Jill Tarter, the director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. After 35 years of being in the front lines looking for extraterrestrial life, Tarter has…

Mike McRae's Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs, and Bad Ideas is short, sweet, often humorous and to the point. It's also pithy and full of quote-worthy sentences:"Since most of the face-like patterns Mary sees every day are indeed faces, her brain's gamble usually pays off. In addition, making the mistake of thinking there is the face of Jesus on her iron isn't costing her much (except a new iron. Nobody likes to do housework with the face of God)." McRae covers all of the ground traditionally covered in books like this, such as Shermer's The Believing Brain, but he does without tons of…

California faces an identity crisis.  The financial mismanagement is so well known that late-night talk show hosts make jokes about getting loans...from Greece.  Three years ago, third world countries like Romania were safer bonds than California but now Greece is better too?  That's kind of sad. The tired old 'we will cut important services for show until you vote for tax increases' strategy seems to have petered out. But California wants to continue to buy friendship from the 'green' contingent even as the money runs out. California used to remark that businesses and people…

Helicopter parents rejoice - when you are not slathering on chemicals to make sure your cherubs never get any sunshine and scraping off deadly pathogens with antibacterial soap, you can further protect your offspring by insuring they catch no debilitating diseases from...a garden hose. Sure, millions of years of evolution and drinking water a lot more polluted than the municipal kind didn't kill humans but our ancestors did not have to contend with evil BPA. What, you think BPA is just more health scare journalism during slow news weeks when no miracle vegetable stories are available?  …

Science meets society (SMS) has interviewed me. Actually, they took my answers to their list of questions so to make it look like an interview may have taken place. I am thankful for the honor and the exposure and all that, however, I am somewhat concerned about the rewriting. If I had meant that, perhaps I would have written it like that?!? Just saying. I appreciate the important "digesting" by serious journalism when it comes to cutting through the BS of a politician who wants to be elected or the manager who diverts all blame from his company. However, even in those cases, what is wrong…

It seems that one Toby Cubitt,  a quantum physicist, has done research which proves mathematically that physics is hard.  Well no duh.  Physics is the subject sane people avoid in college.  Compare the conceptual complexity of Louis DeBroglie's work on the wave nature of "solid" material particles to a study of Dr. Shaquille O'Neal Ed.D. on how bosses use humor in the workplace.   Toby Cubitt's work is entitled "Extracting dynamical equations from experimental data is NP-hard".  To understand it one needs to understand a bit of mathematical complexity theory.…

You're in luck. To the consternation of advertisers, we gather almost no information about you so if you are concerned about outsiders learning a lot about you from your visit to this article, fear not.  If we were that clever, this site would make a lot of money. What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” - like sharing music and book choices with the Internet - isn’t really frictionless – it forces on us the new frictions of worrying who knows what we’re reading and what our privacy settings are wherever and however we read electronically. It’s also not really…