Posts tagged “Science”
Progress in our ideas of progress
Way back in 2016, Ada Palmer wrote an essay on progress and historical change. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but I especially wish more of my colleagues were familiar with the history of science and philosophy of Frances Bacon she describes in section two. Science has philosophy and history, and to be ignorant […]
Better science textbooks through history and mystery
I think more science textbooks and classes should devote space to wrong ideas and stuff we don’t know. Like Codons took forever to figure out after we got the structure of DNA down. Here are some coding schemes we thought might be real, but were total bullshit. and We figured out the genetic code, but […]
This is what a scientist says when they are lying on the floor sobbing
continuing climate change will likely drive many areas of temperate forest toward large-scale transformations [link]
How I feel after a typical science communication workshop
“you know what, I’m gonna pass because I just don’t feel inspired …you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.”At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine? Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! We need to talk about TED
Would NSF have funded Galileo?
Still, says Clette, it is fascinating to ‘work’ with colleagues from hundreds of years ago. For instance, he says that even though Galileo’s coverage of the Sun was spotty because Galileo was “busy with planets and other things”, the drawings are detailed enough to reveal information about the magnetic structure of the sunspot groups and […]
How to make the world worse when communicating your research
At a workshop on media relations for scientists, we read the first page of a paper from a totally foreign field and wrote a headline and first paragraph for a news story on the study. It was pretty challenging, but fun, to think of attention-getting but accurate ways to convey research. Then the presenter, someone […]
While you’re waiting for the bus
Why are so many women-in-science events actually about leaving science and having babies? Good science journalism can help scientists get their work done. The oldest pine cone ever found. The president of the World Bank editorializes about the need for climate change mitigation. The IEA tells us how to fix climate change, or at least […]