Swans on Tea

Cocktail Party Physics: a few choice words from the red pen brigade
Some more on the topic of targeting your communication, and the utility of editors.
The hardest thing about teaching anybody anything is finding the right level of communication, and the right way to express the concepts. It would seem logical that you don’t go [...]

Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather
It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east, or southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, that knowledge was little help in predicting the weather until you could move weather reports downwind faster than the weather [...]

Last fall, someone animated the xkcd cartoon that celebrated the boom-de-yada song
Now, in a bit of life imitates art – imitates life-imitates art-imitates life, (does surreal come in layers,or are they orthogonal dimensions?) we have a collection of people of varying degrees of celebrity in the science and tech world (I recognized Bruce Schneier [...]

We might err, but science is self-correcting
An Oxford colleague, one of the world’s top climate scientists, made the same point last week when he said to me: “It’s odd that people talk about ‘climate sceptics’ as though they are a special category. All of us in the climate science community are climate sceptics. It’s our [...]

There’s a lot of information out there, and no possible way to tell if it’s right or not. Whom do you trust?
It’s not really an easy question to answer, because there are so many willing to deceive us and it’s not that hard to do. Lately there’s been a lot of grumblings about [...]

PhD comics advice for news media

Calamities of Nature: The Demon-Haunted World
via

Inventing a New Economy
What patent applications can tell us about America’s economic prospects.
A quick glance suggests several conclusions: First, the view that a worldwide technological and innovative explosion began in the mid-1960s and continues until now is correct. The sheer number of patent applications—which had remained relatively static from the 1880s until the 1950s—suddenly grew [...]

Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?
If a news organization had put words in the mouth of a political figure, there would almost certainly be a firestorm of controversy. The same would occur if one had turned to a Hollywood star or sports figure for comment on, say, a Congressional Budget Office [...]

Tree Lobsters! #118 Skeptics & Charlatans

Can Obama Stop the War on Science?
One of our two great parties — and many, if not most, of the people who support it – decided some time ago that science was an enemy, and there’s little reason to think it will change its stance any time soon. That doesn’t mean that all Republican politicians [...]