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The controversial Keystone XL project proposed by Canadian dirty oil giant TransCanada was dealt a potentially devastating blow on its quest for federal approval after …
Continue readingTag: science
DeSmogBlog - Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science: Will Republicans Attack Climate Preparedness Even at the Cost of National Security?
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Recently, House Republicans—constantly trying to frustrate all manner of climate change measures by the administration—took a cl…
Continue reading350 or bust: Global Groundwater Depletion Is Detected From Space
Climate Change Quote of the Day: “Look, water has been a resource that has been plentiful. But now we’ve got climate change, we’ve got population growth, we’ve got widespread groundwater contamination, we’ve got satellites showing us we are d…
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Cleavage between Science and Religion – Richard Dawkins
When the religious compare their dogma of choice to science it is almost always a grand misrepresentation of what science actually is. One can break it down for them categorically for instance: religion – requires a belief in magic and the supernatural science – requires a dedication to finding the evidence and testable facts about […]
Exponential Book: Killing me softly with his (referee) report
Dear Colleague, given that every other day we seem to be telling each other appalling stories of disgraceful article refereeing to which we are subjected, I think we should all try and agree, first of all among ourselves, on what constitutes “bad…
Continue readingMind of Dan: 65 Years
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational de…
Continue readingMind of Dan: Are they still bothering with that stupid null hypotheses?
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Continue readingArt Threat: The arts are vital to our prosperity
By supporting the individuals inherently inclined to create, we foster a culture in which innovative thinking is encouraged. Through their unusual vision we can draw our own alternatives in science, business and yes, even politics.
Continue readingExponential Book: My thoughts on CCP
The Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society has now its own blog, brought to you by its very own executive committee, of which I am presently a “member-at-large” (soon to be apprehended and brought into custody, I…
Continue readingExponential Book: Make up your mind, already !
Academic job seekers are sometimes in the fortunate position of choosing one of several job offers (not often these days, given the difficult job market). This happens both at the postdoctoral, as well as the faculty level. The reason is simple; someon…
Continue readingExponential Book: Great blog. By the way, you are full of it.
Last week I was in Dallas, at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society, attended by members of the Division of Condensed Matter and Computational physics. For different reasons I ended up spending quite a bit of time talking to postdoc…
Continue readingPoliTeching: A New Innovation Center for Progress; Nuclear Debate
I’ve been following the nuclear debate online. I have not blogged anything about Japan’s nuclear plant crisis because there is not enough information coming out (as far as the plant’s condition is concern). Some people on both sides of the nuclear debate have wasted no time in using the crisis to express their nuclear sentiments. […]
Blast Furnace Canada Blog: Japan tsunami
No politics, entertainment, business or whatever, and for the obvious reasons …
Certainly this is a sad day with the news about one of the biggest earthquakes (8.9, off Honshu, although some reports say as much as 9.2) and tsunamis ever recorded ca…
Continue readingPop The Stack: Sure science is great, but how does it make you feel?
A new study indicates that high school teachers in the US overwhelmingly softsell evolution in biology class. Beyond the 13% of teachers that actively teach creationism, apparently around 60% of teachers encourage students to treat this foundation of modern science as a moral belief. The ‘controversy’ around evolution has been exaggerated to such an extent that teachers who […]
Intermittent Blogging Ahead
Well, it looks like 2011 will be as bad as 2010, with regards to my professional life (among other things).
(Yes, my mother died last June, but I don’t expect anyone from my immediate family to pass away this year …)
Back there, I explained how the…
Continue readingPop The Stack: Happy New Year 41 U.E.
In just about four and a half hours it will be New Years in Greenwich,UK. You know what that means, time itself will be 41 years old. That is, it will be the 1293840000 seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since Dawn of the Unix Epoch on Jan 1,1970. The moment most computers use as a reference […]
Pop The Stack: A nod is as good as a wink to a blind bat
Another day, another justification for dropping the mandatory long-form census by the Conservative government. Today’s argument comes from Finance Minister Jim Flaherty; he basically argues that because a bunch of policy wonks came voluntarily to a meeting when invited by the Federal Finance Minister that most Canadians will fill out a 40 page census form if they […]
Pop The Stack: On Predicting the Future of Science and Technology
We must be wary not to overestimate the progress of science and equally wary we not underestimate the progress of technology. Just a thought that occurred to me today. People are always eager to predict that science will be ‘pretty much done’ in the next 30 years, answering all the hard questions and progressing at […]
Pop The Stack: Time for Rex to Go
Ever since I cut Rex Murphy out of my life (see Goodbye Rex) it seems he’s been popping up more and more trying to get my attention back. I’ve been trying not to listen to him but today I gave in when I found this. I’m sure I could link directly to the CBC video, […]
Pop The Stack: A Dark Source for our Familiar Myths
Just a quick comment on this fascinating story up at the newscientist about the possible dark matter original of our familar bright constellation stars. I’m quite interested in astronomy and I didn’t know that most of the bright stars that make up the most familiar constellations in our skies (Orion, canis major, the souther cross, […]