Monthly Archives: June 2008

Meta-reinventing the sacred, yet again

Kauffman is, like E.O. Wilson in The Creation, and unlike Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, willing to compromise on the metaphysics – or rather, to live together with people who subscribe to a different set of metaphysics – so long as we can build a common civilization together in this world. And he believes that it is imperative that we do so. Continue reading

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Science Framed at Caltech

Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet came to Caltech and gave SASS talk on Monday night, and ran a science media messaging workshop entitled Speaking Science Bootcamp all day Tuesday. It was great. Anybody who’s getting a PhD in science should go through at least that much communication training, and if they’re in an area that has policy implications, or they have any interest whatsoever in doing outreach or communication of science, they should have a week long course on the same material. Continue reading

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Our Drought Aware Shower

Water rates in all of the SoCal MWD are going up this summer by 15-30%. Drought has been declared. There’s talk of Lake Mead being completely dry by 2021, and our shower has decided to conserve water. It refuses to stay on for more than a few seconds at a time, strongly suggesting that you conserve water. At first this might seem annoying, but long showers have been a guilty pleasure of mine, and I actually don’t mind getting some backtalk from the plumbing. Continue reading

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The Two Mile Time Machine by Richard B. Alley

It’s as if we are pointing a revolver to our collective head, and in order to figure out whether there are any bullets in the gun, we’ve decided to pull the trigger. It’s worse than Russian roulette, because we don’t even know how many rounds the gun holds. We also just keep pulling the trigger. Every additional 100ppm of CO2 we put into the atmosphere is another gentle squeeze with our finger. Continue reading

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How important is local food?

From a purely climatic point of view. Assuming the following: For each calorie of food you consume, the equivalent of 9 additional calories worth of gas were burned to get the food to your plate (this is industrial food production). … Continue reading

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Freeman Dyson on Climate

The futurist and physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books on Climate Change. He’s a very (very) bright guy, but I think he is wrong. Actually, I think that the whole framing of the … Continue reading

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