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What does Stalinist biology have in common with gun-nuttery?
Archive for the ‘Science and its methods’ Category
January 8th, 2013
Mapping EGS seismic clouds with pretty coloured bubbles.
December 21st, 2012
The precautions against superstorm Sandy worked because the US government FEMA listened to a European computer forecast, not its own.
July 15th, 2012
A speculation about quantum fields and consciousness.
July 6th, 2012
Category: Science and its methods, Wretched excess
A Feynman diagram explanation of the Supreme Court
April 19th, 2012
Category: Policy Analysis, Science and its methods
At The Incidental Economist, I write about how the role of scientific evidence in public policy making is often misunderstood and misrepresented. That essay in turn stems from a BMJ article (partly gated) co-authored with Dr. Peter Piot, the founding Director of the UN Office on AIDS, in which we discuss how science is essential [...]
March 21st, 2012
Some comments on an earlier post suggest this would be useful to set out. Heating The energy required to keep your house warm in heating season is exactly the energy lost through the exterior walls, windows, doors, roof, and up the chimney if you have one. Period. First lesson: cut that loss. Weatherstrip, get storm [...]
January 11th, 2012
Category: Drug Policy, Science and its methods
CDC’s new survey shows an apparent sharp increase in the prevalence of binge drinking. Many factors might be driving the part of the jump that reflects a true change in drinking. But as I describe on Stanford SCOPE today, at least part of the increase is due to survey researchers finally beginning to call cell [...]
December 20th, 2011
At my company (less in my unit of it), teaching is basically treated as a tax you have to pay to do your research, and faculty are hired and promoted for research and encouraged to avoid this tax where possible; indeed, one of our principal recruitment gestures is a reduced teaching load for the first [...]
December 19th, 2011
Category: Education policy, Science and its methods
Kevin Drum channels Brad DeLong to recall a Calvin and Hobbes sequence in which Calvin’s dad reassures him that it’s colder in the winter because the earth is farther from the sun then than in the summer. Kevin asks for a survey to find out how many people believe that. As it happens, a small [...]