Science
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Hubble redux (not)
Following up on my a previous posts about the future of the Hubble Space Telescope and on manned and unmanned space exploration: By now the web has discovered that the Bush administration has decided to remove funding for Hubble Space Telescope servicing (robotic and human) from the next budget. Of course, the purity of the…
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Discrimination or difference? Harvard Chief’s foot remains in mouth
From The New York Times: The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who offended some women… [and men!] …at an academic conference last week by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers, stood by his comments yesterday but said he regretted if they were…
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Evolution: still fact
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional: “An anonymous reader writes ‘MSNBC reports that a judge in Atlanta, GA has ruled that a sticker placed on all textbooks in Cobb County stating that ‘Evolution is a theory, not a fact,’ is unconstitutional, and ordered that all stickers be removed.’” (Via Slashdot.) Meanwhile, here in the UK, not…
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Science Publishing III: Attribution
Finally, my colleague Sean Carroll writes about David Politzer’s Nobel-prize speech, and giving credit where it’s due.
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Science Publishing II: RSS & XML
&uot For the technically-minded, here’s an article (via Lockergnome) on The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web, by Hammond, Hannay, and Lund of the Nature Publishing Group: RSS is one of a new breed of technologies that is contributing to the ever-expanding dominance of the Web as the pre-eminent,…
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Science Publishing I: Science Commons
Some of the biggest issues in science today have to do with the prosaic questions of publishing: How do we disseminate scientific work and the underlying scientific data so that the maximum number of scientists (and members of the public) have access to it? How do we ensure that proper credit is given for work?…
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The Multiverse
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As an irrelevant aside, contrary to the the narrator’s claim in What We Still Don’t Know, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees certainly did not coin the term “multiverse” (the idea that what we call the whole Universe is just one among many, perhaps each with its own properties); it was used in superhero comics in…
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What we still don’t know
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Channel 4 in the UK just finished showing What We Still Don’t Know, a new science show presented by Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. The aim was admirable, discussing science’s open questions, rather than presenting the usual heroic fait accompli of pop-science. Somehow, the series got hijacked over the course of the episodes, becoming…
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Astronomers on the internet
I’m up in beautiful Edinburgh (perhaps my favorite city in the UK, even at this very dark time of year) fulfilling my duties as the chair of the Astrogrid Science Advisory group, at their latest project meeting. Astrogrid is part of the world wide effort to create a virtual observatory, a way for astronomers to…
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Existential Detectives and Bad Religion
“I ♥ Huckabees,” the new movie from David O. Russell, features Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as “Jaffe & Jaffe, Existential Investigators.” (I’m always pleased to see my family name in lights.) Not a deeply philosophical movie, but entertaining and intelligent enough. Smarter than, say, this commentary from last weekend’s Guardian by Mike Purton, “Physics…
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