… or as some of my fellow ScienceBlogs bloggers are. Nay, it would appear I would be slightly more at home on Babylon 5 (although it required a tie-breaker to make that determination).
I trust the good folks at the Seed Spaceshipyards will find a way to make a craft that will suit all of us (including other outliers like Orac and Chad).
Author Archives: admin
Koufax Award Voting is Open!
The polls for 2005 Koufax Awards are now open! There are 15 award categories, and a good representation of science bloggers (including ScienceBlogsers) among the nominees.
Including (aw, shucks!) “Adventures in Ethics and Science” in the Best New Blog category. Of course, I would be honored if you were to vote for me! (Voting this round is in the comments or via email. Please, only vote once in each category — this isn’t a Front Page poll!)
Here are some of my favorites in the categories in which I’m not competing:
What can you do with a science degree besides research?
A reader asks me to dig up a post he thinks I might have written about various careers, other than research careers, that one might pursue with a science degree. As far as I know, I haven’t written a post on this subject (although maybe he has a time machine and is remembering it from the future …).
It’s a very good question, though! Especially since one of my slogans is “Your major doesn’t need to be your life path,” I believe that science majors can do many, many things in the world of work (just like philosophy majors, only with fewer incredulous looks from bystanders).
But, it’s been a long time since a science major who wasn’t looking to become a philosopher has asked me for career advice. I’m a little rusty at this particular question.
Friday Sprog Blogging: dinner table taxonomy
(At the dinner table last night)
Dr. Free-Ride: (to younger offspring) What are you learning about in nature study these days?
Younger offspring: (slurping noodles) Turtles.
Dr. Free-Ride: What are you learning about turtles?
Younger offspring: (chewing) Turtles.
Dr. Free-Ride: What?!
Younger offspring: (taking another bite) Reptiles and amphibians.
Dr. Free-Ride: Child, it’s Thursday night. I’m working against a deadline here!
Stories I’m following (but can’t yet weigh in on)
You know how, when you go to your day job, the relevant stories keep unfolding? And you say, “Gee, I should think more about that so I have something useful to say here,” but meanwhile another story pops up? And soon, you’ve got like 20 tabs open on Firefox with the things you want to deal with, but you’re going to have to restart the computer because your software update requires a restart and you’re not ready to deal fully with those stories you’ve been tracking?!
Yeah, me too. So, until I can catch up, here are some links:
The Areas of My Expertise
(Apologies to John Hodgman for swiping his nifty title.)
There has been some discussion in these parts about just who ought to be allowed to talk about scientific issues of various sorts, and just what kind of authority we ought to grant such talk. It’s well and good to say that a journalism major who never quite finished his degree is less of an authority on matters cosmological than a NASA scientist, but what should we say about engineers or medical doctors with “concerns” about evolutionary theory? What about the property manager who has done a lot of reading? How important is all that specialization research scientists do? To some extent, doesn’t all science follow the same rules, thus equipping any scientist to weigh in intelligently about it?
Rather than give you a general answer to that question, I thought it best to lay out the competence I personally am comfortable claiming, in my capacity as a trained scientist.
Some love for the philosophers
No, not for me (although some comments elsewhere in the ScienceBlogs galaxy have been rather more anti-philosophy than pro); for John Perry and Ken Taylor, the guys who do Philosophy Talk on public radio (and on streaming audio on your computer).
They’ve been doing the show for more than two years now. However, the seed money that got them started is dwindling. Here’s their bleg:
OK, let’s get rid of basic research.
Yesterday I flailed vaguely in the direction of a case we could make for funding basic research with public monies. I was trying to find an alternative to the standard argument usually advanced for funding such research (namely, that basic research frequently brings about all manner of practical applications that were completely unforeseen when the basic research was envisioned and conducted). The standard argument makes a reasonable point — we can’t usually tell ahead of time what basic knowledge will be “good for” — but it strikes me that this strategy boils down to saying “basic research is really applied research, only the applications are fun surprises down the road.”
Some of us, I think, see basic research as potentially worthwhile even in the absence of applications down the road.
But who cares what the technocrats think! If it’s the public’s money, then it’s the public’s opinions that matter here. Why on earth should they fund research whose only payoff is to deepen our knowledge and understanding of some bit of the universe?
As commenters to the earlier post point out, the public cares little for expanding the knowledge base if it doesn’t translate into direct benefits to them — in health care, gas mileage, tastier chips, tinier iPods, whatever. Scientists are free to pursue the answers to the deep foundational questions that keep them up at night, by why should we have to pay for it?
Maybe basic knowledge isn’t the same kind of societal good that a museum or a park is. (Maybe it is, and the public doesn’t want to fund museums or parks, either.)
So, it is resolved: The public shall no longer fund basic research. What now?
The challenges of getting the story straight
I have noted before that communicating science to non-scientists can be, to put it technically, wicked hard. Some of this has to do with the current state of science journalism — journalists who don’t really understand scientific methodology or rules for engagement in disagreements between scientists get obsessed with “balance” rather than finding the center of gravity of the scientific community’s understanding of a given phenomenon. I’m optimisitic that science journalism can be improved, but it probably won’t be fixed by tomorrow.
You might think, though, that there are some good bets for getting a scientific point across to non-scientists. Say you’re given the opportunity to explain — at length — a scientific finding to a writer, and that writer works with you to make sure the story gets it right. Say you have a lay audience, but it’s a lay audience genuinely interested in the kind of scientific work you’re trying to communicate (because they work at the center where such work is done). You’ve worked out an explanation of the work that’s sufficiently non-technical for your audience (as confirmed by the writer who is working on the story). You are involved up until the story hits the research center newsletter. You’ve got it made in the shade, right?
Maybe not. Ask JoAnne Hewett.
Rock out to the new Tangled Bank
Tangled Bank #48 is up at Aetiology. Tara gives the science iPod a shuffle and comes up with 13 tracks of grunge-y scientific goodness.
It’s got a good beat and is easy to dance (or wear flannel) to!