This story from the New York Times is disturbing–apparently bats are dying, in large numbers, and no one knows why. They’re looking at a set of caves and mines in the northeast that are home to large bat colonies, and in all of these caves, something like ninety percent of the bats are dead [...]
Tags: science
Posted in personal | No Comments »>Yesterday, in my lecture class (Science in the United States), we ended up having a bit of a class discussion about the borders and boundaries of science. I love this type of question, and I think that we learn a lot about our own assumptions and categories when we try and work through [...]
Tags: boundaries, history, science, teaching
Posted in academic | 5 Comments »>Within the community of people who make their living paying attention to science–science writers, historians of science, science ethics and policy experts, among others–there are a few recurring concerns. One is the lack of scientific literacy in the general public, which is usually seen as being related to a “soundbite culture”. Popular media [...]
Tags: health, science, science literacy, statistics
Posted in academic, personal | No Comments »>Collected points of (possible) interest:
It’s fund drive month at Strange Horizons! We haven’t been publicizing this as much as we ought to, and I have a large share of the blame for that, but still, fund drive month! Your donations allow Strange Horizons to continue providing high-quality speculative fiction (and nonfiction! and poetry! [...]
Tags: mars, science, strange horizons
Posted in science fiction | 10 Comments »>Today in class, the history of math and engineering in West Africa and in Egypt. It’s a great topic that I hope I did justice to, because looking at the development of mathematical concepts in very different cultural contexts can possibly help us not take math too much for granted–it’s not just a fixed [...]
Tags: history, science, teaching
Posted in academic | 8 Comments »>
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