Fair Brewing

It just so happens that I have a friend in the coffee and tea business. Better yet, they do fair trade, organic coffee and tea. Plus, I’ve got a can of their coffee beans sitting on my desk that I get to sniff at regular intervals. Yum! Don’t you wish you were me? Well, you [...]

Stomachache Time Again

My brother Carl sent me the URL of Theocracy Watch. I guess being informed is our best defense… Still it makes me feel pretty scared in a tummy-twisting kind of way.

mars needs… cookies?

The folks over at the “Mars Homestead Project”:http://www.marshome.org/ are collecting recipes to compile a “Mars cookbook”:http://www.marshome.org/about/cookbook.html. Know any good ones? I’m not sure how one would test low-pressure and low-gravity baking on Earth, but there are probably some creative ways to get around that. 3-Bean “Spirit”:http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/ Chili, anyone?

on natural philosophers

New Scientist has a beautiful “interview with Benoit Mandelbrot”:http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp, who discovered the Mandelbrot set and brought fractals to the masses. It’s refreshing to see someone with such history and brilliance at the same time. Mandelbrot is 80 years old, yet he’s still pursuing revolutionary branches of mathematics. bq. [I am] A mathematical scientist. It’s the [...]

reason and “balance”

The Columbia Journalism Review has a thought-provoking “article on media coverage of science”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp, specifically the role of “balance” in determining the journalistic merit of a science article. This has been on my mind lately, since public perception of scientific topics like climate change, medicine, and evolution is so crucial to making sound decisions.