Check this story out. Here’s the backstory: Otto Hahn, (without mentioning mentor/partner Lise Meitner) published the news that he and co-workers had identified the element Barium in a sample of Uranium that had been bombarded by neutrons in December, 1938. Meitner, of Jewish background, had of necessity, abandoned her collaboration with Hahn and escaped for [...]
Archive for March 2008
Program Notes: Who Patented the Bomb? Ask NPR.
March 30, 2008More on Torture, McCain, Sullivan, with some help from Albert Einstein
March 28, 2008It’s Friday, the traditional blogospheric day for ephemera (that is to say, even more evanescent stuff than usual). I know that this is supposed to be a science-y blog, and what I’m going to write below has exactly zero disciplinary rigor in it. It is a personal note, a follow up to last night’s post [...]
This Might Be a Good Day for Andrew Sullivan…
March 27, 2008to stop sniffing glue — or whatever it is that impels him to write stuff like this: I am still open to supporting McCain this fall, primarily because of character and decency. Hagee and Falwell should not be ignored; but nor should they be dispositive. This is supposed to be a science blog. So the [...]
Stupidity Kills: McCain/Vaccination edition.
March 25, 2008As promised, a post about this story. In my previous post, I asked what was missing from this seemingly straightforward bit of science/medical reporting about a growing number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because of fears that vaccines are unsafe. The answer: a couple of things. First, the piece had lots of [...]
(Stolen Tag Line alert): The Way We Live Now
March 25, 2008Read this. (h/t Grace). Partly, this is just to wallow in the horror of the contemporary mediastream. But this is, obliquely, another response to Sean Carroll’s advice to scientists confronting science journalists. My sober reaction to that post can be found below, but the horror contained in Gene Weingarten’s ordeal gets at the much bigger [...]
Friday (Isaac) Newton blogging (Monday edition): Isaac solves the subprime mess.
March 24, 2008We are in a mess. How bad is it? I don’t know — but when the Fed et al. race to make sure that the most significant housing lenders in this country are less fiscally sound than they were last week, all to pump some extra dollars into the mortgage market, you know it ain’t [...]
A bit more unsolicited advice
March 23, 2008Sean Carroll — the Cosmic Variance one — has a very useful post up on how scientists should engage the press. Most pleasing from where I sit (as the transducer, not the source of the signal) Sean makes it clear that there are two sides to every missed connection between a story as the scientist [...]
Housekeeping; A Bit of Blogrolling
March 23, 2008Just a quick note to acknowledge the obvious: posting has been a bit light and irregular for the last couple of weeks: I plead both a book and a grant deadline. Neither are completely under control — but there is some light at the end of the tunnel that, with luck, is not the 3:10 [...]
Ooops…
March 21, 2008This is going to be all over the science blogosphere in a blink, so there is no real need for me to pile on, except that it gives me the opportunity to recycle one of my recent favorite political snarks, I mean, if you have done something really dumb — like make an ignorant, ill-informed, [...]
Head’s Up: New Scope up…
March 21, 2008Scope is the MIT Grad Program in Science Writing’s student webzine. The new issue is up — in fact this is its inaugural web-distributed edition. Check it out — and please note that while the good stuff within is the product of hard work by the program’s students, the existence of a Web-based Scope is [...]
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