Fred Bortz's blog
I have added a review of Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town by naturalist Susan Hand Shetterly to The Science Shelf Book Review Archive, and I am reproducing it here. I have also added a midwinter update newsletter with a number of interesting new titles, some of which I will be reviewing in the coming months.
Another blogger stirred up a predictable argument with his assessment of "Climategate." I waited for the inevitable bomb-tossing to ensue before commenting. But I think it's worth making those comments a blog posting of my own. I think they could lead to a civil discussion of how scientists should act when dealing with politically sensitive topics. Care to chime in? Here's what I wrote:
A writing friend suggested I sensationalize the headline of this little but interesting and instructive tale. So assuming the headline got your attention, read on if you want to know how I noticed a scientific error in the caption on a NASA/JPL Photojournal page. I promise you'll discover something interesting about the Martian sky if you do.
I just read a Scientific American article about an expert who predicted last week that an earthquake near Port-au-Prince would be catastrophic. He was not predicting that such a quake was imminent but rather that it was a calamity waiting to happen.
Contrast that with a recent sparring match I've had with a misguided blogger who claims to have a theory that predicts earthquakes--but said nothing about an impending tragedy in Haiti.
My latest book for middle-graders, Seven Wonders of Exploration Technology, is now available from Twenty-First Century Books, an imprint of Lerner Publishing. "Exploration" is viewed broadly enough to include the Large Hadron Collider and climate modeling.
This is a follow-up to an earlier posting about gravitational waves, which relates a bone of contention between me and another blogger who insists that gravitational waves do not exist.
In my daily Sigma Xi e-mail "Science in the News," I received the following link titled "Science Not Faked, But Not Pretty" about the hacked IPCC e-mails.
Could it be that the scientists were too accepting of advice that they should pay attention to the way they frame their arguments for the general public?
