It's Halloween and I am in New York and I wanted to do something local. But since Sleepy Hollow does not have a way to get there by subway (I don't even know where I would rent a car in Manhattan, I suppose I could get there by bus, but even using a subway is a populist stretch for me) I instead decided to get up and create a Ghostbusters tour. Why? Because even though only three actual...
read moreLast week, the Western Plant Health Association, which represents California, Arizona and Hawaii companies involved in plant nutrients, soil amendments, agricultural minerals and crop protection products (basically, technologies such as fertilizer and pesticides), held its annual meeting in Maui and I was invited to speak about the issues involved in bringing agricultural science to a public that...
read moreWhen we think of science today, we think of Big Science, like the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project.That makes sense, Americans like big and bold, but that was not always the case. It used to be thatg science was a lonely occupation and asking for money was a negative. There was one man who turned science from being a solitary, somewhat modest endeavor into Big Science. His name...
read moreScience 2.0 family, it is with great pride that I announce I have been named the president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). read...
read moreIn 1966, when the "Star Trek" television show debuted, it was revolutionary - not just in the ways that are commonly stated, like that it took a stand against racism and petty geopolitics, we had Sidney Poitier and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. by then, but rather what it did for science.In the post-World War II era, science had gone from being a well-respected endeavor to being 'mad'. This was after...
read moreIn 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us "defining deviancy down", a clever bit of alliteration based on the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim from his defining work of 1895. Durkheim wrote that crime is normal, it is going to happen, but by defining what is deviant, a community decides what is not and creates a reasonable standard for living together. read...
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