Say what you will about this Peter Watts guy, he sure has a way with punchy quotes. Just look at some of the one-liners he’s come up with that various folks have pinched for their sigfiles, or stuck on the sidebars of their blogs. Just look at all the pithy wisdom quoted on GoodReads: “Science [...]
Well, traditional conservation, anyway. The kind where you presume to “manage” a wildlife population by ensuring, year after year, that its population remains stable. The problem is that as any population varies, so too does its behavior. Mortality curves, reproductive rates, vulnerability to pathogens and predators — a hundred other variables — all change with [...]
As a postscript to my previous entry — and as a case study to the current one — I spent a little while over this weekend doodling the outlines of a fake nature documentary riffing off the old “Hinterland: Who’s Who” vignettes that used to run on CBC. Mine was called “Internet: Who’s Who”. [...]
Christmas in a household of professional Baptists has always been a time to think about the joys of giving. In my particular case this has proven to be a double-edged sword, the flip side being that it is not a time to think about “getting”. Devoting any neurons to the contemplation of what one might [...]
“Dismay, Confusion Greet Human Stem Cell Patent Ban“, wails Gretchen Vogel’s headline in the October 28th issue of Science. The news item itself begins with a question: “Has the environmental group Greenpeace dealt a major blow to the medical use of human embryonic stem cells in Europe? That’s what biologists, patent specialists, and lawyers are [...]
…Democracy is based on the idea that a million idiots can make a better decision than a single intelligent person. I suppose the obvious rejoinder would have something to do with sour grapes. Still, the following facts are not in dispute: this is the first government in Canadian history to have been found in contempt [...]
A dispatch from a place we haven’t quite got to yet: A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave their lives in defense of glassy spires and luxury enclaves— defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the sheer weight of [...]
Dead zones suffocating 20,000 square kilometers of ocean. Endangered wetlands, disappearing at the rate of over 300 Ha/day. Clouds of black viscous poison soiling the coastlines of four states. And then the Deepwater Horizon blew up. What, you thought those apocalyptic descriptions were of the spill? You thought the Gulf of Mexico was some pristine [...]
You know what the creators of epic, multiyear-arc television shows need? They need a novelist or two on staff. Or a playwright. Somebody who understands that an epic tale needs to be planned in advance, that plot is not something you work out after you’ve already written 90% of the story, that you can’t just [...]
There are so many little things I could talk about: another doomed award nom, a couple of nifty academic analyses of Blindsight, even an intriguing new finding of a relationship between hand-washing and buyer’s remorse (no, really — it factors into everything from musical preferences to crucifixions). And I’ll post on at least some of [...]
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