For those of you who have been following the progress of the case, the appellate court will hear oral arguments on November 25th (a few weeks from now). That will be over two years since the lawsuit was filed, in utter defiance of the District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP law, whose purpose was exactly to prevent this kind of delay in dismissal of vexatious free-speech torts.
[Cross posted at Ricochet]
Can you catch it from an infected blanket?
With a bonus electron microscope picture of the virus erupting from an infected cell.
Thoughts from Charles Cooke:
…the nature of the apology seems to tell us exactly why he did not just own up and move on. He can’t. He’s trapped, having become responsible for the self-esteem and self-identity of millions of adoring followers. Deep down, I bet Tyson wished he could just say, “my mistake.” Instead, he had to embed his note in an avalanche of superfluous pseudo-context; to insist that the whole affair “fascinated me greatly”; to enter into peculiar digressions about the nature of evidence and of memory; and, rather than admitting that a critic was right, to propose extraneously that “the mind is surely the next mysterious universe to be plumbed.” I find this all rather sad, I must say. I like Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’m sure he’s a nice, smart, interesting guy. His most ardent followers, however, are not. And, if his behavior over the past month is any indication, he’s been captured by them.
Yes. This hasn’t enhanced his reputation. Or notoriety.
Coming up with a new way to do blood tests has made this woman, a college drop out, a billionaire.
People on twitter ask things like “How is Mann’s calling Curry a serial climate misinformer as bad or worse as Steyn referring to Mann’s fraudulent hockey stick?” Well the issue is the different norms of behavior between scientists and political commentators. In the climate wars, there is not a level mudslinging playing field for scientists and political commentators.
When I have criticized Mann, I have criticized his involvement in Hiding the Decline, and also his violations of the norms of what I regard as appropriate behavior by scientists. This is far different than what Mann has been doing in #1-#5 above. 5 years ago, defending Michael Mann against his attackers was regarded by many scientists as defending climate science. At this point, I am not seeing many climate scientists standing up for Michael Mann, owing to his violations of the norms, unless they are extreme partisans.
Related: Mann is an Island.
Note also that Steve McIntyre has found more hockey-stick problems.
It’s as simplistic and stupid as thinking that CO2 is a magical control knob for the climate.
The Salk Institute seems to have found an on/off switch for cell aging.
Faster, please.
Is it time to stop worrying about contaminating it?
As I’ve often said, wannabe Mars colonists’ biggest fear should be the discovery of indigenous life there.
The most popular answer outside the academy is the cynical one: Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.
The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter. Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to use a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in one another’s company. It would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the meaning of the term transcription factor every time she used it, and so we should not expect the tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily understood by amateurs.
But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesn’t fit my experience. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an experimental paper explains, “Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.” After some detective work, I determined that it meant, “Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false.” The original academese was not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the polysyllables?
RTWT