COVID-19 origins
The SARS-CoV-2 red herring
It's no longer about science
Donald Trump
COVID-19 pandemic
An infuriating editorial in Science
I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry. Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted more or less rightward on specific issues, it has certainly shifted towards falsehoods on many of them. Party leaders, including
anti-masker
Trump, science denial and violence
For a few days last week, before the mail-in votes had been counted in the US, the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed set for a nail-biting finish. In this time a lot of people expressed disappointment on Twitter that nearly half of all Americans who had voted
anti-vaxxer
Pandemic: A world-building exercise
First, there was light news of a vaccine against COVID-19 nearing the end of its phase 3 clinical trials with very promising results, accompanied with breezy speculations (often tied to the stock prices of a certain drug-maker) about how it’s going to end the pandemic in six months. An
Abdus Salam
The ignoble president and the Nobel Prize
What is the collective noun for a group of Nobel laureates? I’m considering ballast. A ballast of Nobel laureates is appealing because these people, especially if they are all white and male, often tend to take themselves too seriously and are taken so by others as well. I’m
coronavirus lab origin hypothesis
The WHA coronavirus resolution is not great for science
On May 19, member states of the WHO moved a vote in the World Health Assembly (WHA), asking for an independent investigation into the sources of the novel coronavirus. Their exact demands were spelled out in a draft resolution that asked the WHO to, among other things, “identify the zoonotic
anti-CAA protests
A personal manifesto
Many people who are unsure of how their work can help put out the various (figurative) fires ravaging the country at the moment often quickly conclude that purpose is best found at the frontlines of this battle. The common trap here is to conflate the most obvious path with the
Bill Gates
Accumulation then philanthropy
Peter Woit’s review of a new book about Jim Simons, the mathematician and capitalist who set up the Simons Foundation, which funds math and physics research around the world but principally in the West to the tune of $300 million a year, raises an intriguing question only to supersede
bias
Two sides of the road and the gutter next to it
I have a mid-October deadline for an essay so obviously when I started reading up on the topic this morning, I ended up on a different part of the web – where I found this: a piece by a journalist talking about the problems with displaying one’s biases. Its headline:
Charlottesville
False equivalency
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: Does finding these powerful ways to frame the [Charlottesville] situation amount to abandoning journalistic impartiality? “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said this
alarmist
Establishing trust across the aisle on issues of climate change
Featured image: An image from a shipborne NASA investigation to study how changing conditions in the Arctic affect the ocean’s chemistry and ecosystems. Credit: gsfc/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. I met someone over the weekend who wasn’t sure: 1. That there is scientific consensus on the magnitude
2016
The metaphorical transparency of responsible media
Featured image credit: dryfish/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. I’d written a two-part essay (although they were both quite short; reproduced in full below) on The Wire about what science was like in 2016 and what we can look forward to in 2017. The first part was about how
