Sometimes a news story's structure has just the right cadence and sequence of thought to hit the reader with its most cogent point like a hammer blow- not on the first swing (ie in the lede) but just a bit below. And it's not the smack that readers may expect.
Sometimes a news story's structure has just the right cadence and sequence of thought to hit the reader with its most cogent point like a hammer blow- not on the first swing (ie in the lede) but just a bit below. And it's not the smack that readers may expect.
One learns here that advanced methods of extraction, including of "unconventional and high-carbon oil" - such as from the Alberta oil sands that are glimpsed in that AP photo that the Guardian used - means that fears are probably groundless that worldwide economic turmoil is looming when oil and...
Never one to miss a chance to suggest everything is all about me ... last week a writer and editor playing partner of mine and I hit a court near campus and came across old pal Geoff Marcy, whose Cal-professor hobby is astronomy and planet-finding, pursuing his heart's true calling. A tall guy named Robert,...
Never one to miss a chance to suggest everything is all about me ... last week a writer and editor playing partner of mine and I hit a court near campus and came across old pal Geoff Marcy, whose Cal-professor hobby is astronomy and planet-finding, pursuing his heart's true calling. A tall guy named Robert, from the law school, was running him from baseline to alley and back while blasting serves like bolides screaming in from the Oort cloud. Whenever I play Geoff he kills me. This was good theatre. Hey Geoff, I said, I hear you and the Kepler gang got baskets of other Earths almost ready to deliver. You just waiting on that third orbit to confirm full Goldilocks zone? Not enough sigmas yet? Or are they all huddled around little red dwarfs?
My wise guy exo-jargon exhausted I shut up. He said we already have them. Just wait.
Boy howdy. That didn't take long. A passel of papers this week at the American Astronomical Ass'n meeting in...
Let me be among the last to wonder how a national network okayed a program that manages to interview oceanographer Robert Ballard, no slacker when it comes to self-promotion and grandiosity, and jobs him. It takes his verbiage out of context and ratchets the bloviating right into cloud cuckoo land. And this by one...
Let me be among the last to wonder how a national network okayed a program that manages to interview oceanographer Robert Ballard, no slacker when it comes to self-promotion and grandiosity, and jobs him. It takes his verbiage out of context and ratchets the bloviating right into cloud cuckoo land. And this by one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents in broadcasting, Christianne Amanpour.
The program ran in December as Christmas loomed with the modest title Mysteries of the Bible: Proof of Noah's Ark? ;
My goodness. This was a terrible bait and switch. Many watchers surely never got past the bait to recognize the switch. Selective editing and overdrawn overlines lead one to think that the biblical flood, you know a flood that is like the one in Genesis that covered all the world and...
Reporters got a slight reprieve this week from weariness while writing yet another global warming story on records set and on ecosystems and economies stricken by climate-related natural disaster. The reason is that both of the latest examples are such extreme events that even the most jaded reporter on the...
Reporters got a slight reprieve this week from weariness while writing yet another global warming story on records set and on ecosystems and economies stricken by climate-related natural disaster. The reason is that both of the latest examples are such extreme events that even the most jaded reporter on the climate beat has to be hitting the keyboard with vigor - imaginations going overtime trying to find fresh ways to express the superlative. The first instance of news is that the temperature average in 2012 for the 48 contiguous US states not only set a record as has been expected it demolished the old one by a margin that few would have imagined likely - a full effing (ie Fahrenheit) degree. Even though global temps last year were about on par for the new-normal but scorching last ten years, the US experience is a standout and not in a good way. The second is that in Australia temperatures have gone so high, and keep in mind it is still early in the Southern summer, that...
One suspects that within the lifetimes of most everybody under age 45 or so, a human being will orbit and perhaps set foot on Mars. My money is on private voyages for the restless, brave, and hyper-wealthy who might remain on our roasting planet 20 years or so from now and want to visit somewhere...
One suspects that within the lifetimes of most everybody under age 45 or so, a human being will orbit and perhaps set foot on Mars. My money is on private voyages for the restless, brave, and hyper-wealthy who might remain on our roasting planet 20 years or so from now and want to visit somewhere that's really cold. But, as measured by the behavior of news people paid to guess the public's interest in things, the very idea of such a trip strikes a deep and broadly shared chord.
The latest example is the broad covereage given to reports from a recent simulated Mars mission. The six 'crew' members, all men, spent 17 months confined in an interlocked barracks in Moscow, built in tubular fashion to evoke the shape that best holds pressurized air. Their two-way communications were subject to long delays, due to the transmission time lapse from real Earth to real Mars. They had to throw their trash out via space-lock type ports. They...
This is a post of opportunity, mainly just to share some unusual science writing in public and to somewhat relucantly reveal a little bit of this tracker's new semi-retirement. But it has to do with research, specifically on marine mammals, and it arises in a local new agency, so here is science writing...
This is a post of opportunity, mainly just to share some unusual science writing in public and to somewhat relucantly reveal a little bit of this tracker's new semi-retirement. But it has to do with research, specifically on marine mammals, and it arises in a local new agency, so here is science writing of a sort.
Recently we came upon and bought an old house, a vacation and family retreat sort of thing, on the outskirts of the town of Mendocino up north of here in the county of the same name. Googling around for info up there has somehow snared me into some news sites that push Mendo news my way. For unclear reasons I came upon a mostly internet, but also paper, hyper-local up there called the The Ava.com, with AVA for Anderson Valley Advertiser. It is headquartered in a valley on Route 128 in Mendocino County and that runs from Hwy 101 east of the coast range over to the coast - lots of bucolic wonder with the last miles through some glorious second...
Here's a beguiling headline and story that just ran in the UK:
Here's a beguiling headline and story that just ran in the UK:
A constant since the dawn of the nuclear age has been speculation - backed by experiments - that there are other ways to harness the atom for electricity than with the standard uranium fission reactors that bring with them such headaches as waste disposal, security risks including possible conversion of their related hardware to weapons production, and the possibility of meltdowns such as...
First reported by Russian amateur astronomers in September and by a lot of the specialty press at the time, and now getting a second news bounce including at one major wire service, comet ISON (for an astronomy consortium called the International Scientific Optical Network) is boring into the inner solar system as...
First reported by Russian amateur astronomers in September and by a lot of the specialty press at the time, and now getting a second news bounce including at one major wire service, comet ISON (for an astronomy consortium called the International Scientific Optical Network) is boring into the inner solar system as we sit. It appears to hail from the Oort Cloud way out there Barely pertinent aside: the OC is part of the Sun's family, is way beyond where Voyager I is now, so please again scotch the idea that said long-traveling probe is anywhere near exiting the solar system. As for ISON, its orbit will pivot around the sun just 1.2 million km or 800,000 miles from the solar surface and that's close. It's hot in there. If the experience does not cause the comet to fritter and tatter then on its way back out its bright coma and tail could be stupendous, brighter overall than...
[Originally posted Dec. 23, but now greatly expanded and updated.]
Lists! We got'em! Send us more (via suggest stories).
It's the time of year of slow news except for fiscal cliffs in the present case...
[Originally posted Dec. 23, but now greatly expanded and updated.]
Lists! We got'em! Send us more (via suggest stories).
It's the time of year of slow news except for fiscal cliffs in the present case, a season when media like putting together compendia of the year's high and low points mainly because the news hole is aching for fodder and some readers like these things.
The big daddy of these score sheets isn't even put together mainly by ordinary journalists but...
The AP's John Fahey, in a longish interview with Chevron's CEO John Watson, tried a bunch of times to learn if the oil man harbors any compunctions about selling...
The AP's John Fahey, in a longish interview with Chevron's CEO John Watson, tried a bunch of times to learn if the oil man harbors any compunctions about selling oodles of carbon footprint to anybody willing to pay for it. No dice.
Mostly the two talked about supply and demand and the business prospects for oil extraction. But Fahey, according to this Q and A, did repeatedly probe the man in the suit about fossil fuels, climate change, and corporate responsibility - if not in exactly those words. Here are questions he asked the man one after the other : "Do Fossil fuel producers bear the responsibility for curbing greenhouse gas emissions?" , "How should society go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions?", "The US is a wealthy country, how should we reduce emissions?", "When it...
Salon just put up an intriguing long yarn from writer Zac Unger. It reads like the transcript of an engrossing seminar in a journalism school on the confusing ground that reporters must cross while trying to learn whom to trust as a source.
Good on Salon for giving it...
Salon just put up an intriguing long yarn from writer Zac Unger. It reads like the transcript of an engrossing seminar in a journalism school on the confusing ground that reporters must cross while trying to learn whom to trust as a source.
Good on Salon for giving it more visibility. The piece originally ran elsewhere, where we'd have missed it, so to give due, primary credit ...
The Pacific Standard hed with its clear suggestion of ambiguity is better than Salon's "The Polar Bear Just Might Outlive Us All." For one thing, whole species do...
The New Yorker recently ran two wonderful stories. While quite different in style both are unmistakably about the changing environment. This includes the drastic loss of our planet's accumulated richness in the last century or so. It's all our fault and it's accelerating, no denying that in these...
The New Yorker recently ran two wonderful stories. While quite different in style both are unmistakably about the changing environment. This includes the drastic loss of our planet's accumulated richness in the last century or so. It's all our fault and it's accelerating, no denying that in these yarns. But references to such grim reflection are muted. To my mind the two pieces illustrate the penetration into wonk-talk first and into journalism now by a spirit of accomodation, even resignation, to the drastic changes fossil fuel emissions and human growth are wreaking. We must, serious people say, stop trying to horrify people into stopping the cause of the change. Tell them it's all about energy efficiency, self-sufficiency, or green jobs. Adaptation was once a term shunned among enviros as defeatist. Now it, and geo-engineering, are fully acceptable. Full-on mitigation is for another day, or decade. That's too bad by my lights. But it sure is hard to...
Right on schedule yesterday afternoon US time - and NASA orbital mechanicists are very good at setting and following schedules - the Grail Mission's two lunar gravity mapping spacecraft augured into a tall ridge rimming a crater near the Moon's north pole. Plenty of reporters filed on it, many but not...
Right on schedule yesterday afternoon US time - and NASA orbital mechanicists are very good at setting and following schedules - the Grail Mission's two lunar gravity mapping spacecraft augured into a tall ridge rimming a crater near the Moon's north pole. Plenty of reporters filed on it, many but not all of the stories shorties. How can this not be news? It has violence but nobody gets hurt, the spectacle is easy to imagine even if nobody appears to have gotten any photographic evidence of dust flying, and it provides a dramatic angle to stamp "done" on an exquisitely scientific example of tax dollars at work.
Yesterday, on hearing that NASA has named the tall ridge that interrupted the flights of the low-skimming pair of instruments after the late astronaut Sally Ride led me to wonder if this is an unalloyed tribute. The spacecraft, nicknamed Ebb and Flow and each about the size of a clothes dryer, were dumped there so that they would...
GfK stands for Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, a consumer research institute and polling company that a professor founded in Nuremberg in 1934 (a rather distinctive era in German history). It is now a behemoth with 12,000+ employees in 37 countries. Oh, you knew that? I bet you did. I did not until...
GfK stands for Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, a consumer research institute and polling company that a professor founded in Nuremberg in 1934 (a rather distinctive era in German history). It is now a behemoth with 12,000+ employees in 37 countries. Oh, you knew that? I bet you did. I did not until this morning learn what a GfK is. 'looked it up after scanning through the Associated Press's science newsfeed. It included this important if incremental piece of news with a partly-baffling headline, filed Friday:
Thanks to a piece in Slate filed last Friday by Jonathan Mingle, I learned of a surprisingly candid and also coarse...
Thanks to a piece in Slate filed last Friday by Jonathan Mingle, I learned of a surprisingly candid and also coarse paper title on climate change that a UC San Diego geomorphologist and complex modeling expert presented during the meeting in San Francisco of the American Geophysical Union last week: Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism. The f-bomb got detonated without any asterisks flying out in the session itself. AGU hardly spotlighted it. Still, that word is a newsmaker at such a staid (on paper) place as this hallowed academic conference. It got further pickup and discussion on blogs but not many general media reporters went with it. I have a hypothesis why and it has...
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