Lotsa workshopping going on up here, lotsa notetaking as researchers go over their findings and hypotheses. Good hallway confabs, excellent scenery, fab members of the tribe.
In more data-driven words:
ScienceWriters2011, latest of the annual joint meetings of the National Association of Science Writers, with its Workshops, and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writers and its New Horizons in Science briefings, is winding up in fine style on this rolling landscape ~7000 feet up on the Colorado Plateau. That is, in Flagstaff, Arizona, pierced by historical Route 66 and site of the New Horizons sponsor, the quite impressive, if not nationally well-known (sports mascot: the Lumberjacks), Northern Arizona University.
A few notes off the top of my head, and then more on the attendance breakthrough. This is random and entirely from spontaneous recall of things that are easy to recall:
- At a Workshop on covering controversial science, book and expozay writer Gary Taubes expressed continuing conviction that the Nobel Prize Committee blew it years ago when it awarded the big one in physics (correction to previous error on the field, see comments) to a man that Taubes had already written up as, well, he didn’t say fraud, but he did write him up as very wrong. Then he threw in that, as with his recent doubts on standard nutrition advice, he harbors doubts about climate change science too. Hmm. Really? Uh oh. But no Taubes-bomb seems to be likely in that arena. After, several of us walked briskly up and asked him if he’s planning to write on it. No, not at all, he said, not his field. Whew. “But I can easily imagine how that could all fall apart.,” he said. Unwhew.
At New Horizons Monday, Theoretical physicist and Astrophysicist Sean Carroll‘s explanation that just because the laws of physics mean life after death, spoon bending with one’s mind, and homeopathy are outlawed by quantum field theory and that is a dead cold fact, and that free will also violates physics, it does not mean that we can’t talk as though we have choices. That has to do with dysteleology (and Ernst Haeckel), and about supervenience, and about the annoying kid who says “I knew you were going to do that.” He gave me a copy of his powerpoint from which I filched this pic. Maybe we can get the whole edifying slide show up on the CASW or ScienceWriters2011 website.- A personal fave, and not involving anybody famous as in the first two bullets, was a presentation by NAU restoration ecologist and ass’t prof. of biology Jane Marks. She described the recovery and repopulation of Fossil Creek here in Arizona after a century-old dam, built largely with Apache labor and still feeding a flume that still made money for the local utility, was knocked down a few years back with the utility’s apparently uncoerced agreement. Full stream flow restored. Good news for native chub fish things (my notes are mute) that are back at the top of the food chain after invasive perch and sunfish (I think) got chemically carpet bombed. A big deal for understanding the consequences of taking down dams (in US, 200 of them in the last 20 years). One result, she said, however, is an invasive species hard to hit with chemical pesticides, one that is “really really inexcusable.” You got it. “People are messing it up.” So many tourists and locals alike so love the restored stream that they are sort of trashing it, falling in, leaving stuff, parking RVs all over the place, etc etc at what is supposed to be a wild and scenic river. They aren’t bad people (as Caltech’s Sean Carroll would say, they had no free choice. It has to do with determinism and laws of physics), there are just way too many of them. Perfect example of uninentended or unexpected consequences. She thinks something will be done – rationing of tourism permits, something.
- I missed hearing Steven Pinker, here as part of his book tour on the supposed decline of violence in many nations. But most (no data) of those who did were impressed, no matter what the NY Review of Books said. I’d have been there but a medical urgency intervened (not mine, an old pal’s, all looking good now).
More on the meeting’s demographics. By one unofficial count of registrations, the turnout of journalists, either freelance (133) or staffers at independent pubs (50) is solid, about half the total. There also were many PIOs from universities, about 65, some of whom may be scouting it with a possible bid for hosting the New Horizons half of the meeting, plus many writers and editors for university or research lab-associated publications. Plus J-school profs. A good crowd.
Me, I’m ready for that raft on the river.
– Charlie Petit
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