Christmas has become synonymous with good cheer, joy, and childlike wonder. From there we get the optimistic mantra “Every day is Christmas Eve” as looking forward to a happy day makes us happy. And so a sense of gleeful anticipation and positivity extends into Advent, the season of preparation leading up to Christmas. But then I am reminded of SAdvent. A few years ago on the Judge John Hodgman podcast (where humorist & actor John Hodgman arbitrates nonlegal questions) a husband and wife sought a decision about their observance of Advent. The husband freely acknowledged the joyousness of Christmas, and so felt that the time leading up to it should be more restrained and reflective to heighten the experience of Christmas. In other words, Christmas is not that special if the festivities stretch out over the preceding 24 days as well. He suggested that this was in keeping with the traditional liturgical observance of Advent, which can be somber and even apocalyptic.
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climate change
Science Corner: A Bumper Crop of Science
Some weeks it can be tricky to find a way into the science news that might be of interest to those outside the specific community of investigation. But not this week. Climate change, major space missions, and human bioengineering command our attention, and all three were in the headlines in the past four days. So let’s take a quick survey of all three.
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Science Book Club: The War on Science Ch 11-13
Announcement: I’m proposing one final video chat in a couple of weeks (8/3 9pm EDT). That gives everyone a chance to catch up.
This is our sixth and penultimate week reading through The War on Science; next week I’ll review the book as a whole. We’re covering the last three chapters this week; the last chapter is too brief for its own post. (Previous posts: Ch 1-2, Ch 3-4, Ch 5-6, Ch 7-8, Ch 9-10) This is the “what then shall we do?” section. As with the rest of the book, it is sweeping and ambitious in scope. The solutions remind me of my original question about the target audience; a number of them are curiously narrow.
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Science Book Club: The War on Science Ch 9-10
Reminder: we’re having another video chat tomorrow night (7/13 9pm EDT). Feel free to join even if you couldn’t come last time.
We’re in week 5 of discussing The War on Science and I have a confession/apology. I’m reading the book electronically and the table of contents has no page numbers, so I didn’t realize this week’s chapters were significantly longer than the others (Ch 1-2, Ch 3-4, Ch 5-6, Ch 7-8); Chapter 10 alone is nearly a quarter of the main content. In hindsight, it feels as though Otto primarily wanted to write a book on climate change denial and included the rest of the material to put it in a broader context. In general, I think the context is helpful, although having been teased for 8 chapters about the significance of the religious front to the overall war, I was pretty underwhelmed by Chapter 9. Maybe Otto had already scattered his best points about religion in the previous chapters, or maybe I’ve just spent more time thinking about the interaction of science and religion, but for its considerable length Chapter 9 felt light on substance.
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Science Corner: The Demon (And the Angel?) in the Permafrost
Recently, we discussed the possibility of bring the woolly mammoth back to life. One of the more ambitious plans involved raising herds of new mammoths to roam the Arctic and punch holes in the upper layers of ice. Those holes would expose deeper permafrost layers to cold air that will reduce thawing. The thermodynamics are plausible for the same reason igloos work as shelter; the air temperature is below freezing, which means that the insulating ice is actually keeping the ground underneath warmer than if it were exposed to the air. But we may need to come up with a more practical plan for achieving the same goal because the permafrost is melting and ancient organisms may be coming back to life: not mammoths, but microbes.
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