Dad can affect baby's health

I saw this blog post referencing an article I wrote for the Raleigh News & Observer.

 I really just wanted to make 3 comments on it:

1) The blog post really goes where I never ever expected it to go, which is why I had to share it.

2) The author uses my first name. It appears only women are prone to this infantilizing treatment. Yay.

3) It would have been really cool to have made this one research paper part of a longer story explaining epigenetics. I think a good percentage of newspaper readers (sadly not 100...) get genetics, and epigenetics would blow many of their socks off. If they are above a certain age (not very old!) they certainly wouldn't have learned it in high school and perhaps not even in college.

Political Scientists

I'm going to be catching up on responding to articles I've had a chance to read in the last year, but haven't had a chance to properly digest. This article by one of my instructors at the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, Cory Dean, is spot on:

"In a telephone interview, Dr. Ehlers, a Michigan Republican who retired this year, said he thinks a kind of “reverse snobbery” keeps researchers out of public life. “You have these professors struggling to write their $30,000 grant applications at the same time there are people they would never accept in their research groups making $100-million decisions in the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy,” he said. He said it was “shortsighted” of the science and engineering community not to encourage “some of their best and brightest” into public life."

A classic experiment, explained

Suppose you send a loved one on a small errand. Take out the trash. If you are concerned about his or her propensity to dawdle, it’s easy to calculate his or her average speed to acquire solid evidence. Just take the distance to the curb, multiply by 2 to account for the “to” and “from” portions of the trip. Divide this result by the total time it took and you’ll get the average speed. (If the result is comparable to the land speed of a box turtle, you are in the clear to berate your loved one.) In 1849, Armand Fizeau used this same principle to calculate the speed of light directly: He reflected light off of a mirror a fixed distance away and timed the round trip. This was the first measurement of the speed of light on Earth.

While Fizeau used the same method to calculate the speed of light, it wasn’t quite so easy.

NY = LA, more or less?

This was an exercise (at least the first few paragraphs were) for the Santa Fe Workshop I attended in May.

Geoffrey West wants to let us in on a little-known tidbit. New York and Los Angeles are basically the same city. You probably think that’s preposterous. New York is the land of the subway, L.A. is the land of the freeway. New York has city lights in the nights, L.A. has sunshine-drenched days. They’re different.

West audaciously gives us an additional morsel. Their sameness can be mathematically proven. Now you’re tempted to use this paper to line the birdcage. How could something as human as a city, in all its qualitative complexity, be quantitatively characterized?