Life without beer: part 2 of my beer & running science experiment

  The question came to me at 10-something AM in the morning. I had just hurdled a flaming fire pit, the finish line of a stupidly steep trail run in the desolate cliffs of Western Colorado. Now I was drinking a can of cold beer I’d pulled from the race refreshment cooler. And damn, if [...]

What beer and running taught me about science (part 1 of 2)

Our runners. (click on photos to watch them drink beer.)   I love to run. I also love to drink beer. Sometimes I run, then drink beer. My friends and I do this pretty regularly, and at some point I began to wonder if it was as harmless as we thought.

Even though I no longer plan to be a biologist…

Science education amounts to a Great Winnowing — from millions of school kids fascinated by science down to orders of magnitude fewer actually making a living, or a life, doing it decades later. Whatever the reasons so many flee or are pushed out of science — and there are many, both personal and institutional — [...]

A Reason to Stay

There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public [...]

Six Million and Counting

Vanishing Points

If the artwork to the left looks familiar, the reason might be that it was part of the argument that Ann made in her post on Tuesday. She suggested that the beauty of the Florentine paintings of the fifteenth century—“stunning, literally; you look at them and can hardly breathe”—couldn’t have been due only to the [...]

Trash, Recycling and the Heartbreaking Lessons of YouTube Ethnography

I live in a bubble. Its name is San Francisco, a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. I come from the outside world, so I [...]

The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony

The Seven Deadly Sins: Greed

I wuz robbed. A few months ago a scientific discovery that I had covered in depth in my most recent book became the subject of a major news story. The same morning that the story broke, I got an email from a member of one of the discovery teams suggesting that I write an op-ed [...]

Biologist Michael Soule on the Seven Deadly Sins

Dearest readers, we hope you had a gluttonous, slothful, greedy and lustful holiday, with only the tiniest touches of wrath. Here at the Last Word on Nothing, we’re celebrating the season with a series of posts on the Seven Deadly Sins. Beginning tomorrow, each of our crack writers will tackle his or her favorite (or [...]