Salon has done a service by gathering the responses of 11 scientists and science journalists to the recent news from the World Health Organization that mobile phone usage poses a “possible” cancer risk. We all pretty much say that we’re not very worried, and a number of folks point out that using your cell phone while driving is a far bigger risk than any cancer risk, for obvious reasons. My contribution was not very verbose, but I think it captures what we should take away from the science in many ways:

I use the classic white headphones with my iPhone but much more out of convenience than out of fear. This report–calling mobile phone use a “possible” carcinogen–won’t change that.

Other responses come from Natalie Angier, PZ Myers, Antonio Damasio, Ed Yong, and others. Check them out here.

The news stream of the country just shifted dramatically. I was up late last night, putting on hold an article deadline, unable to take my eyes off CNN–and remembering what it was like to be in D.C. on 9/11, huddled in a hotel watching the news, and then for more than a month afterwards, as we were all additionally terrorized by the anthrax mailings.

Blogging itself was largely born in the wake of 9/11–the fear and the insatiable demand for news and information, combined with the Internet, set the stage. I started blogging shortly afterwards when I and others created Tapped, the blog of the American Prospect magazine.

Now, ten years later….it is simply stunning to watch President Obama book-end an era, in a way we’d nearly forgotten was possible.

I’m in New Orleans this week, doing some writing and also attending…Mardi Gras. I just saw my first parade, Muses, last night.

Which inspired the joking title of this blog post. For fun, I Googled the phrase “the science of mardi gras” to see what turned up. All I got was a bizarre reference to a pretty unscientific comment by Anderson Cooper:

It’s a very public event, of course, but there’s something intensely personal about the throwing of the beads. You make eye contact with someone, toss them a necklace. They say thank you, and you roll on. The only beads people want are the ones they catch themselves. I find that very telling. The beads that fall on the ground are rarely picked up. They lack the personal connection, the bond has been broken.

That’s not my experience of Mardi Gras. My experience is that the good beads are fought for, and kids scavenge on the ground for whatever isn’t caught. If a bead is still lying on the ground it’s because it’s broken.

What’s more, as a look at the “science of mardi gras” this is pretty lame. A real science of Mardi Gras might examine, say, the strange and artificial economy that gets created for a short span of time. In this economy, completely worthless beads suddenly come to have a temporary but real value–especially if they’re plastic pearls–even as more “scarce” throws, like coconuts, spears, etc, are valued still higher. (Of course, the ones really making money are the people selling beads by the “gross”–a bag of 144 individual ones–for more than $ 20, just so they can be thrown off of floats.)

There would also be a lot of studies of alcohol’s effects on group behavior. So–Mardi Gras’s “science” very much awaits.

We are both here in Washington, D.C. (or will be soon) for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. Some of the stuff happening is here. First off, John Holdren speaks tomorrow night, so everybody will be expecting pointed words on the science budget.

Meanwhile, let me pull a few threads–sessions that sound very cool and where I think I’d learn something:

Comparing National Responses to Climate Change: Networks of Debate and Contention (more…)

I’ve just been surveying this fascinating roster of the most famous scientists, living and dead, based upon name mentions in Google Books. Darwin is the most famous, so all others are ranked in units called milli-Darwins (mD)–it takes a thousand of them to equal a Darwin.

I was somewhat surprised to learn, first of all, that Einstein only gets 878 milli-Darwins. I would have thought, instinctively, that he’s still more famous, although I agree Darwin has been surging over the past few decades.

Having a Nobel prize does not seem particularly well correlated with fame in this analysis. And as for the late, great popular science writers of the last generation? Well, it seems they’re much more famous than most Nobelists. In terms of rank, it goes Asimov (183 mD), Gould (169 mD), and then Sagan (152 mD). The latter is tied with Rachel Carson (152 mD), who is the second highest woman on the list after Marie Curie (189 mD).

I do have a lot of questions about this method. Because it relies upon name appearance in books, it seems likely to diverge greatly from how today’s pop culture awareness would rate famous scientists. There are a number of figures in the top 10, for instance, that I’ve barely heard of myself (Oliver Lodge, 394 mD, Karl Pearson, 346 mD). Still, quite a fascinating little exercise.

Joe Schreiber, an Emmy award winning producer and one of our NSF workshop trainers, used this quotation last week with the recruits who had to stand up and speak before the group. It is so amazing that I just had to repost it from this source, which I hope is reliable:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

– “Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

I guess football coaches use this one a lot. It’s kind of the tough guy version of “‘Tis better to have loved and lost: Than never to have loved at all.”

I like it.

Warren Buffett says we should be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.

Well, the market today closed just below 12,000, a level it has only exceeded in the past during the 1-2 year period leading up to the mega crash. Says one financial commenter:

It is suddenly as if the recession and the spill-over effect from it never happened.

Draw your own conclusions.

This is pretty amusing:

….the Global Warming Truth Index combines average temperatures from the hometowns of Fox News commentators Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Then, the index compares the current month’s temperatures in the hometowns to historical averages for all three cities. All weather data comes from regional offices of the National Weather Service.

Using this methodology, combined Fox commentator hometown temperatures in December 2010 were…

Read on to find out. Funny stuff; and they deserve it.

There’s supposed to be a big announcement tomorrow. AT&T’s stock has tanked, just as it always does when there are Verizon iPhone rumors (but this one is supposed to be the real thing).

Meanwhile, Apple’s stock is soaring, just as it always does seemingly no matter what happens. (“Any investor getting caught up in CDMA iPhone hype needs to realize that the real winner probably won’t be Verizon. It will likely be Apple,” writes CNN’s financial commentator Paul LaMonica.)

Meanwhile, there are also lowly consumers who will be affected. I have an iPhone with AT&T and I share the complaints of everyone else in the universe about poor service. It is hard to even remember a time when your calls weren’t dropped.

However, I’m wondering if AT&T’s problems aren’t the result of winning this mega-popular product to begin with and shouldering its huge data demands–and whether Verizon can actually do it better once it gets all those new subscribers.

I’m not switching just cause I’m currently locked in on an AT&T contract (along with millions of others). But when that ends…well. What are others planning to do?

As part of some new research, I’m currently reading a classic in social psychology: When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger et al, 1956. Somebody may have assigned it to you in college.

If not, here’s the rapid-fire Cliff Notes: A team of psychologists infiltrate a group of space-age cranks who believe that beings from other planets are communicating with them directly, and warning them of a vast cataclysm that is going to rip the United States asunder (and yes, it involves the reappearance of Atlantis). The scientists narrate it all in clinical style, factual, detached, e.g.: “scarcely a day passed without a communique of some kind from outer space.” And: “Later, a few of the young people also attempted levitation of one another, though this venture also failed.”

The religious followers eventually come up with a very specific prediction of disaster, and they then begin to proselytize about it. And of course, the day comes, and they’re wrong.

So then what? That’s what’s so mind-blowing. Festinger came up with the theory of “cognitive dissonance” to explain how people reconcile contradictory ideas in their minds. In this case the contradictory ideas would be 1) “I believe strongly in my space-age sci-fi fantasy religion and the aetherial beings who have been communicating with me” 2) “the prediction they gave me, and that I made public to all the world, has been unequivocally refuted.”

So what do people do to make their minds whole in this situation? Well, I invite you to guess.

What a wacky species we are. Happy 2011. (Just one year short of 2012…)