Blogs / The Loom

I’ve spent part of my day working on my slides for my keynote address this Saturday at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism. I’ll be talking about science and the news, and the weird new interactions they have these days. Darwinius and other stunning episodes will feature prominently. The whole day looks great. Hope to see some Loom readers there!

Radiolab and parasites. A match made in parasitic heaven. If you haven’t discovered this excellent radio program, check out the first episode of their sixth season. During the first 20 minutes of the show, I persuade the hosts of the show, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, that parasites are not degenerate or evil, but rather sophisticated creatures that have a huge influence on humanity and the entire natural world (the basic message in my book, Parasite Rex). The rest of the show delves into some particularly cool parasite tales. Check it out.

It has been a week of crazy writing–four pieces ranging from short to way too long. Hence little blogging. I apologize. I will reform. I will honor the blogger’s code. Monday.

In the meantime, two bits of news.

1. Radio: I will be on Coast to Coast AM at 10 pm Saturday PST/ 1 am EST to talk about bedbugs. We are in the midst of a bedbug Renaissance, and I intend to be its Dante. Details to come here.

In more radio news, I was just on New Hampshire Public Radio talking about global-warming-driven evolution. Listen here. (Oh–and for a kick, watch this hot-button two-fer drive a global-warming-denialist creationist craaaazy.)

2. Finally–carlzimmer.com is back in business. If you’re in New York, LA, Vancouver, New Haven, Denver, or Ithaca NY, be sure to check out the talk page. I’ll be adding more stuff very soon. (And please get in touch if you organize talks and want to chat about my giving one!)

A good weekend to all, free of bedbugs except the bedbugs of the mind…

The Zimmer family takes over Bloggingheads. My brother Ben takes me on a journey through Word World. Check it out.

We arrived on Appledore Island this afternoon, which is drenched in sunshine and heat. The gulls are screaming and the students are busy reading up on tidal pools (or, as I was informed at dinner, the intertidal) in advance of our journey tomorrow. But despite the fact that New Hampshire is just a strip on the horizon, the email and the cell phones work here, and this evening I was asked to talk on the radio tomorrow about my recent article on global warming and evolution. I’ll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC in New York some time between 12:30 and 1 pm EST on Tuesday. You can listen live here, or wait for the archived podcast.

Listen right here!

A while back my web site was hacked and my archive of stories vanished. After switching servers, I left the site frozen in time while I dealt with more pressing matters. I’ve finally gotten a little stretch of free time to refresh my memory of Dreamweaver, and now the site is back up to date. Along with the archive, you can also find an updated list of past and future talks. I’m starting to make plans for talks about The Tangled Bank and the 15oth anniversary of The Origin of Species this fall, and appearances are now just starting to fall into place. I expect more talks to pop up in the weeks to come, and I will be much more diligent in getting the information online quickly.

The New York Academy of Science has set up a nice site documenting their Two Cultures meeting in May. On their video page, you can see the panel on the media where I spoke. Despite appearances, I am not the younger brother of Andy Revkin and Ira Flatow. And be sure to check the two videos from Dean Kamen, describing his robot competition for kids.

On today’s episode of Bloggingheads, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I talk about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, the new book he has co-authored with his co-blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum. We definitely have our differences, or different emphases, but I hope our argument ended up being enlightening, rather than demolishing.

One big difference was over high school science education. I just can’t see any long-term solution that is superior to doing a better job of teaching high school kids about science and getting them to feel that it’s part of their lives. Part of this involves getting really good teachers out into all schools, not just the ones surrounded by McMansions. Part of this involves a program like the one I mentioned in the bloggingheads talk, called FIRST, which was developed by Dean Kamen as a kind of robot-building Superbowl. And guess what? Kamen actually fills football stadiums with kids, and those kids are more likely to do better in school, get into science and engineering, etc.

Frankly, I don’t buy the counter-argument that there are lots of people with advanced degrees who don’t believe in vaccines, etc., and so “just more science education” won’t matter much. Let’s really unpack what we mean by “advanced degrees,” really. I know plenty of people who went to top colleges, and then on to top law schools or got higher degrees in literature or such–and the last time they took a real science class was in high school. It’s not as if the science seeped through the walls of the chemistry or biology departments and infused them while they were listening to lectures about Derrida or modern politics.

Now–if I could just find that $50 billion I had set aside for improving high school science education…I know it’s around here somewhere…

Chris will be coming to my neck of the woods (New Haven) on Tuesday, July 21, to give a talk. I’ll be introducing him. Details here.

I will be on the public radio show The Takeaway at 720 am EST Tuesday to talk about fireflies. I’ll update this post with a link to the podcast when it’s online. [And here it is.]

Not too long ago I was interviewed for episode of the radio show Radiolab. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich led me to a windowless cubicle where they then grilled me for a long, long time. From that interrogation, they produce a medley in which I say:

“Sloppy, sloppy, noisy, chaos, jumble, chance, sloppy, sloppy…”

Fortunately, they also saved a little more of our conversation, which was on a topic near and dear to my heart: the noisiness of life. It’s a subject I discuss at some length in my book Microcosm (ahem–paperback coming out on July 14–ahem). To wit: if you think that down at the level of molecules and atoms our bodies are just regular clock-like devices that go tick-tock-tick-tock, you’d be wrong. It’s a sloppy, noisy process, out of which it’s amazing that the regularities and predictabilities of our lives emerge.

The episode that Jad and Robert produced, called “Stochasticity,” (listen here) looks at the many roles chance plays in our life–from the level of cells, where I tend to lurk, to the myth of the hot hand in basketball.

Of course, like any self-absorbed starlet, I must say now that some of my best work was left behind on the cutting-room floor, or at least inside somebody’s hard drive. It was inevitable, given how cool and multi-faceted the mystery of biological noise can be. For example, I talk about noise filters on Radiolab, but I didn’t talk about one of the most important ones, which keeps signals clear in in our brains. If you want to read more, check out this piece I wrote last year for Wired. And I also didn’t get to explain that noise isn’t just something to get rid of, just an unalloyed bad thing. In fact, life has evolved to use noise to its advantage. Even E. coli knows how to play the odds like a skilled gambler, as I explained last year in the New York Times.

And if you want to head straight for the scientific literature behind this story, a great place to start is with the wonderfully-named 2008 review, “Nature, Nurture, or Chance: Stochastic Gene Expression and Its Consequences” (pdf at author’s site)

[Image: jaxpix on Flickr, via Creative Commons Licence]

As I mentioned earlier, as part of the World Science Festival, I’ll be talking Sunday with Eric Sanderson, an ecologist who has just published the book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, based on his remarkable project to map out the ecosystems of New York on the eve of the arrival of Europeans. We’ll be at the Author’s Corner, which is now in a different location: The Discovery Theater, on the 8th floor of the Kimmel Center at NYU on Washington Square. Here are the details and a map .

Eric and I will speak from 11:00 am to 11:30 and then we’ll both be signing books at noon.

See you there!

Next week the second annual World Science Festival hits New York. I’m now going to be involved in three events that I hope Loom readers can attend.

1. Thursay, June 11, 6:30-8:00 PM  “Wall-E’s World: Designs for an Invisible Footprint.” I’ll be talking to designers and an astrobiologist about cities, trash, space travel, and the search for a sustainable future.

2. Friday, June 12, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM “Picturing Earth: The Story of Life in Images.” Frans Lanting takes majestic pictures of our living world (you may have seen some of his stuff in National Geographic).  His latest project is called, Life: A Journey Through Time. He has produced a series of wonderful images to capture what life was like over the past 3.5+ billion years. I’ll be moderating a panel about the history of life with Lanting, his wife and partner Chris Eckstrom, and two leading paleontologists. Mike Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History is an expert on mammals and dinosaurs, and Derek Briggs, director of Yale’s Peabody Museum, specializes on the origin of major groups of animals between 600 and 500 million years ago.

3. Sunday, June 14, 11:00 AM-1 PM: Author’s Alley. On Sunday, the World Science Festival hits the asphalt with a science street fair. Among the attractions will science book authors, who will be both signing books and having on-stage conversations. At 11, I’ll be talking with Eric Sanderson, an ecologist who has just published the book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, based on his remarkable project to map out the ecosystems of New York on the eve of the arrival of Europeans. As things are scheduled at the moment, we’ll both be signing our books after the talk, from noon to 1. If the schedule changes, I’ll post an update.