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Rebuilding our nation's intellectual infrastructure, the delusional sense of touch, pitying the weather forecaster, dolphin sexism, a global epidemic of plastic-contaminated lab results...

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• Primal, Acute and Easily Duped: Our Sense of Touch
  The extraordinary accuracy of the sense of touch (accurate to an astonishing 1/25,000th of an inch) is offset by it’s inability to separate sensation from delusion.
• Deciphering a 20% Chance of Rain
  We should pity, not scorn, the weather forecaster and his often miserable predictions, and the best way to learn how to forgive is to recognize the complicated extrapolations and best guesses used to determine their forecast.
• Dolphin males leave sponging to the females
  Sexism spreads to the seas!
• More biologists report plastic contamination
  For those who missed it the first time, a lab studying endocrine inhibition found contamination from plastic lab materials had trashed their results. Now, and no surprise here, it seems they weren’t the only ones as a global epidemic of contaminated results begins to emerge.
• Are Chemists, Engineers on Green Jobs List?
  In order to actually address the issue of climate change and energy policy we need to undertake an overhaul of our nation’s intellectual infrastructure. Top on the to do list: research priorities, innovation pumps, redistributing defense funding dollars. The concept of rebuilding our intellectual infrastructure is scrutinized over at Common Tragedies.

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Originally published December 9, 2008