| UNSCIENTIFIC AMERICA How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future Chris Mooney Sheril Kirshenbaum New York: Basic Books, July 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-465-01305-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-465-01305-8 | 209p. | HC | $24.00 | |
| Page 37: | "Star Wars was just one of Sagan's targets. He also challenged the Reagan administration by publicizing his 'nuclear winter' hypothesis, which countered the hawks' assumption that a nuclear war could, in any sense, be 'winnable.' Using computer simulations, Sagan and a group of other sicentists found that in a situation of nuclear fallout, the fires produced could create so much smoke and dust that they might block out the sun's rays, creating a sustained planetary cooling that could threaten agriculture and possibly trigger global famine." |
| This mis-states the TTAPS hypothesis. It would happen in a situation of nuclear fallout, sure. But the fallout has nothing to do with nuclear winter. Fallout is merely incidental to global thermonuclear war: the detonation of perhaps 1,000 megatons total yield.1 The fires started by this enormous energy are what leads to nuclear winter. (Also, S/B "Sun's rays".) |
| Pages 43-4: | "The bold claims of the third culture czars sprang from genuine enthusiasm for (and excitement about) promising new areas of scientific research, but there was also an occasional undercurrent of arrogance..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "third-culture czars". |
| Page 48: | "Promising lower costs to consumers thanks to more competition within the media industry, the bill generated little debate and almost no attention beyond the Beltway." |
| It is perhaps arrogant to assume that readers know what this means. |
| Page 119: | "The Gathering Storm reforms seek to repair the nation's so-called science-education pipeline, which sucks in young students and spits them out at the other end as minted scientists. Yet a survey of this human assembly train shows that those reforms are, at best, only a partial salve for its many miles of corrosion and poor engineering." |
| Mix metaphors much? |
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