Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] For Fruit Flies, Gene Shift Tilts SexOrientation

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 6/7/05, Paul Slusarz <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> From: "Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
> 
> : I could go
> : on, but only Mike Miller is reading this far, so I won't. :-)
> 
> The reader base has just doubled...

I think we're up to 2, but not including Mike, oddly enough.
 
> : Gosh; if that made sense, then I'm pretty proud of myself.
> :-)
> 
> Yeah, it did make sense, and a science column editor in any
> newspaper would probably take it as it is and print it.

Hopefully they'd at least fix the typos.

>  I wonder why public "abstracts" for papers couldn't be written
> that way to encourage more involvement from the public.

This is in theory what the press people at the journals are supposed
to do.  What happens in reality is that the newspapers dumb stuff down
so much that there's not much left by the time it's in the press.

> I also wonder why there isn't a science column in the Maneater, but
> there are several opinion columns where writers clearly
> struggle for producing enough content each week.

Well, the Maneater is written by students who have ambitions to
writing real columns, and science writing isn't a popular specialty it
seems.  The Missouran is a step up, but the Columbia Tribune is only
at the same step.  I'm actually never going to talk to any reporter at
the Tribune ever again after the last stunt they pulled on me.

Weirder still is the apparent relative lack of science-oriented blogs.
 Maybe they're out there and I don't know about them, but they're not
high profile if they exist at all.

The part I get *really* depressed about,  though, is that the science
coverage even up at the level of the NYT is not really that good.  You
don't always get the impression that the writer really "got it" in the
first place.  At Life Sciences 2004, there was a symposium on the
relationship between science and the press.  I think most of the
science types felt pretty discouraged afterwards, since your worst
fears were basically realized.

jking

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