Overheard Online

Sometimes it will be hard, or impossible, to discover simple models explaining huge collections of messy data taken from noisy, nonlinear phenomena. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Hypotheses aren’t simply useful tools in some potentially outmoded vision of science; they are the whole point. Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about.
Cosmic Variance on Theory

So it turns out that what the public really trusts is whatever journalists tell them about science. This is why it is so important to do everything we can to support good science journalism, and to resist the temptation to contribute to poor efforts by overly sensationalizing our own work when speaking to journalists about it.
Cosmic Variance on Science Journalism

I don’t want to dislike Hillary Clinton — she is smart and capable, and would be an enormously better President than John McCain. But treating experts as the enemy is a craven strategy to achieve short-term gains at the cost of substantial long-term harm.
Cosmic Variance on Hillary Clinton

The decision of where to go to school presents a clean well-defined juncture, where you can imagine two clear paths before you, one that leads to a happy land filled with unicorns and flowers and all night coffee shops and independent record stores, and another that leads to a sad grey land where you spend your time shuffling piles of paper for The Man.
Cosmic Variance on College

Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.
Cosmic Variance on Science

A fourth-grader reads an article in the Science Times, and is so moved by outrage that he pens a stern missive to the scientists quoted? It’s not very often that you have a chance to inspire a young mind like that, even if you do inspire him to berate you.
Cosmic Variance on Scientific Child