I only really follow two sports teams: The SF Giants and a certain college bball team that is about to get NIT'd after losing in the early season to such stalwarts as U of Montana (a game I took my then-5-mo-old to), UC Irvine and recently D-II UC Davis (my alma mater).

I've always been a Barry Bonds apologist, probably because every time I've gotten out to Pac Bell in the past few years he's hit something into the water. And it's always been clear that while he hates the media, he loves the SF fans and he loves baseball. Even if every columnist in the country takes it personally that he doesn't want to answer the same set of dumb questions after every game, I think the love of the game and fans is far more important.

Doctor Nisbet's got another good framing post up here. His title says it all: "Global Warming Ranks Last Among Enviro Problem Public Worries About." (Also see this post.)

Which is the point I was after in this post. In that post, I went into these James Hansen comments:

The boycott was much debated throughout the blog'o'planet before the KSB hearings started, but did nothing to reverse the decision to boycott. Consequentially, the KSB hearings went on without much credible science to speak to it.

My undergrad path was Aeronautical Engineering -> Mechanical Engineering/Materials Science -> Geography -> Geology. Then I did Physical Oceanography in grad school.

But no wonder I'm so confused. I should have been a psych major! Or gone to math. (Yea right...as soon as I took PDE's I knew why I wasn't a math major.) The journalism hit is pretty close...when I was applying to grad school I almost went the journalism route instead and I do see blogging as a kind of microjournalism.

My results:

But no, it was sadly real. Here's what happened:

Chris raises an angle on this Juliet Eilpern WAPo story covering this Science mag article.

He runs miningstocks.com and shills extractive industry stocks. The latest "newsletter" (J. Taylor's Energy & Energy Tech Stocks), tells us, in a big headline splashed across the front, of a coming "Runaway Uranium Stock Boom!"

Followed by this: http://www.blogwise.com/blogmaps

(or just click here if you already have google earth installed)

I was (and still am, I guess) both a pointyheaded academic type and a serious club athlete, and I appreciated the internal UC Davis ethos that all athletes were expected to be student athletes.

The pressure worked last year and will likely work again this year. (AFAIK, a similar letter was sent last year.) The difference this year is that it appears that there will not be a repeat of last year's food fight over the issue. Very interesting is this quote from Rep. Pombo (R-CA), chair of Resources and one of the most pro-drilling members:

"I think our best shot at getting it done was last year," noting that this year's elections complicate efforts to press the issue. "I think if it does move, it's probably going to have to start on the Senate side." [from CQ Today]

That's a shocking abdication of the fight.

(After watching for the past two years Bingaman try to drive debate on GHGs and Domenici often resist debate on GHGs, I can't give Domenici his props just yet. Although, I will admit that Domenici resistance to throwing GHG language into the energy bill was done because he wanted that turkey to pass and knew that GHG language was going to make it that much harder. Since Bingaman was close to getting some language in, my guess is the two made some sort of deal in which Bingaman would back off then in exchange for getting Domenici to go along with an effort later. Any local knowledge on this, J. Fleck?)

Comments from me forthcoming, but for now I just wanted to throw the paper out there....

Last October a National Academy of Sciences panel, chaired by an industry titan and big W supporter, put out a report titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm.

Their charge was to respond to this request by Senators Bingaman (D-NM) and Lamar (R-TX):

What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century? What strategy, with several concrete steps, could be used to implement each of those actions?

The big-4 airlines remind me of the big 3 automakers. Late last week, James Spearot, the Director of the Chemical and Environmental Sciences Laboratory at the General Motors Research and Development Center, gave a talk to an ensemble undergrad enginenerding crowd at CU. Turns out GM is pinning all their hopes for the future on hydrogen.

The worst offender was Selena Roberts and her column after sour-pussed column, written as if she had been ass-grabbed before the games by Bode Miller and so had a strong vendetta against him and everything else American.

It went beyond Roberts, though, and the consistently negative and catty coverage was building on my psyche. The Times made the athletes pay unfairly for the overhyping sins of the USOC, advertisers and the media. Further, the Times' editors seemed to have conducted a poll of Americans and found that they were only interested in alpine skiing and consistently snide recounts of failure.

This bill just made it out of the House Committee on Education, and basically rewrites post-tenure review rules to sound essentially just like pre-tenure rules, which makes me wonder why you'd even have tenure at all. Maybe that's the point of the legislation.