1. catdynamics
  2. how stimulating...

how stimulating...

By catdynamics on February 11, 2009.

so a deal has been reached on the stimulus bill
final version will be smaller than either house or senate version

science is too minor to be mentioned in the news summaries, will have to wait for the revised text to know what they did

but, NIH emerged as a "winner" - Sen Specter inserted $6.5 billion as short term boost for NIH
Good for them, or is it... that is a heck of percentage chunk to absorb short term.

But, did the conference decide that was good enough for all the science?
Or did some NSF, NOAA, DoE and even NASA stimulus survive?

We'll find out, all too soon.

I don't know how they actually do the house/senate conference negotiations, but I have this vision of a very junior staffer with a government issue laptop trying to edit a spreadsheet as the numbers get bounced around...

"was that million, or billion?"
"oh, trillion? I don't know if excel can handle that many digits"
"ok, the new total is... shit, it crashed... just hold on a minute, rebooting"
"this thing does autosave now, right?"
"what do you mean I have to turn it on? it is not default?"
"cool, there's an edit history function!"
"hey, who took out section 7.3.c.4.iv yesterday?"

"what does NaN mean again?"

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Politics

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