links for 2009-06-23

"Keep being AWESOME!"

"Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, a journalist-scientist team, offer an updated "two cultures" polemic for America in the 21st century. Just as in Snow's time, some of our gravest challengesâclimate change, the energy crisis, national economic competitivenessâand gravest threats--global pandemics, nuclear proliferationâhave fundamentally scientific underpinnings. Yet we still live in a culture that rarely takes science seriously or has it on the radar. "

"Not only is there this problematic lack of bragging, but with the kindle edition of the book I canât have a handsome volume laying around the house as if to say to visitors, âwhy, yes, I may be a professional political pundit but Iâm also a man of culture.â And Iâll have nothing on my shelf. Amazon should at least send you a sticker when you buy a book on Kindle so you can maintain some kind of display wall of all the impressive books youâve read."

"[H]arvesting energy from speed bumps is only green in a very abstract way, since the car is going to speed up again once past it â youâd be greener by not having the speed bumps there at all, which is one reason why you get better mileage on the highway â you eliminate those stops and starts. A car that is already going the desired speed is going to surrender energy to the device and slow down even though it didnât need to. Green-wise, youâd be better served with an improved design of the traffic flow. [...]

What they are doing is getting the customers to pay for some of their electricity."

""Eh, who cares," says Giblets. "Meanwhile a super-secret rocket ship carrying our best and brightest rich people blasts off from earth to start up a newer, sexier earth in the vastness of space!"
"They are caught by the government of space and deported for overstaying their visas," says me."

"Got a spare $6,000?

Chancellor Don Griffin at City College of San Francisco suggests using it to rescue an endangered community college class. Contribute and the class will be named for you."

"So, in order to solve the problem of fine tuning of the SM, we have to assume that there exist more than twenty so-far-unseen elementary particles, and that these particles all have masses above our detection limits, but not too much so (lest their mending effect on the fine-tuning becomes more complicated to keep intact). Together with those additional particles, there are at least 105 new unknown parameters to buy in the package, which the theory does not explain: not just the particle masses, but their couplings, mixings, etcetera. A whole new world to explore. "