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Of course big business loves regulation

An interesting article from Timmy, who makes clearly a point I've glimpsed muddily recently. Notice that the point stands, even if you happen to like regulation (I think there is far too much). Permit me to quote (fair use, I'm sure): Big business positively delights in much regulation... Capitalism... is indeed all about making profit. Get the most out of whatever it is that you're doing. It's the market, the competition that it allows, which is what tempers this [] profit gouging. You can't charge what you like for a pint of beer because there's another pub around the corner... What…

Police and Thieves

You recognise the image, no doubt. And before I go any further I should say that both the image and the title are unfair. But they came irresistibly to my mind anyway. The context is a link and comment I recently posted to facebook, viz: Andrew Mitchell: the 'toxic' smears aimed at destroying my party and me [Torygraph] Having the police federation forcing the Tory whip to resign was appalling (I don't much like our politicians, but I'm absolutely opposed to the police getting to choose those they like). But at least there is starting to be some comeback http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/…

Schneier confuses life with death

Steve [*] Schneier (security expert and tee-shirt provider to the cognoscenti) has a post in which he pokes at the massive costs of counter-terrorism, apparently out of all proportion to the threat. However, he has a bizarrely wrong calculation: I quote: The death toll of all these is... sixteen deaths in the U.S. to terrorism in the past ten years. Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security (this does not include our many foreign wars), that's $62.5 billion per life saved. Is there any other risk that we are even remotely as crazy about? I'm happy…

Comets make men mad

The Younger Dryas was a cooling event about 12 kyr ago - see the wikipedia article, which still has the pic I drew in it. It is an example of rapid climate change, and was probably caused by THC shutdown caused by meltwater from the Laurentide icesheet, though exactly how is unclear. However, some people would like it to be caused by a comet. That was first suggested in 2007, and RC said we doubt it. Then again in 2009 some more evidence was produced, and RC said we still doubt it. Others were less cautious; and Unscientifc American gushed over it as did Nat. Geog.. Bits of their work turned…

Who was that masked man?

Scenes from a ski-ing holiday to Les Deux alpes a few years back. This is La Roche de la Muzelle, which I think is gorgeous. Maybe I'll get to climb it one day. Summitpost says it is PD / II (though not in winter) and the route to it goes over that beautiful roman bridge. These are the reasons I was digging around in old pix: at the after rowing curry Andy said he could find a pic of me with pony tail on my wiki page, but it has gone. And I said, aha, but I have far better than that. Note that the beret is a Pyrennean one. And in a token bit of climate don't miss The good…

Day 4: down

Oh dear, and we were rowing so well, too. Our best row of the week, and we pushed hard to get Cantabs, but while we closed on them (again!) it wasn't enough to hold off the Leys who came up astonishingly fast to get their blades. But a good night for the club overall. M3 put in some very tenacious rowing to hold off City 10, who were on for blades, until Grassy. With a large overlap (but not quite big enough for an automatic bump without touching) Emma Howard steered a brilliant line, helped (apparently) by M3's natural tendency to turn to strokeside. And then City's cox put too much thought…

IOP (oh no not again)

[Tags: climate-wonk incest. Everyone else please ignore] We interrupt your diet of boatie-type news [update: sorry, late boatie news: a great bow-cam video of Champs 6 bumping the Hornets (sorry Paul)] for something related to climate: BigCityLib notices that the IOP (remember that bunch of revisionist fools?) has deleted the Energy sub group: Following the meeting of the Science Board on 17 June 2010, it is with regret that I announce that the Energy Sub-group is to be disbanded, immediately. Or has it? The website still has them [Update: thanks to J who points out that is the Energy Group,…

[Glossary] Common abbreviations and uncommon words

As used on this blog, and sometimes elsewhere. This post will be a work in progress, probably. I said that I would occaisionally push the publication date closer to "now" to keep it near the top, but that doesn't work: wordpress changes the URL to include the month so old links break. Rats. [[link]] - used sometimes when I'm directing you to a wikipedia page in emulation of mediawiki markup. A2 - SRES scenario A2. A "high emission" scenario. AR4 - IPCC Fouth Assessment Report (not falled the FAR because that was IPCC '90, the First Assessment Report, though of course it wasn't called that).…

Climate and Cancer

Ha ha, there you go, yet another provocative headline that won't really deliver. From the comments elsewhere (thanks F): At the rate newspapers keep pushing the boundaries of what nonsense they will publish, then Einstein's theories will be up for grabs in a few years. And there is worse than the reporting done on climate science: try nutrition, or cancer. which set me to wondering, hence this post. I would agree that the reporting on nutrition or health etc is utterly appalling; Ben Goldacre has made a good career noticing this. My immeadiate reaction to that is: but everyone *knows* it is…

What happened to global warming?

I have Hank to "thank" for pointing me towards http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.stm, which was presumably written to prove that the BBC is no longer sane or indeed terribly interested in reality. Rather than that, you're better off with something like RC: A warming pause?. Why they write "And our climate models did not forecast it" when what they really mean is "climate models did forecast this but we paid no attention and / or were too stupid to understand, and still are" is... well, entirely obvious when I think about it :-) But the true test of an article about global warming…

The atmospheric CO2 levels at Hawaii's Mauna Loa observatory have declined since 2004?

Well no, of course they haven't. It is yet more septic twaddle from Avery; David Appell has a screenshot, since he expects the original is so blatantly stupid that it will be taken down. And he was right, it is now gone, though not silently: *Apologia: I deeply regret my misstatement that CO2 levels are Mauna Loa were declining. They are not. Nor is there clear evidence that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is yet slowing. In the past, I have demanded a higher standard of evidence than I had for the first edition of this column, and will return to that policy. says The American Daily, and the…

Its a bit thin, isn't it?

Nurture offers us ...how far our understanding of climate change has come in the past twelve months. But its a bit thin, especially for just a pick of the top five; there are of course others we could have mentioned. 5. is "skeptics are still out there" - which has nothing to do with the science. 4 is "The hockey stick holds up" - true, but hardly a major advance in understanding. 2 (I'll get back to 3) is "Arctic summer sea ice is in rapid decline" which I consider dubious (and I've offered to put money on, if anyone thinks rapid decline in 2009 is a sure thing, come on if you think you're…

New Fossil Hominid Found

The Washington Post reports the latest fossil hominid discovered in Africa: Fossil hunters have unearthed the fossil skeleton of a baby who died 3.3 million years ago, marking the first time scientists have discovered the nearly complete remains of a child of an ancient human ancestor. The child, a girl who was about 3-years-old when she perished in what may have been a flash flood, provides an unprecedented window into human evolution, in part because she belongs to the same species as “Lucy,” one of the most famous hominid specimens in paleontology, experts said. Here's another…

Another Transitional Form

MSNBC is reporting the discovery of yet another transitional form, this time linking ancient and modern birds: Dozens of fossils of an ancient loonlike creature that some say is the missing link in bird evolution have been discovered in northwest China. The remains of 40 of the nearly modern amphibious birds, so well-preserved that some even have their feathers, were found in Gansu province, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found. “Gansus is a missing link in bird evolution,” said…

Conservative Christians Criticize Republicans

As a coda to the previous post, consider this article, from yesterday's The New York Times. It's headline is the title of this entry. Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion. “There is a growing feeling among conservatives that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall,” said…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Roman Engineering, Water, and Baseball

It's been a month since the last links dump of posts from Forbes, though, really, I took a couple of weeks off there, so it's been less than that in terms of active blogging time. But I've put up a bunch of stuff in July, so here are some links: -- The Physics Of Ancient Roman Architecture: First of a couple posts inspired by our trip to Rome, this one looking at the basic mechanics of the key structural element of Roman building, the arch. -- What Ancient Roman Buildings Teach Us About Science And Engineering: Second post about Roman construction, in which looking into the question of how…

On the Aesthetics of Photo Cropping

The images from my new camera are huge-- 6000x4000 pixels-- so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it's never worked right on the rare occasions that I've tried). Since I'm opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little cropping and color-correcting. When I'm taking photos of the kids, it's often hard to get them framed really well for the initial shot (they insist on moving and doing cute stuff...), so the cropping is sometimes very significant. One of the rules for composing photos that even a doofus like me knows…

Most Played Songs Meme

This went around a different corner of my social-media universe while I was off in Waterloo, away from my iTunes. I was curious about it, though, so looked at the contents of the "25 Most Played" playlist, and having done that, I might as well post them here (the number in parentheses is the number of times it's been played according to iTunes): Beautiful Wreck," Shawn Mullins, (280) "In The Mood," Glenn Miller And His Orchestra, (279) "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," Darlene Love, (278) "Almost Saturday Night," John Fogerty, (277) "Shake It Up," The Cars, (275) "Sunblock," Emmet…

Weekend Diversion: Spider Webs... on drugs?

"If I see a spider in my house, I put it in a cup, and then I take it outside. I save it. What is wrong with me?" -Jacqueline Emerson There's something not only incredibly useful but also beautiful about the intricate structure of a spider web. It's such a universally admired phenomenon that it's become a metaphor for many other things, as Welbilt sings you in their song, Spiderweb. Dependent on the type of spider and various environmental factors, the web can take on any number of beautiful shapes. Image credit: Darlyne Murawski, via National Geographic Society, 2007. Image credit:…

How Warm Was May?

Human released greenhouse gas pollution continues to warm the surface of the planet. May was thought to be likely a very very warm month but it turns out to be merely very warm (only one "very") according to data released this morning. Shockingly, May turned out to be, in the NASA GISS data set, less warm than expected. (I mainly get my cues for what to expect from my friend and colleague John Abraham, who has written up the May NASA GISS results HERE.) At the same time the May data came out (earlier today) the data for April was adjusted by NASA (these adjustments happen all the time,…

Bakken Oil Train Hits Semi At Unsafe Crossing

There is a poorly secured railroad crossing in Saint Paul Park (south of Saint Paul, Minnesota) where a small industrial road crosses a BNSF track. The crossing has warning lights but no barriers. Yesterday (June 7, 2015) a semi crossing the tracks was hit by a Bakken oil train coming down the BNSF line. The Bakken oil trains on this BNSF line has been an increasing matter of concern. As Bakken oil trains derail and in some cases catch fire en route from the Dakotas to the east coast, folks who see these trains run by their homes, through their small towns, and across their travel routes…

Star Wars Fan Film: The Recompense

I've written about The Recompense here, and that writeup includes interviews with the creative team putting the film together. This is just a quick note to remind you that The Recompense has a kick starter project with one week left. So, now, you have to go there and kick in a few bucks! The graphic above is the budget breakdown for the film, indicating what has already been invested and what the Kickstarter campaign will fund. Here is a note from the film's team: With just over one week left in our campaign, we wanted to show you how your contributions, if our project is successfully…

On the Eve of GOP Debate, Only Two Candidates Matter

There will be a third GOP debate on Wednesday night. If you don't have the right cable or satellite subscription, apparently, you are not welcome to attend. (Correct me if I'm wrong, in the comments section below.) But who cares, really? It will be a low information event. The debate will be split into two parts, lower and higher ranking candidates separately, but the debate involving the higher ranking candidates will include more of them, and only two have anything close to poll numbers that matter. Not that polls are everything, but if you are a candidate that has failed to break 10%…

Weekend Diversion: The Beauty of Humans in Space

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." -Gus Grissom, who perished in the Apollo 1 fire. Every once in a while, I try to look past the amazing accomplishments humanity has made in space. And here's a great little piece by Leo Kottke for you to listen to, Memories Are Made Of This.Forget about walking on the Moon, sending spacecrafts to all the planets and even out of the Solar System, and instead to just focus on how beautiful some small…

Programming in Small Basic

Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math is yet another addition to the growing list of programming books for people interesting in learning programming. Basic is an under-appreciated language. I wish I had a good basic compiler handy, and I'd love to see a basic scripting version that worked like bash. Can you see the value of that? Anyway, Small Basic is an updated modernish basic that runs only on Windows, so while I can't use it, you might, and this book looks like a good intro. From the publisher: Small Basic is a free,…

Nuclear Industry Suffers Meltdown?

It is hard to get very far into a discussion of non-fossil fuel energy, and the energy transition, without someone coming along and yammering about nuclear energy. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for inexpensive and safe nuclear power and for building nuclear power plants that promise to eat up all the waste, do not create any more waste, are totally safe, are affordable, are efficient, don't require the equivalent of slave labor to mine the uranium, and are cost effective. Bring it on! But the nuclear industry is generally troubled by the fact that this list of promises is not possible…

Ellison vs. Perez

Which one are you for? I'll take either. At first I didn't want Ellison to leave MN05, but if he does, and he should if he is DNC chair, we have some excellent replacements lined up, and since MN05 is the most left leaning congressional district in the country, we don't have to worry about it going blue. BernieDems hate Perez because he supported Clinton, and their vitriol is greater than the hatred of Ellison, who supported Sanders in the primary and then Clinton in the general. But, if we react to BernieDem whinging and temper tantrums, we might as well get out of the game now. These…

Brexit, Climate Change, No Drama Obama

Two related, but contrasting, items on Brexit. The climate change connection to Brexit is unclear and mostly negative. It is simply true that we benefit from international unity when addressing a global problem, and the EU is a powerful forward looking entity that could address climate change more effectively than the collection of individual nations in the EU otherwise might. With the UK out of the EU, AGW may be somewhat harder to address. Or, maybe not so much. The EU is still only one entity among several dozen, so having this small shift may not be that big of a deal. But the Brexit-…

Hurricane Agatha? Nope.

Monday, June 6, 9:00 PM CT Nope. For the second time in a row, what might have been a named Eastern Pacific tropical storm will probably never amount to more than a depression and a big wet spot in Mexico. Monday, June 6, 2:00 PM CT The first named tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific would be called "Agatha." Rather suddenly, a disturbance in the region near Mexico has gotten itself organized, and the National Weather Service is saying that there is a 100% chance of this blob of weather turning into a named storm by the end of the day Wednesday. We were all a bit shell shocked by…

Hubble rules you, Pluto!

What we know about Pluto today could fit on the back of a postage stamp. -Colleen Hartman Part of the joy of astronomy is, every once in a while, you just get an astoundingly beautiful new picture or video of a foreign planet, star, galaxy or cluster. Pluto, the most distant planet, is among the most elusive. This picture above was snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope about a decade ago, and shows us Pluto (center) with its large moon Charon and its two smaller moons, Nix and Hydra. It's pretty difficult to get better resolution pictures of that planet because Pluto is both so far away and…

Weekend Diversion: Doing Something Thankful

Saying thanks is one of the best things we can do to appreciate the good things in our lives. This goes for our partners, friends, families, coworkers, acquaintances, and for some of us, our dear readers. (Thank you all!) There are many musicians who've said thanks over the years, too, and so here's Led Zeppelin's version of Thank You from the BBC sessions. This past Thursday was Thanksgiving in the United States, and I had a great time with some wonderful people and some outstanding food! As is "tradition," I suppose, I've been eating leftover Thanksgiving food every day since, and that…

The Physics of Touching your Toes!

Can you touch your toes? Seems like an easy thing to do for those of us who have the flexibility. Now, here's the challenge. Stand with your back and your heels pressed up against a wall, and now try to touch your toes. You can't do it! Not without putting your hands down on the floor, you can't. There's a super-simple reason for this: center-of-mass. For human beings, your center-of-mass is somewhere in your abdomen. It's lower down for women than men, but in the abdomen region for everyone. When you typically bend down to touch your toes, you'll notice that the upper part of your body…

Getting a paper past pee review

OK, maybe that's a bit extreme, but some kids take longer than others ... But seriously, this is a heartwarming and touching story of science reaching into childhood and yanking some poor unsuspecting kid into the world of ... academia... From Once Teased For Her Love Of Bugs, 8-Year-Old Co-Authors Scientific Paper. REVIEWER THREE Sophia was a bug loving 8 year old (reminds me of my neighbor) who's mother put her in touch with the Entomological Society of Canada, and this eventually led to Sophia's collaboration on a paper that was recently published. The paper, published in the Annals of…

Hummelgate? The right has sunk lower than I imagined

You've probably all read Glenn Greenwald's withering dissection of a mock scandal ginned up by right-wing bloggers. If you haven't, you should—the short story is that the fact of a war falling into ignominious failure is driving the apologists to desperate acts of rationalization, and the latest effort to save face involved a fairly inconsequential memo from Iraq that mentioned some temporary difficulties. That memo had to be discredited—I don't quite see why, even if we were winning I'd expect occasional setbacks—and they turned to their usual tactic of peering at the profane text intently…

Weekend Diversion: A Charity Challenge!

I was driving to work one day this past week, thinking about how to make some positive change in this world, while this song -- Lochs of Dread -- by Béla Fleck was playing: And a great idea hit me. You see, all over my town, small, local, community-based non-profit organizations (such as museums, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc.) are facing huge shortages, both financially and in terms of workers. I give a little bit of money to charity, and I volunteer a couple of times a month at my local science museum on the weekends, but that's really all I can do. Until now. You see, I believe that if…

The Left-Hand Rule?

Everyone who's taken physics at some point knows about the Right Hand Rule. There are two versions. If you have a wire carrying an electric current, you point your thumb in the direction of the current and your fingers "curl" in the direction of the magnetic field. The other version is that if you have two out of the following three -- current, magnetic field, and a force -- the right hand rule can help you find the direction of the third one that gets induced from the other two: Well, there's one really annoying thing about this rule: it requires the current to be moving positive charges!…

Sometimes we need to look Down!

What makes earthquakes? Although there are many causes, including volcanoes, the most common thing that causes them are tectonic motions, which also cause tsunamis. But as valuable as it is to understand other planets in our solar system and in other star systems, sometimes it's important to understand what's going on inside our own planet. The crust of the Earth actually is made up of a number of plates, which rub against one another and move over time. Who's to blame? I fault the liquid hot magma. So what happens is that these plates slip against each other in one of three ways, as shown…

Somethin’ Neat about our Galaxy

So last week I was up at Pacific University in Portland, OR for a job interview. As part of a faculty interview, you have to lecture on a topic for undergraduates, but they give you the topic just a couple of days before. My topic was Gauss' Law, which talks about the relationship between an Electric Field and an Electric Charge. Well, the same law holds for Newton's theory of Gravitation with a gravitational field instead of an electric field and a gravitational charge (i.e., mass) instead of an electric charge. So I'm at work today thinking about this, doing the thing I do messing around…

Robert O'Brien Trophy Winner: Ben Shapiro

While I was unable to post this weekend, I did see this column by Ben Shapiro (though I saw it at the Worldnutdaily) and planned to comment on it. Shapiro, for those who don't know, is a budding right wing pundit who wants to ban pornography and pretty much anything else he finds offensive. And in this column, he's urging that we revive the sedition laws and punish those who speak ill of the government in wartime. His reasoning is truly ridiculous. It takes this form: In World War I we had the Espionage Act and punished those who spoke out against the war (including folks like Eugene Debs);…

And...Agreeing with Myers

In addition to my disagreement with PZ on some things, I absolutely agree with his post about the administration's many attempts to subordinate good science for political considerations. Many other people have written about this around the blogosphere, based on this article in the New York Times that contains a rather stunning segment about a NASA memo: In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of…

US Government Caves on Mohammed Drawings

A commenter pointed me to this article about how our state department has reacted to the controversy surrounding the Mohammed caricatures in a Danish newspaper: The United States condemned the cartoons on Friday, siding with Muslims who are outraged that newspapers put press freedom over respect for religion. "We ... respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable," said State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper. An incredibly irresponsible quote that sends precisely the wrong…

Word Up, K-Fed

If you haven't heard the little snippet of Keven Federline's attempt to rap that has leaked out on to the internet, you have to find it. It's brutally bad. Don Knotts would have more street cred as a rapper. Federline, better known as Mr. Britney Spears, is shaping up to be a major embarrassment and yet another has-been who never was. No one has yet detected any discernable talent in him other than his ability to woo a celebrity, making him the cultural bastard child of Tom Arnold and Yoko Ono. You just know this one is going to end in a nasty divorce, a multi-state coke binge and an episode…

Stephen Baldwin Loses His Mind

Stephen Baldwin, who owns the apparent distinction of being the dumbest of the Baldwin brothers (and imagine the competition for that designation), has now become a born again Christian and is showing his faith by harrassing the crap out of people going in and out of an adult book store. Never mind that what they're doing is perfectly legal and has nothing whatsoever to do with him, he's standing out front on the sidewalk taking pictures of workers who are remodeling a building to make room for an adult establishment: Baldwin, the youngest of the acting clan that includes older brothers Alec…

Interesting Weekend Planned

I'm hitting the road shortly for a most interesting weekend. Last year I told the story of my oldest and dearest friend, Rick, finding out that he had a sister. He was raised essentially without a family. His mother died when he was a toddler, then he was raised by his grandparents until both died while he was still young. He lived with my family for a time during high school. Last year he got a call from a private investigator who had been hired by a woman to find her mother, and he found out that she was dead, but that Rick had the same mother. He wondered if Rick would want to be contacted…

Buttars is Back in Utah

My thanks to flatlander for keeping me up to date on happenings in Utah. Our favorite state legislator west of the Mississippi, Chris Buttars, is back and this time he has secret legislation to pursue in his crusade against evolution: A Utah senator says he has opened a confidential bill file challenging the State Board of Education's position on teaching evolution in public schools -- a measure he'll unveil at the conservative Utah Eagle Forum's annual convention just days before the 2006 Legislature begins. "I have it 'confidential' " -- or shielded from public view -- "and it's '…

World Series of Poker Final Table

Paul Phillips has a post about the WSOP final table, which aired Tuesday evening on ESPN, reminding me that I hadn't posted anything about it. The most obvious thing about it, and the thing I found most enjoyable about watching it, was the comraderie among the players and the welcome class with which they treated one another. It probably helped that Matusow was knocked out first, he would no doubt have had some nasty things to say at some point down the line, but I had to feel bad for the guy. How brutal is it to sit down at that table and take KK against AA almost immediately? I love…

Does ID = Creationism?

One of the main arguments that Lawrence VanDyke makes, both in his Harvard Law Review book note and in the ongoing exchange over Brian Leiter's criticism of that note, is that ID is not creationist. His evidence for this is that the two largest Young Earth Creationist (YEC) organizations have said they don't consider ID to be creationism because they won't take a position on the age of the earth or a literal biblical interpretation. But then those organizations don't think Old Earth Creationists like Hugh Ross, who completely rejects evolution, to be creationist either. This strikes me as a…

Surprising Supreme Court Decision on Religion

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that caught me very much by surprise. The case is Locke v Davey, and it involved a Washington state program that gives scholarships to students based on academic excellence. Joshua Davey was awarded a Promise Scholarship, but when the state found out he was planning to attend divinity school they cancelled it, under a state law that prevents public money from being spent on religious education. 36 other states have similar laws. In a 7-2 ruling today, the SCOTUS upheld that Washington law and ruled that it did not violate Davey's rights. The most…

A Must-Read on Intelligent Design

The Talk.Reason Archive has an absolutely hilarious article lampooning the Intelligent Design movement. A few of my favorites: Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year. We're not creationists, except for those of us who are, but the rest of us won't confirm that we're not. But if you call us creationists, we'll complain to no end. ID is a widely accepted theory in the scientific community. Just last year, over 100 scientists signed a statement which does not support ID, but does say that they are "…

Even while the world suffers, investing in science is non-negotiable

“I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.” –Albert Schweitzer Every so often, the argument comes up that science is expendable. That we’re simply investing too much of our resources — too much public money — into an endeavor with no short-term benefits. Meanwhile, there’s suffering of all kinds, from poverty to disease to war to natural disasters, plaguing humanity all across the country and our world. Yet even while there is suffering in the world, investing in our long-term future is indispensable. This story is nothing new. To invest in any one thing means to not…