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Science is not your merkin

The Vatican has announced that they are having an evolution congress, and that no creationists or intelligent design creationists will be invited. Isn't that sweet? They're still inviting a swarm of theologians, though, so their exclusion is all window-dressing, a transparent attempt to sidle medieval peddlers of superstitious nonsense up next to some serious science for a photo op and a little propaganda. And they aren't even trying to hide what they're doing. Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc, a philosophy professor at the Gregorian, told Catholic News Service Sept. 16 that organizers "wanted to…

I get eMail

I got this email during the wee hours and thought I'd share it with you (with my editorial rewrites); Dear Red States: We're leaving. We will form our own country and we're taking all the other Blue States with us. If you aren't aware, the Blue States include California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. Even Florida and Ohio are seriously considering joining us -- we've given them until November 4th to decide. We believe this split will be beneficial to both newly-formed nations, and we know we'd be happier and we sincerely think…

Ultimate Pandas

tags: Gerry Ellis, WoLong Nature Preserve, Ultimate Pandas, Giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, nature filming, endangered species, DVD review Everyone loves pandas, right? In fact, these lovable bears are the most recognizable icons worldwide for endangered species, even while remaining endangered themselves. But recently, China has made an effort to protect the giant pandas' native habitat and to establish several in situ captive breeding programs to bolster the dwindling numbers of wild giant pandas, as revealed in a charming new video, Ultimate Pandas, by nature photographer, Gerry Ellis…

Harry Potter Film Actor Murdered in London

tags: Harry Potter film, Marcus Belby, Rob Knox, actor People lay flowers at the scene in Sidcup, Kent, where 18-year-old Rob Knox was stabbed to death in a fight early today. The teenager died around 1am in an attack outside the Metro Bar, four other men were also hurt in the fight. Image: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire. This story should be placed into the "what the hell is wrong with people" category, but alas, it doesn't exist. Tragically, it turns out that one of the teenaged actors who is a character in the sixth Harry Potter film was stabbed to death this morning in front of a bar in Sidcup…

Advancing paid sick leave laws - from Portland to the US Congress

Last week, Portland, Oregon, became the fifth US jurisdiction to require employers to let workers earn paid sick leave. (The state of Connecticut and the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC also have paid sick leave laws; Milwaukee voters also approved one, but then the state passed a law barring cities from adopting such policies.) Under the Portland ordinance, businesses with at least six employees will have to allow workers to earn one hour of paid sick time for each hour worked, up to 40 hours a year. Smaller employers can provide unpaid sick time. The law will go into…

Making a neighborhood inhospitable for rattus norvegicus...RATS!

Mayor Rudolph Guiliani called them "horrible" and "frightening" (NYTimes July 11, 2000.)  The current Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said they are "repulsive" and announced in 2003 that his administration had "zero tolerance" for them (NYTimes, Aug 15, 2003.)   I'm sure their predecessors used equally harsh language to describe New York City's unwelcome inhabitants: rattus norvegicus, a.k.a., the Norway rat.  I'm also confident that there have been dozens and dozens of campaigns over the decades to rid their fine city of the rodents. Credit: Animalfotos.com The trouble is, rattus norvegicus is…

States and localities take on poor working conditions, safety hazards

"Going to work sick or losing pay" is not a choice that Seattle workers should be forced to make.  That's how Seattle City Council member Nick Licata why he sponsored the City's paid sick leave legislation.  The new law took effect September 1.  It is just one of the new State and local laws profiled in our new report The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2011 - Summer 2012. Earlier this week, Liz wrote about the report's first section on new research on worker health and safety, and I wrote about the accomplishments and setbacks on the federal scene.  The report's final…

Supreme Court decision is great for public health – but fate of 16 million poorest uninsured is still unclear

As Kim has already reported, public health advocates are delighted that the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act. The law takes important steps toward improving the way we pay for care and invest in prevention, but its most important achievement is in reforming the bizarre US health-insurance system, whose reliance on voluntary employer-sponsored coverage has resulted in millions of people lacking health insurance. By deciding that the law’s Medicaid expansion is optional for states, though, the Court is leaving the fate of 16 million low-income people up in the air. The ACA…

Sick in America: Concerns about costs and quality of healthcare

Earlier this month, NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health released the results (PDF) of a poll they conducted to learn about the experiences of the 27% of US adults who reported having serious healthcare needs (specifically, those who’d been hospitalized overnight in the past year or who reported having an illness, medical condition, injury, or disability that requires lots of medical care). It’s no surprise that many of the poll respondents reported serious problems with healthcare costs, which sometimes resulted in them not getting needed care. But…

Dangerous workplaces are BAD for business, grain elevator closed following worker deaths

The next time you hear someone claim that worker safety regulations and OSHA hurt job growth and hinder small businesses, remind them about Haasbach, LLC. On July 28, 2010, two workers (Wyatt Whitebread, 14, and Alex Pacas, 19) were killed at a grain handling facility owned by Haasbach, when the young workers were engulfed in corn. The boys, along with several others, were hired to do dangerous work----breaking up corn in a million bushel grain bin----and had not been given the training or equipment to do it safely. Haasbach's owners failed to ensure that basic safety procedures were…

Teenage workers lose legs at work, their employer didn't have workers' comp insurance

[Update (10/11/2011) below] Phyllis Zorn of the Enid (OK) News and Eagle reports that the employer of the two teenage workers who lost legs last month in a grain auger failed to maintain workers' compensation insurance. She writes: "Oklahoma Department of Labor has fined the company $750 for failing to comply with workers' compensation law, the maximum fine allowed in the scenario under current law. 'Zaloudek Grain Co. had not carried workers' compensation insurance for the five months prior to the accident,' Labor Commissioner Mark Costello said. 'Zaloudek had obtained workers'…

Refugees flee famine in Somalia; aid groups struggle to meet huge needs

Months of a severe drought in East Africa have led to famine in two regions in Southern Somalia. According to the UN's definition, famines can only be declared under the following conditions: At least 20 per cent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 per cent; and the death rate exceeds two persons per day per 10,000 persons. These horrific conditions exist in Somalia's Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions. Much of the rest of the country, as well as neighboring parts of Ethiopia and Kenya, are experiencing food…

Nation’s largest wireless infrastructure provider linked to two worker deaths in eight days

Cell tower worker Kris Runyon, 39, fell to his death on Tuesday, May 2 in Meridian, MS. Local news station WAPT reports the incident occurred at about 7 pm when Runyon was 228 feet off the ground on a cell tower. A co-worker witnessed the incident and the county coroner reported that Runyon was wearing safety equipment designed to prevent a fatal fall. The industry news source WirelessEstimator.com reports that Mr. Runyon was employed by D&K Nationwide Communications. D&K is a subcontractor to MasTec, a business that provides engineering, construction, and maintenance services to…

Remembering Steve Wing (1952-2016): an inspiration to students, community activists, and public health colleagues

The environmental justice, public health, and other communities are mourning the death of Steve Wing. Dr. Wing was an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. I did not have the privilege of personally knowing Dr. Wing, but I often used his papers in the classroom. His articles on collaborative research projects with communities which were adversely affected by industrial swine operations were exceptional for their intersection of science and social justice (e.g., here, here, here.) Among those remembering Steve Wing is…

Report: New York City’s paid sick leave law had virtually no negative impact

Despite all the concern about shuttered businesses, fired employees and lost profits, a new report has found that New York City’s paid sick leave law was pretty much a “non-event” for most employers. Released this month, “No Big Deal: The Impact of New York City’s Paid Sick Law on Employers” reported that in the years following the 2014 implementation of the paid sick leave law, the great majority of businesses surveyed said the law had no effect on overall costs. The report, authored by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Murphy Institute at the City University…

Obama’s last budget proposal tackles antibiotic resistance, opioid abuse, climate change

President Obama released his 2017 federal budget proposal yesterday, recommending funding boosts for a number of public health priorities. And even though his presidency is coming to an end and so this budget is probably dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress, it’s worth a peek inside. Here are some of the highlights that seem particularly relevant to public health, health care and working families: Health care access: The Obama budget would expand federal financing to cover the costs of state Medicaid eligibility expansions. That means the federal government would fully cover…

OSHA gives DuPont a 50% discount on penalty for death of 4 workers

Last week OSHA announced citations and proposed a $99,000 penalty against DuPont for safety violations related to the November 2014 incident that killed four employees at its LaPorte, TX chemical plant. Wade Baker, 60, Gibby Tisnado, 48, Robert Tisnado, 39, and Crystal Wise, 53 were asphyxiated by methyl mercaptan because of gross failures in DuPont’s systems to manage highly hazardous chemicals. OSHA’s proposed penalty stems from one repeat, nine serious, and one other-than-serious violation. What baffles me is why OSHA didn’t propose the $70,000 maximum for the repeat violation. OSHA gave…

Thoughts of Violence Past in a Peaceful City

Ferdinand Balfoort contributes a guest entry upon a recent ancestral pilgrimage to Stockholm. I gladly agreed to write something for the blog after being introduced by Martin to a book by Frans G. Bengtsson about Early Modern Scottish brigades (and brigadiers) in the Nordic region including Sweden. I visited Stockholm in December on my quest to find my 16th century ancestor Gilbert Balfour who lost his head during a public decapitation procedure with a sharp implement, somewhere in the Old Town. So far I am no closer to retrieving his head or his grave site, but some illumination has been…

Archaeological Fist Fights in Lund

This year's issue of the Lund Archaeological Review reached me last week. It's the volume for 2005-2006, and most of the papers are dated 2005. Such a delay is no big deal in archaeology: our knowledge growth doesn't progress at the rate typical of the natural sciences. What caught my attention in the new issue was three polemic pieces at the back of the volume. First there's another salvo in the war between my buddy Påvel Nicklasson and his erstwhile colleagues at the Jönköping County Museum. To the extent that I understand the conflict, what seems to have happened is that Dr. Nicklasson, a…

WV Jesus Picture Case Not Over Yet

I thought it might be over the other day when the school board offered to settle and agree not to replace the Jesus picture, but no such luck. The Charleston newspaper reports: An inscribed mirror has replaced the controversial Jesus portrait on the wall at Bridgeport High School, and civil liberties organizations say it is not acceptable. Friday afternoon, students associated with the Christian Freedom Alliance donated the mirror to new principal Mark DeFazio. A brass plate at the bottom reads, "To know the will of God is the highest of all wisdoms. The love of Jesus Christ lives in each of…

Predictable STACLU Response to NSA Ruling

Before I ever read the STACLU response to yesterday's ruling by Judge Taylor, I could easily predict two things: 1. They would declare her an evil, activist, terrorist-loving liberal demon. 2. They would either misunderstand or misrepresent the ruling. Just call me Nostradamus. Here's John Bambenek's absurd response, complete with all of those things. Here's the misrepresentation or misunderstanding (I don't know which is the case. He either has no ability to comprehend the ruling, or he's willfully distorting what it said): The ACLU has convinced a federal judge that monitoring overseas…

Jesus Portrait Case to Go to Court

The school board in Harrison County, West Virginia has decided to fight a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Americans United over a large portrait of Jesus that hangs in the hallway of the high school there. They had vowed not to use public money to fight the suit, but a fund raising campaign raised over $150,000 for a defense fund, prompting the board to vote to fight rather than settle the case (thus showing that the notion that schools have to capitulate to the ACLU's "intimidation" is false; given the popular public opinion against the ACLU in most such cases, it should not be hard to do…

New Argument Against GSAs

I just encountered a new argument against allowing gay/straight alliance clubs in schools, or at least it's one I've never seen before. It comes from a guy running for attorney general in Georgia, who is upset that a Federal judge in Georgia ruled that a school there had to allow such a club (as have judges all over the nation). Agape Press reports: McGuire, a former corporate attorney and one-time state senator, feels the court's ruling in this case has turned the Equal Access Act on its head. "I think the problem here, and I think where the court substantially erred, is that the intent of…

Is Astrology Political?

Until a short while ago, I had no idea that someone could possibly think that I'm part of some "leftist" conspiracy not to attack astrology. To say this post from Commissar at the Politburo Diktat came out of the blue is an understatement: Does the Left have a segment of their base that believes a certain pseudo-science, a segment their leaders are reluctant to antagonize? Is astrology quietly acceptable within the "progressive" community? The Left takes great pleasure in bashing Republican Creationists and ID advocates (quite appropriately, and I join them in this, as my readers know)... I…

The Overwhelming Idiocy of Michael Francisco

This is hands down the winner of April's Robert O'Brien Award. Nothing I read over the next 4 weeks could possibly match the stupidity of this.The DI's newest blogboy, Michael Francisco, has posted one of the dumbest arguments ever uttered in a new post about the Cooper and Manzari article that Wes Elsberry blasted earlier. You have to see this. He actually wrote this as a serious argument: Manzari & Cooper explain in detail how the newly elected Dover Area School Board, which campaigned on removing the ID policy actually voted to keep the policy during their first meeting. Why? Because…

Handicapping the Hugos

There's a comment to the most recent Open Thread at Making Light asking why there isn't more handicapping of the Hugo Awards. The commenter, Kathryn from Sunnyvale, makes reference to a comment on John Scalzi's "Please Vote" thread, that suggested there was a clear favorite in the balloting: There is a certain book on the short list that had more preorders than the rest of the books had sales combined -- by a factor of 10, most like. This certain book's author has a fan community that meets up at each Worldcon and throws the biggest and best parties. This year, over 100 members are expected,…

Generations of Atheism

Writing the previous post about religion reminded me that I never did comment on the two student panels on religious matters that I went to a couple of weeks ago. The details aren't terribly important, but they provide some local anecdotal support for Sean's demographic point. (Alternate post title: "I Believe the Children Are Our Future") The two events were panel discussions featuring students talking about "Growing up X in America" where "X" is a religion of your choice. I missed the first two (X="Muslim" and X="Jewish"), because they fell during a hellishly busy part of the term for me,…

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

In a comment to the AP post, "hogeb" asks an excellent question about pedagogy: I'd like to enlist your advise and the advise of any readers who can provide it. I teach physical science to pre-service elementary school teachers. I try to elucidate the somewhat subtle differences between the application of a force and the just getting in the way of, among other things, and I try to point out why this isn't just semantics but truly important conceptual skills. I'm not sure they hear me, or how well they hear me, they rarely do well on these questions on my tests. If you can try to go back to…

A Simple Game

Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it's really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or "Street Ball" on ESPN2 in the wee hours of the morning, you can get confused, and start to think it's a complicated game. It's not. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. My best game is really as a post player, where I depend on other people to get me the ball, so I confront this a…

Where Have All the Experimentalists Gone?

Over at Gene Expression, Razib spins an interesting question off my call for blog posts: why are there so many biology bloggers? As I said in comments over there, I think there are two main reasons why you find more bio-bloggers than physics bloggers. The first is that there are simply more biologists than physicists-- we're expecting an unprecedented 13 senior physics majors next year, which is forcing some frantic re-organization to handle the load, but a class that small would be a major crisis for the Biology department. The second reason is that biology is really the main front of the "…

Libertopia Approaches?

The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that's slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make a black hole that will eat the whole New York metro area. This isn't my field (not by a long shot), but I think this is terrifically exciting work, not least because the observations that they've made confound existing theories-- the "plasma" acts more like a liquid…

Value Added Testing (or "Merry Christmas, Novak")

One of the more contentious recurring topics around here over the years has been education policy, mostly centering around the question of teacher evaluation and teacher's unions. It's probably the subject for which there's the biggest gap between my opinions and those of some of my regular readers. As this is a good time of year for peace and reconcilliation, let me point to this guest post at Calpundit Monthly, in which Paul Glastris talks about the problems of "gifted" kids under the "No Child Left Behind" system, and pushes a Washington Monthly article on Value-Added Testing. The idea…

On getting out more

No, not physically, alas. Though I did go to Oxford. This post is about people getting too stuck in their own comfort ghetto. Not me, obviously - plenty of people are attacking me :-). This is thrown up by comments at my Economics and Climatology? post, though I've been thinking this for a while. So, if you make the mistake of visiting the cess-pit that is WUWT, you'll find a cloistered worldlet full of septics. Visitors with an interest in the truth (as opposed to the Truth) are welcome, but only as long as they can be shouted down or allow themselves to be sidetracked into the odd issues…

Supreme irony: wind farms can cause atmospheric warming, finds a new study?

What is it about GW that brings out such levels of stupidity in so many people? Lets start with the easy bit. There's a paper Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature by Zhou et al.. It isn't very exciting, but it made into Nature Climate Change, probably because of the inevitable stupidity it would arouse. What it says is Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72â°C per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions. This isn't ironic or even particularly surprising: the effect is due to mixing down of warmer air on…

This year's sea ice

Time for another look at sea ice. Here is the familiar IARC-JAXA plot: And we see: well, it is looking low, and has been consistently all winter. Not record-breakingly, like it was last December, but even so. Interesting. This year, I'm not planning to run a book, unless anyone offers to make a worthwhile bet. I'll put up my "prediction", which is the same as ever: the mean prediction is for the trend amount, i.e. the same as last year minus a little bit (5.235, as I recall), and the "bet range" is that plus or minus interannual variation, which as I recall is around 0.5 units. If you happen…

Obama does not impress

On the recent oil spill issue (possible disclaimer: I'm wondering about buying I bought some BP shares). I'm thinking about headlines like Obama Says He Would Fire BP CEO, Wants to Know 'Whose Ass to Kick'. [Update: both TB and H point out that this quote is taken well out of context; see the comments or http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/kicking-ass-white-house. So I have to partially retract my outrage. But only partially, because the main point still stands (who to blame?) as does the quote below -W] The real story here isn't hard to see: Obama is desperate not to get blamed for…

Phony Outrage and Senator Schumer

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made the following statement on the floor of the Senate last Tuesday. He was speaking in support of federal funding for stem cell research: Substantively, there is no doubt this is the right thing to do. But I put it in a broader context. There is a group of people of deep faith. I respect that faith. I've been in enough inner city black churches, working class Catholic parishes, rural Methodist houses of worship and small Jewish synagogues to understand that faith is a gift. The trouble with this group, which I call the theocrats, is they want their faith to…

Actual Hugo Comments

So, as alluded to over the weekend, the Hugo nominations this year are a train wreck. The short fiction categories are absolutely dominated by works from the "slates" pushed by a particular collection of (mostly) right-wing authors and that prion disease in human disguise "Vox Day." The primary purpose of the "slates" is to poke a stick in the eye of people on the other end of the political spectrum within SF, which is why three of the five nominees in one category got to John C. Wright channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand. If you want a round-up of the entirely predictable reactions to this…

Ownership of the Means of Adjudication

Back on Thursday when I was waiting to be annoyed by a speech, one of the ways I passed time was reading stuff on my phone, which included This Grantland piece about Charles Barkley and "advanced stats". In it, Bryan Curtis makes the argument that while Barkley's recent comments disparaging statistical tools seem at first like just the same old innumeracy, it's really a question of ownership. But Barkley was firing a shot in a second war. Let’s call it Moneyball II. This clash doesn’t pit a blogger versus a newspaperman in a debate over the value of PER. It pits media versus athletes in a…

Read the Whole Thing

Jon "Men Who Stare at Goats" Ronson has a new book coming out, and has been promoting it with excerpts in major newspapers, most notably the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. In these, he tracks down people whose lives were wrecked by massive public shaming campaigns over idiotic things they wrote on social media, and talks to them about what happened, and what they've been doing since. Ronson's whole career is built around profiling unusual and often unpleasant people in a way that is ultimately sympathetic without endorsing their problematic aspects-- it belatedly occurs to me that…

Weekend Diversion: Unlikely Friendships

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men." -Alice Walker This weekend -- perhaps inspired by the growing friendship between our new dog and our old one -- I've got a surprising find along with a sweet White Stripes song for you, We're Going To Be Friends. Every once in a while, I'll run across something in the natural world that wholeheartedly surprises me. I remember watching a nature documentary about lions, where I saw a wounded, pregnant lioness leave her pack to give birth…

Weekend Diversion: The Best Holiday Present

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace." -Milan Kundera It's the holiday season, and for most of us, that means spending time with loved ones, having some type of feast-day, and in many cases, giving and sharing gifts with one another. To spread a little holiday cheer, I present to you my all-time favorite Christmas song, Run-DMC's classic, Christmas In Hollis. Those of you who've been following Starts With A Bang since the…

Weekend Diversion: Discovering the Universe

"The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it." -Richard Feynman What did you think about, wonder about, and dream about the first time you saw the true magnificence of the night sky? Did you wonder about planets orbiting each of the thousands of points of light you saw? Did you think about the possibilities of rocky worlds with liquid water, of life, and even of intelligent aliens? Or did you perhaps think on even larger scales, about what stars…

The Tide is Turning on Climate Change

If you are running for office, note that the majority of Americans think global warming is real, important, and can and should be addressed by government. This has been happening since two elections back, when we started to see candidates threatened, if only to a limited degree, based on an untenable position on climate change. Last election cycle this became even more important as organizations like ClimateHawksVote had remarkable successes in supporting climate hawk candidates -- candidates that place climate change at the top of the list of important issues. Since then even more has…

Science and Coding Books For Kids

I mention a couple of kids books in my overviews on Fossil and Evolution Books and Books about Climate Change. Here are a few excellent science and computer programming (aka coding) books for kids. Geology book for kids The Incredible Plate Tectonics Comic: The Adventures of Geo, Vol. 1 is a good stab at making a comic that teaches some science. We follow the adventures of Geo and his robotic dog, Rocky as the visit the ancient supercontinent of Pangea. This journey is pursuant to Geo's upcoming test in his geology class. What is the center of the Earth made out of? How do volcanoes work?…

The Smallest Mini-Galaxy in the Universe!

"Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy." -Wislawa Szymborska Our Milky Way Galaxy is home to not only our Earth and our Solar System, but hundreds of billions of other stars. Image credit: Aarne Bielefeldt. Held together by not only the incredible gravity of all of our stars, but by dark gas and dust far outweighing all the stars, and by trillions of suns worth of dark matter as well, our galaxy represents one of perhaps a hundred billion just like it in our vast Universe. Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, M.…

Trypanosomiasis Discovery: An Argument for Basic Research

One of the differences among the current four candidates for POTUS is the recognition, by only one of them, of the great importance of basic research. By that, I mean, give the scientists funding to pursue the questions that interest them. A sort of free market of ideas driven not by profits of the Bayers, Koch Borthers, and Cargils of the world, but rather, by how cool stuff is and how much untethered knowledge is advanced each time something else cool happens. Tsetse fly Trypanosomiasis is a terrible disease. I know only one person who had it, he was treated, survived, but his brain did…

What we need to do to stop global warming

Obviously, we need to stop the human enhanced extra greenhouse effect. There are a number of ways to approach this. Let me say right away that taking CO2, the main greenhouse gas of concern long term, out of the atmosphere is NOT one of the ways. Here's why: It takes energy to put Carbon into solid or liquid form. You get energy back when you move the Carbon into a gas form (as CO2). That is something of an oversimplification but long term, large scale, it is correct. Since, for the most part, the greenhouse effect is caused by the the generation of energy for use, which causes the movement…

Police unnecessarily kill a third black man this week, threaten to kill more

Police had cornered a murder suspect. There were negotiations and there was exchange of gunfire. Normally this stand off would have been maintained as long as possible. The way these things end, usually, is that the suspect gives up, the suspect kills themselves, there is what the police would call a "fair" exchange of gunfire* and the suspect is wounded or killed, etc. But the police had a new tool they could use to shorten the time span for such standoffs. They blew the suspect up with a bomb delivered specifically for that purpose. A robot drove over to the suspect, got the bomb near…

Who Won The California, New Jersey and Other Democratic Primaries?

And, how did my model do? There was a lot of talk about California, and a lot of back and forth, but in the end I stuck with my original model to predict the outcome of that race. See the table above for the results, but the bottom line is that I predicted that Clinton would get 57 percent of the votes and Sanders 43 percent. It turns out that Clinton got 57 percent and Sanders got 43 percent. Excuse me for a moment while I bask in the bright light of being-right-ness. Thank you. Now, on to the details. First, a quick, note on the numbers and methods. All my percents (for prediction and…