Politics
tsmith | March 13, 2009For those of you following our "academic freedom" bill saga here in Iowa, you'll be pleased to know that today was the last day for the bill to make it out of subcommittee, which it appears it hasn't. Hector Avalos has an overview of the history of the bill, our response, and the results at The Panda's Thumb.
catdynamics | March 13, 2009"Astronomers are just as dumb as economists"
are not!
poopyhead!
and, anyway, at least we know how to spell asteroid... nah, nah.
from Economists Aren't More Stupid than Other Scientists
- wait: "Other Scientists"...?
Tee hee.
h/t CR
Oh, if we're going to be all serious and shit:
asteroids really truly do exist
we know asteroids hit in the past (cf The Moon)
we have seen significant planetesimal impacts in the current epoch (cf SL-9 on Jupiter)
we know asteroids will hit in the future
- aside: I spent an enjoyable dinner with an economist considering his rational estimate…
tqa | March 13, 2009
Sam: Toby, do you really think it's a good idea to invite people to dinner and then tell them exactly what they're doing wrong with their lives?
Toby: Absolutely. Otherwise it's just a waste of food.
The West Wing
Season 1, Episode 7, The State Dinner
Jon Stewart understands better than anyone - except possibly Steven Colbert - the tremendous opportunity that a comedian has when it comes to speaking truth to power. He's been making the most of that opportunity over the past week or so, with the "weeklong feud of the century". If you've missed it, you've probably been in a coma, but it's…
clock | March 13, 2009From an e-mail from SPARC and The Alliance for Taxpayer Access yesterday:
FIRST U.S. PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY MADE PERMANENT
2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist
Washington, D.C. - March 12, 2009 - President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes' of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the…
clock | March 13, 2009
Science on the Campaign Trail:
In November 2007, a group of six citizens decided to do something to elevate science and technology in the national dialogue. They created Science Debate 2008, an initiative calling for a presidential debate on science policy. They put up a Web site, and began encouraging friends and colleagues to sign a petition calling for the debate. Within weeks 38,000 scientists, engineers, and other concerned citizens had signed on. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academies, and the Council on Competitiveness (CoC) joined as…
jlynch | March 12, 2009Jim Cramer (of CNBC "Mad Money") doesn't come off too well when he chats with Stewart. See here (video) and here. Short version: the financial news industry is guilty of sins of commission in all of this. As Stewart says, "it's not a fucking game".
catdynamics | March 12, 2009USS Chung-Hoon is headed for the South China Sea, where there have been recent minor confrontation between US and Chinese vessels
Chung-Hoon is a Burke class Aegis destroyer - good radar, but curious choice for sea defence, heavy on missiles and a bit slow and heavy to be playing bumping games.
Would have thought a frigate or two would be a better choice, nimbler better against surface harassment.
But, she's not the only ship at sea.
In fact were W still president, my eyebrows would be twitching, because the Eisenhower is overlapping with the Roosevelt in the Middle East, with the latter…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 200911:23 First commercial break in the big Jon Stewart -- Jim Cramer interview. So far it's Stewart in a rout. Cramer's making a fool of himself; I actually feel a bit bad for him. It's pure train wreck time. Hard to watch but impossible to turn away.
11:30 Colbert's coming on so I'll keep this short. Stewart signed off by saying he hoped it was as uncomfortable to watch as it was to do. Believe me, it was. But it needed to be done and God bless Stewart for doing it. I've been saying for some time that people like him, and Colbert and Maher are the only ones doing any serious…
laelaps | March 12, 2009Everyone is talking about Atlas Shrugged in reference to current economic woes, but to me the arguments of the Faux News crew are more reminiscent of those made by Herbert Spencer and other "social Darwinists" in the latter half of the 19th century. (Check out Banquet at Delmonico's for more);
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bioephemera | March 12, 2009The Pi Day bill went up for a vote today and passed 391-10. Now Congressman Jason Chaffetz explains (via Twitter, natch) why he dared vote against the hallowed number:
Fie, fie! No Yes PeCan Pi for you, Representative Chaffetz (R-Utah)! But kudos for a creative excuse.
razib | March 12, 2009I made a comment to the effect that political moderation tends to correlate with lower intelligence when looking over survey data on attitudes toward unpopular speech. This assertion didn't come out of a vacuum, when mining the GSS there were repeated indications that moderates were somewhat stupider than they should be. But here's the WORDSUM scores for whites separated into moderate vs. non-moderate classes (liberals & conservatives aggregated in the second).
But of course you want to control for education!
As you can see, even controlling for graduate degree or high school…
catdynamics | March 12, 2009we are currently at a solar minimum, and the next cycle is starting,
but the numbers are down and the
Sun is unusually quiet
Like so:
yup, still no spots
Ok, should we be worried?
Is this the start of a new Maunder Minimum?
Will the Thames freeze?
Will there be knee deep snow in New England before Thanksgiving?
Will annoying climate skeptics chuckle and gloat?
Well, no, not yet:
though if by this time next year there are still no spots, we might start to think...
One should note that solar radiance and activity is independent of atmospheric IR opacity - it is perfectly possible for cyclic…
pharyngula | March 12, 2009As part of his deplorable legacy, one of the last things George W. Bush rushed through in his last days of power was a set of changes in environmental policy that basically gutted protections for endangered organisms. Our new president has been given the power to undo those changes in a recent spending bill.
Obama may now, with the stroke of a pen, rescind the Bush Administration's last-minute rules that:
forcibly removed global warming from the list of extinction threats to the polar bear (despite scientific opinion that global warming is the bear's chief extinction threat)
allowed oil…
cmooney | March 12, 2009A really great Issues in Science and Technology article by Sheril and our ScienceDebate2008 colleague (and CEO) Shawn Otto is now available online here. It is a look back at the unprecedented ScienceDebate initiative and the not inconsiderable impact it had on the campaign--despite numerous hurdles, including an uninterested media and candidates who were not exactly jumping to debate science policy. An excerpt:
Although the candidates still refused to debate, instead attending yet another faith forum at Saddleback Church in California, Science Debate 2008 was able to obtain written answers…
catdynamics | March 11, 2009I originally thought this had to be a graduate student stunt
Watch Coin Dominoes and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
but then I realized i was being silly.
Graduate students don't have that much money.
Especially in the UK.
link
razib | March 11, 2009No surprise that a reader points out that healthier areas seem to map onto "Blue" areas of the United States. But there is actually more to this than meets the eye: Are Republicans Healthier Than Democrats?:
In the International Journal of Epidemiology, S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write that, after controlling for age, sex, race, marital status, religious service attendance, highest educational degree, and total family income, Republicans were 25% less likely than Democrats to report being in poor health. They find a key component of this to be smoking: after controlling for that…
razib | March 11, 2009The Center For American Progress has a new report out profiling the ideological disposition of the American populace. It simply repeats the old finding that the United States prefers Left-liberal policies a la carte to a far greater extent than the label liberal. This is natural, the electorate tends to favor lower taxes and greater spending simultaneously. I can't but notice the similarity with atheism here; many more Americans adhere to the atheist position than are willing to call themselves atheists. But in the younger cohorts this disjunction seems less noticeable, so I wonder if much…
oracknows | March 11, 2009I know I've been hard on a lot of legislators, including woo-friendly clods such as Tom Harkin, Ron Paul, and Dan Burton. Occasionally, though, a legislator will show that he "gets it" (or at least hasn't drunk the Kool Aid). Forwarded to me was a letter sent from Representative John Linder (R-GA) in response to a letter from the Autism Action Network, apparently upset over the IACC's not being as excited about throwing good money after bad studying the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. Here is Mr. Linder's response, and it's a good one (for a politician, anyway):…
tqa | March 11, 2009
To the best of my knowledge, there have been no significant developments in the continuing saga of "who is blocking the science nominees in the Senate". Progressive Alaska's Philip Munger noted in a comment here that Senator Mark Begich's (D-AK) office says Begich is not involved, and that he has received additional information pointing to David Vitter as the culprit. Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo's Elana Schor reports that she's received denials from both Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and John Barrasso (R-WY) - and that's in addition to the denial she received from Vitter yesterday.
In the absence…