Politics
stoat | November 20, 2007They're cr*p, aren't they? Tracy Says was the name of a band at the UK Met Office. They got their name from the quote :-). Reading the appalling stories that "Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing" I am irrestistibly reminded of them. The Register has a bit more; thanks to Inel for the tip.
I have two reactions to this story: the first is the familiar feeling: these people are cr*p. Anyone vaguely competent in the real world would encrypt the data with something unbreakable - gpg is, as far as I know. But we all know…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
For a Swede, I believe I have an unusually small environmental footprint as my income is low and my habits relatively ascetic. But compared to most people in the world, anyone with half my standard of living is of course a huge culprit. The only thing I might brag about is having relatively few children, as I've fathered only one in each of my two marriages. Still, so do most Chinese, regardless of income, thanks to the admirable foresight and regrettable heavy-handedness of their dictatorship.
An obvious thing I could do to improve my enviro-karma is to fly less. I generally make two or…
j7uy5 | November 20, 2007America missed her chance to elect a sane pro-environmental
candidate
in 2000. Or rather, the Supreme Court missed its chance.
Whatever. The critical point is that
environmentalism cannot be understood as an isolated issue.
Pro-environmental thinking must pervade everything we do from
now on.
That is not to say that it is the only issue. In
some cases, it will not be the most important issue. But it
should be considered in all aspects of governmental activity.
Economic growth is totally worthless, if not sustainable.
Sometimes, it is worse than worthless. I believe we
shall
see…
pharyngula | November 19, 2007My fellow Minnesotans know what I mean when I groan over our local conservative columnist at the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten. Her latest column is a tirade against the horrible culture of victimhood in our universities, citing a recent incident in which a student newspaper editor decided to decorate the office with a handmade noose to motivate his black co-workers. Kersten thinks this is just awful. Not the insensitivity of the editor, of course — being ignorant of history is par for the course for Republicans, as is race-baiting. No, she's appalled that he was fired.
The column is a hoot…
stoat | November 19, 2007Reading the torygraph business section I came across Deutsche Bank in ownership court row: "An American judge has prevented Deutsche Bank from repossessing 14 homes because the bank could not prove it owned the defaulting mortgages involved... Pooling involves taking hundreds if not thousands of mortgages, putting them in one unit, and then selling parts of that unit to others. As a result, it can often be unclear which bank actually owns the individual mortgages. Judge Boyko had ordered lawyers acting for Deutsche Bank National Trust Company to prove the lender was the ultimate owner of the…
terrasig | November 19, 2007As we approach 100,000 visitors since joining ScienceBlogs I am amazed to still be getting 500-700 visits per month at the old home of Terra Sigillata, all without any promotion or new posts. The most-visited of the old posts is the following which appeared originally on 21 February 2006.
Much of humankind's experience with pharmacologically-active natural products has been through the mind-altering effects of plants used in religious ceremonies.
Today [21 Feb 2006], the US Supreme Court upheld a decision to permit a New Mexico sect of a Brazilian religious order to continue using an…
grrlscientist | November 18, 2007Those of you who have been unemployed realize that businesses are always trying to figure out another way to punish you for committing the crime of being unemployed while not being wealthy, but hey, this has got to be the worst: one of our elected congresscritters is working on another way to further disenfranchise you. According to a news story that was published today, Senator Tom Coburn (a rethuglican from the proud goat-roping state of Oklahoma) is actively seeking to prevent people from protecting themselves from genetic discrimination. HUH??
Okay, let's just pretend that you have lost…
gregladen | November 18, 2007The latest target for demonizing by right-wing talk radio is an 18-year-old Yup'ik Eskimo woman who traveled to Washington, D.C., this month to tell what global warming is doing to her remote home village of St. Michael, Alaska.
Charlee Lockwood spoke of how moose have moved north, berry patches produce less fruit and the catch is declining at her family's fish camp. "Our culture will die because everyone will have to move someplace and there will be no one to teach them," she told a House panel.
Over about 600 radio stations last week, however, talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh declared that…
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
I have always enjoyed reading the work of Frans de Waal, a primatologist who focuses on the social structure and psychology of apes, particularly the two chimp species, and monkeys. His previous books, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist, and Peacemaking among Primates have all entranced me and inspired my reflections on such diverse topics as evolutionary psychology, the origins of political and social structures, and, of course, the evolution of religion.
His recent book, Our…
gregladen | November 17, 2007This is the kind of story that makes it difficult to remain culturally relativistic. it also makes it hard to look at women who are in purdah walking around in a "free" country like the US and not, in part blame them for compliance.
A woman was gang raped in Saudi Arabia. Fourteen times. Seven men are now in jail, convicted of rape and serving sentences up to five years. In Saudi Arabia, I think five years is a lot for violently raping a woman.
The woman who was raped, however, was sentenced to be tortured for being in the car of a "strange man."
In this case, the torture would…
revere | November 17, 2007I used to watch The Daily Show every night (thanks to TiVo). Now I don't because of the writers' strike. So I have to settle for this. Enjoy:
jlynch | November 17, 2007I’m finally back from spending a few days in DC - my second trip to the city in the past two weeks. I was there to receive the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year award for Arizona. The award - presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education - is the only national award that recognizes professors for their commitment to undergraduate education and mentoring. I was deeply, deeply, honored to be counted among the four national award winners and the forty state winners, especially as the nomination comes from your…
drorzel | November 17, 2007Kevin Drum is thinking about debate formats:
Now, there's nothing wrong with a few beachballs. Giving every candidate a couple of minutes to simply explain their healthcare plan -- or whatever -- without interruption is fine. But then what? Do we really want several months of "debates" in which candidates do nothing but rattle off bits and pieces of their stump speeches endlessly?
The problem here is that he's asking the wrong question. There are far too many words in that last sentence, which really ought to be shortened to:
Do we really want several months of "debates?"
The answer is "no…
gregladen | November 16, 2007Most New York University students would give up their right to vote for a full year's tuition. One in five will give up their right to vote for an iPod touch.
But only on a year by year basis. To get someone to give up their right to vote forever, you need to pay one million dollars. Two thirds of the NYU students said they would jump at this deal.
This study, involving 3,000 respondents and done for a journalism class, did not seem to specify the following condition: You give up your vote and give it to me (or someone else). History tells us that people will routinely do that. This…
tlambert | November 16, 2007Via James Hrynyshyn, Nature has a good summary of the state of climate politics in the lead up to Bali. There's even a decent summary of the state of play in Austrlia.
Any campaign veteran will tell you that voters are fickle, switching from candidate to candidate and issue to issue as the whim takes them. But in Australia, voters may have changed their minds once and for all on the issue of climate change. In mid-2006, something seemed to shift climate from an 'issue of concern' to the top of the list of people's most serious considerations. ...
Blame any number of factors for the switch:…
drorzel | November 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an article on yet another study of why there aren't more conservatives in academia:
Colleges have been increasingly competing to offer "family friendly" policies -- in the hopes of attracting the best academic talent from a pool of Ph.D.'s that includes both more women than ever before as well as many men who take parenting responsibilities seriously. A new study suggests that such policies may be important for another group that believes its needs aren't fully addressed in academe: conservatives.
The study -- "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates" --…
tsmith | November 16, 2007Now that a proposed increase of funding to NIH has again been shot down, scientists have to once again face the reality of intense competition for very scarce funds.
However, the process of awarding research grants is, well, a bit crazy. Scientists work for months on a grant, drafting, revising, trying to winnow it down to fit the page limitations, finding collaborators and assembling potential research teams, obsessing about minutiae in the methods section. We then cross our fingers and send them off for review (which can take many months), and hope that they'll be well-received. When…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007Currently, both the
href="http://rawstory.com/news/2007/House_passes_FISA_update_without_telecom_1115.html">House
and the
href="http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/in-twist-senate.html">Senate
are leaning away from granting immunity to telecommunications companies
that were involved
in warrantless domestic spying.
In an unrelated debacle, the State Department tried to
href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004662.php">grant
immunity to Blackwater personnel who shot a bunch of Iraqi
citizens. (Now the
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/world/middleeast/…
gregladen | November 15, 2007"Too bad for you..." says President George Bush.
US President George W. Bush on Tuesday (Nov 13) vetoed a spending bill that aimed to boost federal funding for the National Institutes of Health. The bill, which was passed by Congress last week, sought to increase NIH funding by about $1 billion from a 2007 budget of about $29 billion to a 2008 budget of about $30 billion.
In a statement released by the White House after Bush vetoed the bill, the president decried the Democrat-led Congress for engaging in what he called a "spending spree," and said that the legislative majority was "acting…
pharyngula | November 15, 2007If you've been wondering about this administration's priorities (you probably haven't, but go with the flow), take a look at this chart comparing spending on the war with spending on alternative energy research. That thing isn't going to scale tidily to fit on a powerpoint slide, I'm afraid.