Politics
oracknows | January 2, 2012Best analogy ever? I think it's a contender, straight from Balloon Juice:
The Republican party in Iowa reminds me of a patient with a terminal disease (Romneyitis) desperately turning to alternative medacine. They've cycled through homeopathy (Bachmann), naturopathy (Cain), chelation (Perry) and aromatherapy (Paul). Now they've hit the final frontier--urotherapy. I'm glad that I've never been so desperately ill that I've contemplated drinking my own piss, but I can imagine what it might feel like if I consider the level of desperation needed to vote for Rick Santorum.
I must admit, I laughed…
oracknows | December 30, 2011OK, I know I said that this morning's post would likely be the last post of 2011, but then--wouldn't you know it?--the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism had to go and post a post entitled AAPS on Vaccine Exemptions. I think it deserves a brief mention today for the simple reason that it's a perfect example of crank magnetism. It makes a lot of sense that Anne Dachel of AoA would be very impressed by the sorts of things that Dr. Jane Orient, the current president of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) because, well, the AAPS is a crank organization every bit as cranky…
esiegel | December 23, 2011"Just as I did some 25 years ago, my graduate student is right now using one of the NOAO telescopes, learning how to do observational astronomy... Closing down one of these observatories in the next few years would likely lead to long term problems with producing adequately prepared astronomers in the future, and they are as necessary to achieving the goals of our decadal reports as any multi-billion dollar facility." -Adam Stanford, UC Davis
Every week, I come to you so excited to tell you all about some amazing physics or astronomy story, whether it's something new that's just been…
jrosenhouse | December 20, 2011You should read Ross Douthat's obnoxious eulogy for Christopher Hitchens just so you can enjoy this magnificent takedown from Charles Pierce, over at Esquire. Pierce writes:
For the sheer magnitude of its horsepucky, this column may well stand forever. Generations yet unborn will come and read it, just to stare out of the magnificent vista of presumption, self-regard, and tinpot piety the way people bring their children to look at the Grand Canyon. It takes an unusual amount of juice-box hubris to put your thoughts in a dead man's head. It takes towering presumption to put into a dead man's…
catdynamics | December 20, 2011Theorists think of observations and data a bit like businesses think of science and technology: it happens, apparently effortlessly, and is available for free as needed or on demand.
catdynamics | December 19, 2011This year I noted an anomaly in one of my class assignments...
In my class, that just finished, as part of some of the short writing assignments, I ask the students to look at past, current and future space science missions, NASA or ESA, and to describe one of each to me : 1-2 pages at a level aimed at a science educated audience.
I usually get a nice set of diverse descriptions as people choose their favourites, but this year, for the future mission assignments, there was something strange.
About two thirds of the students chose NuSTAR for their description.
Now, NuSTAR is a nice little…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2011The memory of Herman Lundborg (1868-1943) is insolubly linked to the Swedish State Institute of Eugenics that he headed, and thus lives in infamy. Eugenics was the pseudoscientific belief that human populations deteriorated over time unless care was taken to weed out weak specimens and keep them from procreating. Somehow, these allegedly weak specimens tended to have foreign looks and/or a low income and education. But the social pseudo-Darwinism of the early 20th century explained that people were poor and uneducated because they were stupid, and they were stupid because they had bad genes.…
jtoney | December 17, 2011
Photo source, @mjb's Flicr Photostream (Matthew Bradley)
Prologue:
I have a hypothesis: Newt Gingrich, a provocateur reaching for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, has stated that the "Palestinian people are an invented people" - well, Newt Gingrich, while not an invented person, is an invented Professor. Gingrich's longtime communications aide Rick Tyler described him as "probably the smartest political strategist in the country bar none."
That may well be true, but whether coming from loyalty or from a "conservative revenge fantasy" as described by Mr.…
oracknows | December 15, 2011I thought I'd be leaving the topic of Dr. Stanislaw Burzysnki and his combination of Personalized Cancer Therapy for Dummies-level "personalized, gene-targeted cancer therapy" coupled with his "cancer-curing" antineoplastons, which have morphed into an orphan HDAC inhibitor used off-label as part of his pricey everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" combination of targeted therapies and old-fashioned chemotherapy. After all I figured that there would probably be nothing new to say before sometime in January, when he is schedule to appear before the Texas Medical Board to answer for his dubious…
pharyngula | December 10, 2011I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough's latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I've seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I'm sure it's stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!
But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough's narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? ANd when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?
Well…
stoat | December 10, 2011(this post is mostly for my own future reference: so I can see what I thought now, without the distorting lens of memory. but you might care too)
So, we've vetoed the grand European dream, and they will go off without us. The papers, of course, personalise it, because they are rubbish and believe that none of their readers will pay any attention to stories about things rather than personalities. But while the Grauniad may try to frame it as David Cameron blocks EU treaty with veto (let alone "casting Britain adrift in Europe") really this is our government, reflecting the will of parliament…
illconsidered | December 9, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
sastyk | December 8, 2011Megan Quinn Bachman has a fabulous piece on the problem of net energy ignorance. Megan followed a group of ASPO attendees who visited congressional offices to talk about peak oil, and found pretty much what you'd expect - but what you'd expect has serious consequences:
During our congressional briefings, it felt like we were the ones slamming our heads against the wall. We were told that:
-Ethanol could free America from its dependence upon foreign oil (while at the conference chemical engineer and energy analyst Robert Rapier noted that turning all arable land in the world into biofuels…
illconsidered | December 8, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
illconsidered | December 7, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
drorzel | December 7, 2011"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards."
-- Mark Twain
In last night's post about a school board member failing 10th grade standardized tests, I may have unfairly slighted our students. In response to a comment in which Rick Roach, the school board member who couldn't pass 10th grade math, implied that nothing on the test would be of any practical use, I wrote:
As someone who quite regularly has to teach introductory physics to students who struggle with it because they have a shaky grasp of tenth-grade math, I'm really not any happier with the…
stoat | December 6, 2011
More politics, sorry. Still, if you want science, RC and J+J are blogging AGU. But CIP is delighted with Obama's speech on the economy. I'm less so; the comment there from Wolfgang (He always gave great speeches... this was one reason he won in 2008. The problem is that great speeches are not sufficient once the elcetion is over...) looks all too correct. But there is far more to talk about than that, so...
[Note: these quotes are heavily cut to compress them; please check the originals. But I don't think I've altered the sense.]
For many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered…
jrosenhouse | December 6, 2011Blogger R. Joseph Hoffmann recently posted a stunningly idiotic essay lamenting the present state of atheist discourse. It's standard fare for him, this time expressed in especially pretentious and contentless prose. For example, I defy you to discern anything sensible in these two paragraphs:
Atheism has become a very little idea because it is now promoted by little people with a small focus. These people tend to think that there are two kinds of questions: the questions we have already answered and the questions we will answer tomorrow. When they were even smaller than they are now,…
pharyngula | December 6, 2011Minnesota tuition rates have also been skyrocketing. My salary has been creeping upward at single digit percentage rates — low single digits, and we also had a freeze for a few years — and also, we haven't been hiring swarms of new faculty, but only replacing retiring faculty (which, by the way, immediately reduces salary expenses). Why is this happening?
The answer is easy: state governments have been jettisoning their responsibilities and not paying for the educational institutions earlier, wiser generations invested in. Thank you, Republicans, the party of irresponsible spendthrifts, for…
illconsidered | December 5, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.