Politics
drorzel | August 21, 2011A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it's with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh.
The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that's been around for a long time, with lots of different people working on it. GE's technology is based on an idea from some Australians back in the 1990's, and they appear to think they can scale it up to industrial scale. Predictably enough, there's a stark difference of opinion about the…
pharyngula | August 20, 2011In a weird reversal of the normal state of affairs, the Democratic governor of Kentucky has long been pushing support for Ken Ham's ridiculous Ark Park…and now his Republican challenger, David Williams, has come out opposing it. Even more interestingly, he argues that the feasibility study was bogus, and that it simply won't get built. Of course, Ken Ham isn't happy with that.
Unfortunately, Williams is far behind in the polls, and isn't expected to succeed in his bid.
Or rather, fortunately. My brain would melt into a puddle that flowed out my ears if I lived in a country where the crazy…
pharyngula | August 19, 2011Alex Pareene has a nice roundup of the GOP candidates views on science — all of them, except Jon Huntsman, are science-denying wackaloons who reject evolution. As we in Minnesota know, that's actually where Michele Bachmann's career got its start, campaigning locally against evolution.
But poor Ron Paul. He only gets a brief mention, and it's to say that he thinks the evolution debate is irrelevant. Au contraire! He fits in perfectly with the other Republican candidates. Watch him declare that evolution is just "a theory" and he doesn't accept it.
Darn that lamestream media — they just can'…
pharyngula | August 18, 2011This is awful: Rick Perry's Texas A&M Transcript is now available online. He was a pre-vet student in college? Unbelievable. This is a fellow wobbling between a C- and a C+ average from term to term. As an advisor, I would have taken this poor student aside in his second year and explained to him that veterinary school is really, really hard to get into — even harder than medical school — and with his grades he didn't stand a chance of getting in, and even worse, he demonstrated no aptitude at all for the field. I would have recommended that he switch majors and pursue some field that…
oracknows | August 18, 2011It's always frightening when lawyers delve into the realm of medicine. It's even worse when pre-law students and political science majors do the same.
Such was the thought running through my mind when I came across the most recent issue of the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law. The result is what I would most accurately characterize as--shall we say?--uneven. Even though the authors try to don the mantle of skepticism, for the most part they fail. Perhaps the best example of this failure is this particular article entitled Chiropractic Medicine: "Quackery's" Struggle for Fair Practice.…
drorzel | August 16, 2011Two "small world" items, involving people I know turning up unexpectedly, doing well for themselves:
1) As mentioned previously, I've been thinking a lot about physics education stuff (even though I have other things I ought to be doing), and reading a lot more education-oriented blogs. I was surprised, though, to find a physics-related post from Dan Meyer, featuring an example from Greg Schwanbeck. Unless there's a truly amazing name coincidence at work, here, Greg's a former student, Union Class of 2003, I believe. I knew he was teaching high school in Massachusetts, but it's nice to see…
gregladen | August 15, 2011I've known very few real Iowans. I know people who live there now but are from the Twin Cities, but I've only met a handful of native Iowans. One of them is a dear friend, most are only vague acquaintances. Six of them were landlubbing pirates of no value to humanity whatsoever.1 But I'm sure Iowans are mostly wonderful people who are well intentioned, hard working, intelligent, and are just as good as anyone else. Nonetheless, states have personalities and personalities have reputations, and people who live in states contribute to making those personalities and reputations. And for…
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
catdynamics | August 13, 2011This week, a WTF pair of plots were published on some economic data, namely US retail sales and consumer confidence.
I have a theory about that...
Here is the Consumer Confidence plot at Calculated Risk
and here is the Retail Sales chart also from CR
Note that consumer confidence, which is generally taken to be a coincident economic indicator, declines sharply, while retail sales increased.
Confidence and Sales conveniently combined (click to embiggen)
from zerohedge
So, clearly, this is because there were 5 weekends in the reporting period because costs per item on essentials are up…
catdynamics | August 11, 2011Last year, Brad deLong did a most excellent dissection of the lecture, how it came to be, and why universities need to rethink the whole approach to learning concept before they get eaten by technology development providing even cheaper content delivery.
I've been meaning to editorialize on this for a while, and then Chad planning for start of classes prodded me into action, doubly so when Chad posted a link to jolly nice resource for active learning in physics at Learnification
Now, others have provided expositions on how to teach wellgreat...
So I guess it is up to me to risk the wrath of…
stoat | August 11, 2011Well, the riots. And whilst Harry Hutton, as usual, talks a great deal of sense, the sense of surprise remains. The beak makes some good early points; initial reports were very vague; but it now looks like only the police fired. Which really doesn't help. Part of the recent phone hacking stuff has been yet more erosion of trust in the police. Mind you, according to wiki, the family were implausibly pretending that Duggan was unarmed, which didn't help either. And also, contrary to early impressions I'd got, I can see no evidence that the police ever claimed he shot at them.
Time will tell…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Fred Clark has an idea for you:
Start with the housekeeping staff at a Manhattan hotel. They've just learned that their next contract includes no raise, but doubles the employee share of the cost of health benefits. The Norma Rae of this bunch -- let's say Jennifer Lopez* -- convinces them to strike, but they have little leverage and she's struggling to hold the line. These women can't afford the new contract, but they can't afford a lengthy strike either.
As it happens, this very same Manhattan hotel is the site of negotiations between the NFL Players Union and the owners. Mixed up in all…
drorzel | August 10, 2011The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields:
This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone of the report itself. Nice work, Commerce Department PR flacks.
There are a couple of oddities about this report, the most important being that they appear to have excluded academics from the sample, though that probably depends on how people…
oracknows | August 5, 2011I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over the MMR vaccine that is only now beginning to abate. Yes, Andrew Wakefield produced a paper that implied (although Wakefield was very careful not to say explicitly) that the MMR vaccine caused an entity that later became known as "autistic enterocolitis" and later implied that…
drorzel | August 4, 2011Back at the AAAS Meeting, I was really annoyed by a session on fracking, the process by which natural gas is extracted from shale deep underground. As I wrote at the time, regarding the industry shills who spoke:
I left before the whole thing had wrapped up, because it was that or start throwing stuff at Martin and Gorody. Honestly, their presentations made me more convinced than ever that we need strict regulations governing the development of the shale. While the gas will inevitably be extracted (unless somebody comes up with a cheap and readily manufactured solar cell with 60% efficiency…
drorzel | August 3, 2011Several weeks ago, now, SteelyKid flipped out at bedtime. We had told her that the episode of MythBusters playing on the DVR was the last one for the night, but when it ended, she demanded more. When we said no, she went into a full-on toddler freakout, screaming, crying, kicking the floor. I eventually carried her upstairs, put her on her bed, and waited until she could get herself under control enough to talk in a halfway normal voice.
Once she did, we negotiated a compromise. We wouldn't put MythBusters back on tv, but we would go back downstairs and watch three short videos on my…
drorzel | August 3, 2011In the "ideas I wish I'd thought of first" file, the Canberra Times has an op-ed comparing politicians to quantum objects, because they seem to hold contradictory positions at the same time, and are impossible to pin down. It garbles the physics a little, and is very specific to Australia, though, so let's see if we can do a little better at identifying quantum properties of US politicians.
Duality: Quantum physics tells us that all objects in the universe have both particle-like and wave-like properties, and which you observer will depend on the design of your experiment. Similarly, quantum…
pharyngula | August 3, 2011I can't believe we elected any of these hypocritical loons to office anywhere. Look at the shenanigans in Dayton, Ohio.
Kelly Kohls, who was elected in Springboro on a platform of fiscal responsibility two years ago, requested last week the district's curriculum director look into ways of providing "supplemental" instruction dealing with creationism. Fellow member, Scott Anderson, who was elected with Kohls when the district was struggling financially, supports his colleague's idea.
"Creationism is a significant part of the history of this country," Kohls said. "It is an absolutely valid…
aardvarchaeology | August 3, 2011Here's a few thoughts stemming from comments on my recent post regarding the Norwegian terror shootings. The discussion got a little confused as people thought I wanted to discuss psychiatry, when I was really only commenting on the judicial concept of criminal responsibility versus insanity.
Why do modern states have systems of judicial punishment? If you look closer at this issue you'll find that there are several independent motivations that sometimes operate against each other.
1. Violence monopoly and collective revenge. Having been wronged, many people want revenge on the perpetrator.…