It's no secret that Europeans enjoy new ways to tax people - if they can tell you they are doing it for your own good, so much the better.

I often hear arguments that start with phrases like "If we we can save even one life doing ( insert your pet cause here), it's worth it" but is there a limit to how much society wants to spend to save a life?

A study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health says the UK could save the lives of 3,200 people if they taxed more foods.

I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

There's a problem in all of the climate predictions people have made over the last few years - we just don't know who to trust. Some experts remind us that since we can't predict the weather more than 10 days from now making economy-shattering policy decisions on such incomplete science is a bad idea. One prominent politician says he took a random sample of all the climate studies out there and that 928 out of 12,000 articles agreed with him, so he must be right. How are we to know?

Global warming is more politics than science and I don't want to get into whether it is happening or not, or how much, because that's not science, it's advocacy no matter what I say.