Like with psychic readings, sometimes you need to post a disclaimer that the following is 'for entertainment only'.  No science sensibilities were actually harmed in the writing of the following article by Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience:Social scientists, he says,  have a hard time being taken seriously because they have a strong penchant for turning out laughable research, the media has an equal fascination for covering it, and we love absolutely reading about it.  True.  So if you want to believe stressed men find fat women more attractive, you are racist even if you are not and that hangovers are a bonding experience, it is a good week for you.

In a Protestant country, despite claims that religion does not matter, it's still a tough cultural road for Catholics.  Almost no conversation can be had that won't end quickly with Galileo or some pederast priest. Being anti-Catholic is ingrained in history.

New York Times opinion columnist Nick Kristof is at it again. Despite pleas, even from people inclined to like the New York Times and people inclined to side with him politically, he refuses to talk about science a little less or at least learn a little more.

For more than a decade, Europe has been as anti-science as can be imagined regarding genetically modified organisms —  consumer crops that have had their genetic code altered in order to make them easier to farm. Environmental activists have frequently responded to GM crop trials by vandalizing or destroying them, while scare stories about “Frankenfoods” have been a regular staple of the British media diet. But two developments in the last month show that Europe may be joining the science community again, while California prepares to leave it:

The world of game theory has been on fire since Freeman Dyson of Princeton and William Press of the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner's dilemma - and it guarantees one player a better outcome than the other.The Prisoner's Dilemma is this: Alice and Bob commit a crime and are arrested. The police offer each a deal to rat the other our and go free while their friend does 6 months in jail. If both Alice and Bob snitch, they both get 3 months in jail. If they both remain silent, they both get one month in jail for a lesser offence. What should Alice and Bob do? 

"Earlier this week, the magazine "Mother Jones" posted a helpful little story on the question of whether the health-conscious consumer should wash organic produce. Was it necessary, the author pondered, after all “how bad could a little chemical-free dirt really be?”"Chemical free dirt? If you are reading Science 2.0 at all, you know why that term sent Wired scribe Deborah Blum into a science fit. She writes, "By fostering a fictional world view of chemistry, it makes us less safe, not more; less aware of the world around us, not more. Because the only place where you might find chemical-free dirt is in the gardens of your fairy-tale imagination. And that’s not going to be all that useful back here on Earth."

Secular humanists not feminist enough for you?  Atheism not social justice-y enough for you?Okay, on a science site you are stopping me right there and saying, "Isn't atheism just about believing on one less God than 90% of the world? And what's with all this social engineering business?"

Here's an episode of "Futurama" waiting to happen; a nodosaur roamed suburban Washington about 110 million years ago and evidence has just been found.You'd think the ground near a sidewalk at the Goddard complex in Greenbelt, Maryland, home to 7,000 employees engaged in astrophysics, heliophysics and planetary science, would be pretty well covered but dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford found the 14" wide track this summer.

There's good stuff happening in Detroit too.  While journalists make political theater about golfing their way through the abandoned parts of the city (Detroit is the home of Great Society economic interference, where they advocated that janitors in car factories were $50 an hour union jobs, the same sort of micromanagement advocates claim will fix it) high school students are still getting cool things done.

I like John Mackey. He is a savvy food guy who enrages the bulk of his customer base with his libertarian economic policies while they make him rich.  I can't say I share his love for Ayn Rand but I get where he is coming from.  He believes in capitalism. and he should; only in America could you sell regular food grown a little differently and convince people it makes them healthier and they should pay more.  They'd shoot you for that in Russia.