Science 2.0 fave Cam Neylon has some thoughts from a recent conference panel, namely that the thought process did not go beyond the usual "Institutions should do X" stuff. Obviously we all agree, there would be no Science 2.0 if we waited for the NSF or a university or bloggers to create it.
Christianity has its controversies, like the original date on which Easter is based, but it's a celebration and therefore symbolic. Muslims are a little more rigorous in their approach and there has been turmoil over the possibility that
quasi-scientific authorities in Arabia
misread the skies and mistook Saturn for the moon when it declared Ramadan and its daily fasting over last week. If so, it caused people to starting feasting a day early. You can imagine how the more militant Muslims feel about that.
Stalin hated independence, he hated religion, he hated culture, and he hated 'Girl With An Oar', a statue by Ivan Shadr.Well, it's a 23 foot tall nude so I imagine plenty of people in the West would hate it too, murderous savage dictators or not. A gigantic naked chick in Gorky Park in 1934 was a tough sell.Young people like retro, and that includes young people in Russia, who really know little about the USSR and what it stood for so they have recently embraced it - that's okay, we have idiots in America sporting the hammer and sickle as well. And young people like sticking it to convention, so it's no surprise they have been fascinated by a giant naked girl Stalin hated and shipped to Siberia.
Who knew pizza was so competitive? I thought the truly ridiculous ideas would come from the uber-egos of Richard Branson and Larry Ellison but, no, it's about pie.Pizza Hut delivered pizza to pizza to the International Space Station in 2001 and Dominos...well, all they did was pay someone in Japan 25 grand for an hour's work. But they have a new advertising company now and apparently they are thinking big.
It is sometimes said that top people in their fields are 'a mile deep and a yard wide' because they lack perspective about the broader world.Dr. Judit Nadal, 47, director of the Proteomics Facility at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, was politically correct - she was driving an electric car, a blue G-Wiz, when she died. It basically disintegrated when another car hit it because she pulled into traffic without looking.
In the 1980s, conservatives often sided with science while progressives demanded punitive actions regardless of benefit or even evidence of a detriment. Alar, for example, was a head scratcher for anyone outside the environmental movement but Meryl Streep was clearly a science authority and so the media put people in a panic.In the 2000s, the tables turned. Conservatives wanted nothing done despite the science evidence while activists had science on their side.
Things sure have changed now that a Democrat is in power. The New York Times, once proud to publish anything that might make Pres. George W. Bush look bad, has criticized WikiLeaks for publishing unredacted U.S. State Department cables, the kind of thing everyone there used to love printing.The change has been coming for a while. When the so-called ClimateGate scandal was happening, the New York Times also dismissed the content because it had been illegally obtained, just like every piece of WikiLeaks information.
All people care about these days is cost. What happened to buying local?Health Canada warned would-be parents not to purchase "fresh" semen online, saying it may be tainted with infectious diseases. Pesky Canada has strict controls for obtaining donor semen to minimize the potential risk of transmitting serious infectious diseases, like a requirement that donor semen must be quarantined for a minimum of six months and donors screened and tested before the donation and six months after, but that is just Big Government trying to control the mom and pop semen sellers out there.
We keep being told Americans want more government but Gallup polls tell a different story. What Americans want are more computer companies.The semiconductor industry, which gets nothing at all from academia, the many overlapping science funding agencies or mandates and subsidies from the government, ranks at the top of 25 business and industry sectors in this new poll. Yayyy, capitalism.
Climate change has been implicated in many things but mental health is new. A report titled A Climate of Suffering: The Real Costs of Living with Inaction on Climate Change by the Climate Institute says climate change could mean more than direct problems for the environment.Australians are generally pissed off now, it says, and that will only get worse when there are more droughts, heat waves and wild fires. Traditionally, disasters bring people together and make communities act in unison but they contend this will be different; families will be torn apart and anxiety will spike.
