In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
There's a little-known dirty secret in science funding; prior to World War II and the Manhattan Project, the overwhelming majority of basic research was done by corporations. Thus, the tanks, planes, materials advancements and everything else were created by the private sector.
How much impact can taxes and bans have on the conduct of people?
Quite a lot. A 500% tax would clearly reduce demand while outright bans of desired products keep law-abiding people from using a product - and make the others rich.
In defiance of well-established history of resentment about government steering drink choices for freedom-loving westerners - the UK lost a whole colony when they decided to force their subjects to buy only the brand of tea elites wanted them to buy(1) - a subset of progressive social authoritarians maintain that higher taxes on soda drinks, juices, etc. would fix obese people, despite data showing it has never once worked.
If you read mainstream media in 2013, you will learn that wheat and sugar are trying to kill you.It's better not to take them too seriously. While science tends to be rather rigorous in its claims - peer review is an inherently prudent idea that conservative Russell Kirk was likely proud of - health advice is instead based on flitting from one fad to the next, and leading the charge today are the Four Horsemen of the Alternative, Drs. Chopra, Oz, Weil and Gupta, with foot soldiers like Mark Bittman and William Davis gathering up stragglers.
One argument for putting a halt to government spending billions of dollars doing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) 'outreach' is that, like all government programs, they become self-serving and never, ever stop.
Habitat for Humanity International is getting 100,000 PackH2O collapsible water backpacks from the manufacturer, Greif, to use in 8 developing countries.
Any time you get a majority of people together, there will always be some sensitivity and compassion and outreach for the minority. In science academia, it is obvious; small blips in representation get concern about fixing the problem of how to get more of demographic X.
Greenpeace was founded on a pretense of humanitarian action - between 1969 and 1971, they gathered together because they wanted to put an end to hydrogen bomb testing. Later they lost their way and it became about whales and, in the US, being a political action committee for an entire raft of anti-science issues, protesting everything from clean energy to food. Thanks for doing your part to cause global warming, Greenpeace.
Food, medicine and energy are three of the most crucial problems we face today - and they are all protested by a common demographic.Science tends to think on the supply side - how to feed more people, how to get energy to everyone, how to save lives - while anti-science activists promote mitigation and rationing and retreating into the past. They believe in 13th century energy that hasn't worked, like wind power, unproven herbal medicines and a food system where only the agricultural 1% will be able to eat.
In the wave of articles, blog posts and Tweets that are addressing the impact of the shutdown on science, no one has asked the obvious question: If the president care about science so much, why doesn't he care about science?I have argued that science should be considered a strategic resource, no different than food and oil - yet the President who declared he was going to "restore science to its rightful place" has done nothing of the kind.
As a kid, I drank raw milk. It didn't kill me. If I got sick from it, I have no idea, kids get sick from lots of things and just want to get back to playing baseball, we weren't thinking about how we got ill.
Jeremy Leggett, who runs the largest solar power installer in the UK, is celebrating the World Energy Congress in South Korea by selling you a book predicting the demise of his competitors in conventional energy companies.Well, he is going to be right eventually. Though we supposedly hit Peak Oil in 1992, yet still haven't, the math says they can't be wrong forever. To make his case that fossil fuels are doomed sooner rather than later, he invokes the popular standby of people who want to sound science-y: the brain.
In the early parts of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" he spends a great deal of time outlining how both art history (no, really) and his particular brand of religious revisionism are legitimate ... but repressed by Big Religion.In science, we see that all of the time; X says he can invent perpetual motion or has overturned some aspect of medicine or biology and "dogma" keeps it hidden. It's the myth of the oppressed underdog. Americans love it, it's good reading, David vs. Goliath stuff. It is the story of how America came to be.
