HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
When most people think 'green' in America, they think of liberal Democrats. It's a carefully crafted image. Conservatives who deny global warming conserve energy just as much as liberals who accept it but that gets little attention. Sociologists in a new paper instead found that the idea of the 'green' Christian is the environmental trope they need to spend their time debunking.
Some people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future. They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil sells to the public in books (and now from a nice gig at Google also).
My vague libertarian leanings want me to stay out of the marijuana issue, just like I don't interfere in vaginas and just like I think the government should stop micromanaging gold fish and Big Gulps and telling restaurants whether or not to allow a cigar after a great steak.But marijuana has become a political issue and it has fallen along predictable political lines; if you think cigarettes should be banned and marijuana legalized, I know how you vote. And therefore the people suddenly presenting nonsense statistics, dubious medical claims and sociological woo are seemingly doing it because they want to stick it to right wing people who are against pot. That's not science, people.
A few weeks ago, I made note of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller (Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller Has His Own Grad Student Criteria - Weight) and his odd claims about what makes a successful grad student.He claimed that obese women - errr, sorry, people, but since over 70% of psychology grad students are women we know what he meant - wouldn't have the discipline to complete grad school. You know, because they eat too much.
A saying in the Old West was that God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.Well, not completely equal, but his invention of the revolver certainly made life better for flintlock pistol owners. Speed and accuracy were still a subjective issue.Now, maybe even accuracy is going to be egalitarian.When I was a young man at Duquesne, we had a rifle team. In the NCAA then, if you were going to have a popular Division I sport that offered scholarships (such as basketball) you had to offer multiple smaller (less popular) Division I sports also - with scholarships, though obviously not full ones.
"Sharknado" Is Pure Liberal Propaganda. But Is It Also Scientifically Possible?" went the title of a Mother Jones article before a sensible editor considered the possibility that there might be 5 people in the world who aren't aware that Mother Jones loves liberal propaganda and changed it to the more sensible "Can a "Sharknado" Really Happen?"
The American FDA allows ingredients that are banned in other countries.
Could you make an ancient beer using nothing but ancient tools?Probably, if you know how to make beer anyway. But would it be authentic ancient beer? Archaeologists and brewmasters have been trying to make just that kind, sparing no effort to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using nothing more complex than clay jugs and a wooden spoon.It's the ultimate artisan brew.
The contrarian in me forces me to argue against sides I would ordinarily agree with when the argument is made from a flawed premise; California's Proposition 37 got a thumbs down from me because there's no reason a terrifically unhealthy Whole Foods organic cupcake should have zero ingredient labeling requirements while a cupcake mix you buy in a store should have a warning label - the Whole Foods organic cupcake is far less healthy in every way.
Want to off someone but you are ethically against using anything made by Monsanto?
Nuclear power is not an environmental issue.There is just no way to spin that it is. What started off with activists being anti-nuclear weapon has morphed into irrational, anti-science stances against all energy - even reactors that simply cannot have a meltdown and use old nuclear waste for fuel. Who could protest against such a thing?Well, when you have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and a lot of that money is coming from aging hippies who bought into the Ralph Nader/Jane Fonda hysteria that nuclear power was causing a cancer epidemic and the Apocalypse, you have to play along.
