During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
A few years ago, my wife had a milestone birthday and decided she wanted to run a marathon. Now, I don't even like to drive 26 miles much less run that far - that Greek guy is famous because he died doing it and there are some experiments I don't need to replicate in order for them to have my full acceptance.But my wife wanted to do it. I had never seen her so much as walk fast but she signed up with a group called Team In Training and off she went (1) - they have various morale-building events, including dinners, and at one of those I met a fellow marathon husband and he said, "You kind of look like that guy on "Burn Notice".
What can Kung Fu Nuns teach CERN scientists about cosmic energy?
To start with, they would have to convince CERN scientists that 'cosmic energy' actually exists, and they recently got a chance to do that when the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) hosted Drukpa Buddhist's Spiritual Head, His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa.
So the only food that we knew could survive the apocalypse has been driven out of business by its own employees, who also teamed up with single mothers, minorities and atheists to overwhelmingly re-elect a guy determined to jump off a fiscal cliff right just before the end of the world was long projected - December of 2012.Well played, Mayans.
The moon is both easy and tough to figure out. Of the many things Galileo got wrong, the moon was the biggest, despite it being studied for millenia by then, unless you think we only have one tide per day. And last year some people wanted to believe an earthquake in Japan was caused by a 'Supermoon', where our friend Luna was slightly closer to us.
Earlier this year, the US government opened a new front in its war with China over solar panel manufacturing - tariffs designed to close the gap between U.S. and Chinese labor costs.Tariffs don't work, we have known that since the Depression of the 1930s was prolonged due to economic tinkering and boosting tariffs. Creating higher costs for a non-essential product, especially a non-essential product for a market that is only in existence due to government subsidies, drives down demand. The day after the American presidential election, the U.S. International Trade Commission voted to saddle Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd. with a tariff of 35.97% on their silicon module imports from China, which are made by the parent company.
Marriage counseling is so 20th century. The 21st century may belong to relationship neuroinformaticians because they can create a mathematical model for efficient communication in your love life. The dynamics of love can look like a sine wave, with smooth, repetitive highs and lows. That's probably not too bad. We certainly try for a flat line but that is difficult to achieve. What you want to avoid is having your other half begin to vibrate weirdly. When that happens, couples oscillate without any harmony, the waves go out of control and soon you are forced to get back down to dating weight.
We all love paradoxes, those seemingly consistent logical brain-teasers where we sort out what can and should and might and must happen and that invariably lead to self-contradictory arguments.If you are like me and my friends, there is nothing you enjoy more than sitting around during half-time of the Steelers game and arguing over Maxwell's Demon - the many ways to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely that heat transfer happens, from warmer to colder, until equilibrium is reached. If I put an ice pack next to Ben Roethlisberger's blazing hot 145 third down QBR (Total Quarterback Rating), for example, the ice pack will not cool down, it will warm up. So it has always been, so shall it must be. It is common sense.
Sometimes when things catch the attention of the kookier segments of the public, they really take off. Fracking is a good example. Though it's been around since the 1940s, once it got really popular people started inventing fake illnesses to get into the mainstream media Scare Journalism of the Week pieces.
The most startling thing to me about the election of 2012 was how spookily accurate polls were. Social scientists in one camp want to dismiss determinism while the other camp has biology-envy but either the deterministic side got a big boost on Tuesday or the opposing sides in this election were so entrenched there was virtually no reason to vote, other than to see who had the best Get Out The Vote campaign. As I discussed in How Accurate Are Those Political Polls?, that is where the magic happens. Could polls predict how successful a Get Out The Vote campaign is?Maybe. I know one party is scrambling to see what went wrong.
Energy companies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are required to buy some solar power each year. They are required to overpay for that solar power.In return for overpaying, they get Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) which let them pass the extra cost onto local families and taxpayers.
When I was a young guy living in Florida, on one station we used to get reruns of a television show called "The Saint". I liked the stick figure cartoon and the halo that would appear above his head in the beginning. Roger Moore was cool.He became the third actor to play Ian Fleming's British super spy James Bond (and the longest-running) and was the perfect choice. Yet most people remember the 'cartoon-y' James Bond films that came on his watch. He is unfairly derided as the worst James Bond now, and that is saying something in a roster that includes George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton. "The Spy Who Loved Me " holds up pretty well, the recurring actors all have at least one good movie.
Climate change was ignored for all but the last week of the American presidential election. Then, a hurricane hit and it mobilized voters who were otherwise disappointed that neither party cared about science or the climate. Yet it's hard to have a real talk about climate change when activist groups are so anti-science about energy and energy produces a lot of emissions. While Hurricane Sandy may have been the 'October surprise' that re-elected a president (1) but it may also have done something that even an earthquake in Japan could not do; force a real, adult conversation about nuclear power.
