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.
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.
Something happened last night that you don't see very often - almost all of the polls were right. Nearly everyone predicted the state electoral results correctly and that, my friends, is truly rare.
A few months ago, before Monsanto and DuPont realized Proposition 37 may have been started by anti-science crackpots but it was not going away and I was one of the few critical of it, I would have predicted GMO warning labels to win by 66% - because that is the percentage of Democrats in California and while Republicans get attention in science media for being 'anti-science' due to global warming, the actual anti-science positions that are dangerous are bastions of the left.
In his 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” in addition to making the government more transparent and accountable. Millions rallied to his cause. Four years later, how has he done?Unfortunately, not well. On a whole host of issues, Obama has placed politics before science. We will examine just three of them: vaccines, the BP oil spill, and “Cash for Clunkers.”Obama vs. Vaccines
Nate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008. So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75% likely to win when polls only showed the candidates were about even, it set atwitter those people who think statistical models of polls are meaningful. They were vindicated, the age of scientific projections had arrived, in a baseball cap.They thought that because they don't understands polls or statistical models.
In 2008, I was as excited as anyone about the chance to correct some public relations mistakes made by the Bush administration in the nascent years of blogging. Obviously some of the 'Republicans are anti-science' stuff was because when you are far left, even the middle looks like the right, but Republicans had done no favors to themselves by 'taking the bait' on topics like hESC research. What had been a reasonable, bipartisan position on human embryonic stem cells in 2001 (traditional conservatives were actually all for it, more religious types among both Democrats and Republicans were not) became a simple partisan divide when it was revisited two more times and Bush shot it down despite Republicans overall being in favor of it.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science did something that was so obvious it was a surprise to find out they hadn't already done it - they formally came out against labeling GMO foods.
If you get rich suing people, your days going after Big Tobacco are basically over. The tobacco companies have been sued for everything by now and the people who still smoke know what they are doing, and the risks, and they are willing to pay an ever-increasing amount of taxes to fund government employee unions. We can't really blame corporations for that any more. Luckily, the food industry could soon take its place. Not because they have done anything wrong, but rather because we live in a culture where a dizzying cross-section of people assume anyone working for a corporation must be unethical. And creating nuisance laws that make it possible to sue over labels without actually having any evidence of harm are a dream for litigation attorneys.
