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.
I stayed up late (California) to watch the Higgs announcement and posted various thoughts of my own, and comments from the presentations, on my Twitter feed.
What causes obesity? Obviously ingesting more calories than a person burns leads to weight gain but what really causes obesity?Will banning Big Gulps, Happy Meals and Trans fats make people thin? (1)While a modern 'ban, legislate and micromanage' mentality about food has taken hold on the coasts of the US, obesity researchers in the middle, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, contend handing over even more control of choice to social authoritarians won't work; we instead have to show people that just because you can eat a lot of junk food doesn't mean you should. And go for a walk once in a while.
Sigmund Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" - he meant not everything was about sex, which must really frustrate evolutionary psychology grad students(1), being as he is the most famous psychiatrist ever and was wrong about almost everything else but correct on that point.But that also means a cigar isn't always just a cigar, even in the literal sense. In an era where progressive busybodies have taken to micro-regulation of choice (grocery bags, Big Gulps, goldfish, Happy Meals, golf), it was only a matter of time before the cultural mullahs who want to ban cigarettes (but legalize pot) turned their sights on cigars.
Who hasn't thought about Chasing UFOs? When I saw "Independence Day" in 1996 I first thought, "A Mac can bring down an entire alien civilization? Their users really are creative!" but then I wondered if some day, someone might actually get paid to find aliens.Well, that day is here. But I have to warn you, the language is bad in this UFO stuff.
Self-plagiariasm is big news these days. A short while ago, former ACS president Ron Breslow had an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society pulled - not because he claimed dinosaurs might be ruling other planets, but because he re-used work from other articles he wrote without crediting himself.
Is the world ready for a robot DJ?Sometimes you have to be bold. People laughed at Microsoft when they introduced Microsoft Bob too; people didn't know they needed a graphical image of their office showing a fax machine to send a fax - until it was available.
James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, Ph.D, aged 92, is a chemist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. He is called the 'Godfather of Global Warming'. What he was, to most people, was an alarmist more on the order of President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, a doomsday zealot. And I don't mean 'alarmist' in the American political sense, i.e., anyone who accepts the science of climate change - I mean a real End Of The World Is Nigh prophet. So silly even the hysterical poster child of Think Progress, Joe Romm, believed Lovelock was over the top.
Americans are being beat by Asians again. Asians do better on international standardized tests, their economies are better; heck, they are even robbing us of that last stronghold of American dominance - obesity. The Chinese have gotten a level of fat in one generation that it took Americans 200 years to accomplish. Typical overachievers.
What does it take for Fritz Vahrenholt, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hamburg, a former German environment minister and one of the fathers of the German environmental movement (and, unlike everyone at Desmogblog.com, who simply write character assassinations the moment people deviate from their worldview, has actually devoted a lot of time and money to replacing fossil fuels) to lose faith in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?It took working with the IPCC.
I make fun of numerology but I kind of like it. I can like it and still make fun of it because I don't take it too seriously.Want to claim there is a mathematical secret, far beyond human intelligence, buried in religious texts? Sure, I will listen, if it's on TV and well produced. It's fun to speculate that prayers and rituals have a pattern that contains some sacred rhythm and people 3,000 years ago were super smart about it and we are not. It can get a little funky if you take it too seriously, though. Words no longer have meaning if they are instead numerical combinations. Change a word, or add one, and you would apparently allow sleeping with your neighbor's wife or whatever in the Ten Commandments.
'Grey' literature, which led to the "Glaciergate" scandal of 2010 when it was revealed that the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are losing ice (gone by 2035!) was stated as fact even though it was not based on evidence, will no longer be a problem for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Because they have declared that grey literature will no longer be grey - any information they choose to use will be considered peer reviewed just by being posted on the Internet by the IPCC.
Henry I. Miller, M.D., physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and was at the NIH and FDA from 1977 to 1994.He is, basically, a longtime knowledgeable insider into How Things Work. And he isn't a fan of how things work at the National Science Foundation.
