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.
It almost reads like an April Fools Day article. A new UC Davis study has found that more obese people have minimum-wage jobs by demographic, adding to growing evidence that being poor is a risk factor for unhealthy weight.
I went to the Scottish Games in Woodland, California last weekend, two young boys in tow. They weren't remotely interested in Scottish women doing traditional dances and they were vaguely intrigued by why men wore kilts."Papa, why is that man wearing a skirt?" Colin asked.Being that we were east of highway 5 this was a perfectly reasonable question. "It's a kilt," I explained. "If he wore anything underneath it would be a skirt."Like this fellow:But they were incredibly interested in the very large men throwing telephone poles. So I set out to explain how it works and give them some culture in the process.
The End of the World seems to roll around every decade or so. The last time it got a lot of press was the year 2000 A.D., a millennial event in the Gregorian calendar. COBOL programmers were the convenient catalyst for all that, since banks would shut down due to legacy software, but the end of the world needs vassals, the more unwitting the better, so it made sense that COBOL folks would take the fall.Next up is 2012, this time due to one Meso-American calendar, and some speculation has been that the LHC will cause it, unleashing an army of Strangelets led by ancient Mayan overlords.
You know you've lost a lot of intellectual capital when ridiculous parodies of your work generate hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube - and threatening to sue is just making the whole thing sillier.Michael Mann of Penn State isn't happy. Everyone who had any sort of a clue knew his hockey stick regarding global warming wasn't literal but it also wasn't unethical. An internal investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing despite the unfortunate use of the word "trick" by researchers referencing his methods and "hide the decline" has become something of a rallying cry for detractors. But he is getting made fun of just the same and he doesn't like it.
I get asked a lot about Science 2.0® and why I chose to start something like ScientificBlogging.com, because science is such a niche. Is it? 65 million people respond to surveys that they are interested in science. Since there are just over 300 million people in the US and 10% of those can't read due to age or infirmity, that means almost 25% of America alone considers themselves science fans.
3 NASA employees out of the 22,000 people about to lose their jobs sat in a room full of loyal Democrats and listened to President Barack Obama talk about how much he loved NASA. Then he talked about how he was gutting it.Not everyone is buying hope in this instance. Buzz Aldrin agrees with Pres. Obama that the Moon has been done but Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, and Gene Cernan, the last, think it is a big step backwards to instead go to an asteroid. I am probably not the first to say it but it seems we will now boldly go where no one really wants to go.
Science, outside some in the climate community (*), is anti-authoritarian. There is no voting to create a consensus in science, no appeals to authority - science is vulnerable every single day of the year, to experiments, to revisions and to complete debunking by new generations of scientists who, like gun-slingers in the Old West, want to make their name taking down the big guys. Great thinkers like Einstein and Aristotle have been slain by the scientific method so it can happen to anyone - and that power is what made freedom possible, according to Timothy Ferris, emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and book author.
We've had our first missing link of 2010. What, you ask? Was the missing link not discovered twice even last year? Well, yes, if you read the mainstream media it happens quite often. And it is happening again this week so look for plenty of news reports.But just in case you are out there and need to write one of your own, here is a handy template you can use, based on my experience.**********The Mainstream Media Missing Link Article Generator
Having once been an environmental activist, one thing that bothers me about modern day environmental activists (*) is their insistence, despite any evidence, that jamming people into cities and going to Farmer's Markets and having governments buy huge swaths of land that can't be used by anyone is a good thing. Emotional arguments mobilize zealots who are already convinced but do very little for the undecided. But common sense and data do.If most people were going to predict which city would instead have a common sense plan to get greener without more bloated government employment or a bigger deficit or laws, very few people would have said Detroit.
If you want to have staying power on the Internet, you need to have turnover, says a new analysis published in the Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work.Not only do you need to be 'heterogeneous', you need to be diverse.
Day two and day one if you need to catch up.One great thing about being at a conference on a press pass is people want to buy you food. You can literally go the entire day without buying anything for yourself if that's how you roll. Breakfasts - check. Coffee - check. Lunch - well, I am not much of a lunch guy but I suppose I could get the proverbial free lunch in the way of a literal one. Dinner could at least be bar food.
Attending the AAAS symposia on "Facing the Uncertain Future of International Science Journalism" I was stunned by something: I am the most hated guy in every room I walk into.
