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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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What happened to tolerance and diversity?  

The Raelian movement, a UFO religion who believe we were  created by aliens, were going to promote world peace by having tons and tons of sex but they had to cancel it due to pressure.  I mean literally tons of sex; they said they had 250 participants.   And the people who show up for orgies like that are not exactly going to be supermodels, if you know what I mean.  So, if you were planning on attending International Orgasm Day in Tel Aviv this year, you need to make other plans.

To the anonymous prankster who sent me the article above and then included this NASA glacier graphic right after it, you have my eternal respect.
George Bush, he of the horned skull and demonic scowl, mortal enemy of all science, with the funding increases during his tenure being just a clever headfake so he could ruin science for everyone under the age of 30, has done something no one (well, no one who thinks Republicans are all evil and hate science) thought he would do; he gave a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) to Kevin Eggan, PhD, principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
Coturnix at ScienceBlogs.com had an interesting post yesterday on part of the reason they (Science Blogs)  do things the way they do them and the way he says more science writers should - shock value and, at the end of it all, maybe a shot at a greater science democracy.  
Probably tomorrow I am going to do an advanced 'primer' on all the features we have here because I know most people don't even read the FAQ - and that's okay, you shouldn't have to read a FAQ to read an article or leave a comment, but for more exotic stuff and experienced users/contributors, it wouldn't hurt to have a short document that highlights the big stuff that goes beyond the FAQ.

For now, I will just highlight the big (non bug-related) things we did this week.

Corkboard
When I learned that Barack Obama had picked John Podesta as his transition chief, I was not impressed, being that he has a crank belief the government is hiding UFOs.

The folks at ScienceDebate don't necessarily agree, though I think they are going to bless anything Obama does, because about Podesta they wrote a few days ago "Clearly, this is a man who gets it, working, it seems, for a president who gets it."(email, no link on their website)
As you can imagine, running a swanky science publication ends up getting me a lot of press releases.   People want to get the word out about what they are doing and I make no secret of the fact that I want to know what's going on because I don't have time to proactively go out and find the latest stuff.  So I like getting them, including the ones I want to make fun of.