Category Archives: Science And Society

Bi-Lingual Brain Benefits

I’ve always regretted not being bi-lingual. I took Latin in high school, which has been enormously beneficial, but I never spoke it, and I’m really only monolingual. That’s sort of a natural advantage that kids of immigrants have. I don’t know if my half-Iraqi nephew and niece are fluent (they probably just know some words), but I’m sure they’re getting some benefit from hanging out with their mother’s family.

I’d also note, on the education bubble front, that eliminating the requirement of a language for a college degree was an early sign of it.

The Anti-Science of Jenny McCarthy

Julia Ioffe is righteously pissed off:

At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

Somehow, I doubt that most of these people are Republicans.

The Real Anti-Science Party

No, @ChrisMooney, it’s not the Republicans.

[Update a few minutes later]

Whoops. Just read more of it. This is a little out to lunch:

Take the NASA portfolio, for example, where the president unceremoniously cancelled the Constellation plan over the objections of both parties and both chambers of Congress. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, hardly partisan bomb throwers, highlighted this in testimony before the House Science Committee on multiple occasions, pleading, “now is the time to overrule this Administration’s pledge to mediocrity.”

Constellation had absolutely nothing to do with science, and both Armstrong and Cernan were notoriously uninformed about it, relying on nonsense fed them by friends in Houston and Huntsville. Things like this damage the credibility of the rest of the piece in the minds of people who understand space policy.

No, Veronique

The moon is not Antarctica.

Many of the “rocks have rights” crowd would like it to be, though. One of the problems with the Outer Space Treaty was that it was modeled on the Antarctic Treaty.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, Paul, please:

With launch costs of thousands of dollars per pound (and unlikely to come down significantly for the foreseeable future)

They are likely to come down to hundreds, or tens of dollars per pound within a decade, now that we have some actual competition and innovation happening in the industry.