Category Archives: Education

Education, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Kate McKinnon’s Impressions Of Democrat Candidates

46 Comments

These are actually pretty good, but it feeds a pet peeve: “…if you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming.”

That’s the transcript, and to my ear, it sounds accurate (in that it was what McKinnon actually said, and isn’t a bad transcript). Maybe she was saying that Williamson would have said that, but I suspect that it’s what she thinks the expression is.

No, sorry, people, it’s “…another think coming.” “Another thing coming” makes no sense at all. Note the word that starts the sentence.

The people who say that do it because they think that’s the proper expression, regardless of how little sense it makes, because when they’ve heard it, they munge the ending “k” of “think” with the beginning “c” of “coming” in their ears and therefore thingthink that people are saying “thing.”

Business, Economics, Education, Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Lesson For Trump From Media Attacks

13 Comments

Yes, continue to focus on the flawed climate science:

The CNN video ridicules Trump for saying that global warming is “an expensive hoax.” We should respond by outlining the costs involved. Over one billion dollars a day worldwide is now spent on “climate finance,” according to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, yet we see no impact on climate. In 2017, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, explained that if the UN Paris Agreement targets for 2030 were met and sustained through the rest of the century, there would be 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit less warming in 2100, if the models relied upon by the UN were correct. He explains that the cost of the Paris pact would be $1 – 2 trillion every year. So clearly, CNN’s criticism tells Trump that he should continue calling it “an expensive hoax,” and cite the cost estimates and forecast results to illustrate his point.

Yup.

Business, Culinary, Economics, Education, General Science, Health, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Those “Impossible” Burgers

1 Comment

It may be a surprise to some, but not to me, that they are neither healthier for the eater or for the environment.

I’d like to eat actual lab-grown meat, but it has to be cost effective, and nutritionally equivalent to the stuff on the hoof (or claw).

[Update a couple minutes later]

In reading, as is often the case, part of the health claim derives from the false notion that eating “red meat,” and particularly saturated fat, is unhealthy. There is zero scientific evidence for either. So they’re basically proposing to replace something humans have been eating since the dawn of humanity with some lab-produced glop about which we are completely ignorant of its nutritional effects.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The “Republican” Brain

3 Comments

A refutation of a stupid thesis (including a dumb book by Chris Mooney). If I had time, I’d write a book called “The Democrats’ War On Science.” It would have a more solid basis than Mooney’s.

Oh, and this once again puts paid to the notion of “peer review” as having any value.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Consensus,” and politics disguised as science.

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1142073634028044288