Meanwhile, people obsess about carbon on the basis of junk science.
Category Archives: Science And Society
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.
So Much For Trending Stories
In a sensible world, Randall Munroe would have just put a lot of “journalists” out of a job.
Limb Regeneration
A breakthrough in understanding of the process. This would be a huge boon to the military, but good for everyone, especially if it can be extended to organs.
The Class Warfare Of The Green Gentry
…in California. And elsewhere.
Sexually Predatory Cetaceans
Sometimes they can love you to death.
There’s an underwater hotel down in Florida for divers, with windows. They had to put curtains on them, because guests were complaining about the dolphins watching them engaged in amorous activity.
[Update a few minutes later]
You should read all. It’s quite an interesting article on Delphinadae behavior in human history.
Hazardous Asteroids
…may be more common than we thought:
The scientific orthodoxy said that a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.
Famously, a large object exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. But there have been less-heralded impacts, including one on Aug. 3, 1963, when an asteroid created a powerful airburst off the coast of South Africa.
“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown, whose paper appeared in Nature.
But our response, and actions to become a space-faring civilization, remains pathetic.
Dealing With Schizophrenia
Some interesting discussion from those suffering it.