Anamorphic ones.
Category Archives: Science And Society
White Odor
Discovering the olfactory equivalent of white noise.
The Politicians’ War On Science
It’s both red and blue. My thoughts over at PJMedia.
Burt Rutan And Climate Change
Why he doubts it, at least as far as it being anthropogenic. It would be nice if someone would transcribe this, and pull screenshots of the charts.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Dendrochronologists (including Keith Briffa) (hockey) stick it to the Mann.
The Higgs Boson
Well, this sucks. It’s behaving almost exactly as expected.
Kuru
The conquest, or at least understanding, of a dreaded disease. Often, as in this case, understanding itself is a huge breakthrough in avoidance.
“Blue” Science
As I noted a couple days ago, denial of science is bi-partisan. The only difference is the issues affected by the denial.
Carbon Emissions Reductions
The U.S. leads the world in them, but don’t tell anyone:
Efforts to curb so-called man-made climate change had little or nothing to do with it. Government mandated “green” energy didn’t cause the reductions. Neither did environmentalist pressure. And the U.S. did not go along with the Kyoto Protocol to radically cut CO2 emissions. Instead, the drop came about through market forces and technological advances, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.
…”It’s good news and good news doesn’t get reported as much,” John Griffin, executive director of Associated Petroleum Industries of Michigan, said of the lack of reporting about the CO2 reductions. “The mainstream media doesn’t want to report these kinds of things.”
Doesn’t fit the narrative.
Politicians’ “War On Science”
Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses
But I disagree with this:
So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.
Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.
Saving The Incandescent Bulb
A one-man crusade against bi-partisan stupidity.