Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?
Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.
What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”
This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.
The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.
I agree. I have sort of a sweet tooth, so that’s one of the things I’ve given up on this paleolithic diet, but I figure if I’m going to break the diet, I might as well do it whole hog and get it out of my system. As the dentist in the article says, it’s better for the teeth to eat all the candy at once than to have a steady diet of it for weeks. The same goes to the glycemic effects, I think. If I overdo it on salt or sugar in a single meal, I can get back to the routine within a day or two. Also, I bought dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses, which the kids might not like as much, but will be heart healthy for me if I have leftovers.
[Update, a while later]
It is dusk, and the streets are empty.
This just validates my long-standing thesis that Halloween has been taken over from the kids, who used to go trick-or-treating, and used to be free range, to the adult baby boomers, who don’t want to grow up.
A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With the just the right, recently snipped, herb.
That is not a healthy diet. Broccoli is good for you but not just broccoli. He probably could have lived a lot longer if he’d understood nutrition better.
In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.
In one experiment, he got 54 oenology (the study of wine tasting and wine making) undergraduates together and had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red. In the other experiment, he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles. So what were the results?
The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white. In the second experiment, the one with the switched labels, the subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it complex and rounded. They called the same wine in the cheap bottle weak and flat.
I’ve always suspected this. And it reminds me of this post from a couple years ago.
Though it would be easy for cynics to assume otherwise, this was a serious study based on a series of scientific measurements and not on the opinions of Mallucci.
‘We used computer measuring tools to examine the dimensions and proportions of each pair of breasts, identifying four features common to all of them,’ he explains.
The features analysed were the dimensions of the upper and lower pole, medical terms that describe the areas above and below the nipple; plus the angle at which the nipple points and the slope of the upper pole.
‘The study revealed that in all cases the nipple ‘‘meridian’’ – the horizontal line drawn at the level of the nipple – lay at a point where, on average, the proportion of the breast above it represented 45 per cent of overall volume of the breast and below it 55 per cent.
‘In the majority of cases the upper pole was either straight or concave, and the nipple was pointing skywards at an average angle of 20 degrees. In all cases the breasts demonstrated a tight convex lower pole – a neat but voluminous curve.
I would love to see the House impeach Steven Chu. It would be interesting to see what the Senate would do, given how many vulnerable Democrats are up for reelection next year.