Category Archives: Science And Society

Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Demand For Concealed Weapons In Michigan

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…is being driven by women:

Most women would not have thought to carry a gun even five years ago, said Andrea Durhal. When she became a National Rifle Association certified instructor eight years ago, her classes were mostly men. Recently, women have started to fill her classes.

It took a few years for women to get over a fear of guns and take responsibility for their protection, she said.

“We’re being victimized; we’re being raped. The crimes are getting higher and the police departments are less and less,” she said. “People are realizing now that they need to be their own security.”

There’s a very interesting graphic there. The highest percentages of women getting permits is Wayne County (Detroit) and Barry County (Grand Rapids). I would have thought that Genessee (Flint) and Oakland (Pontiac) Counties would be equally high, but they’re slightly less. I wonder why?

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Rolling Back The Clock?

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I’ve always thought that progeria was sort of an existence proof that the aging process is a lot more amenable to external intervention than many want to believe. After all, if it can be accelerated on such a grand scale, why not be able to slow, or even reverse it? Yes, I know that some people think it’s a violation of the Third Law, but I don’t buy it. We do cellular repair perfectly well for years before it starts to decline, and if the repair mechanisms can be made to work again, there is no law of thermodynamics that says we can reduce the entropy again.

So this is a very exciting development, with profound societal implications if it pans out:

The drug rapamycin has been found to reverse the effects of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a fatal genetic disease that resembles rapid aging, in cells taken from patients with the disease. Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection of transplanted organs, has already been shown to extend life span in healthy mice. Researchers hope the findings will provide new insight into treating progeria as well as other age-related diseases.

As Glenn says, faster, please.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Failure Of Al Gore

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More thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:

The global green strategy was a comprehensive, unified and coordinated one. Green activists around the world, in some countries empowered because proportional representation gives fringe groups disproportionate political influence, would unite around the push for a single global solution to climate change. The global solution involved a treaty to be negotiated under UN auspices that would be “legally binding” and subject the emission of greenhouse gasses to strict global controls. Developing countries would receive massive transfers of official aid ($100 billion or more a year) to compensate them for the costs they would incur in meeting carbon targets; developed countries like the United States would face stricter targets still. The target for the treaty was to cap global emissions at levels believed to keep the global temperature rise this century to two degrees centigrade.

To reach this Valhalla, a political strategy was put in place; it is the strategy that the former vice president is still gamely trying to push in his Rolling Stone article. It has failed.

Good. As with Obama, his failure is success for the rest of us.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, a success for the rest of us who don’t live in California. Here, he succeeded, because the voters are idiots, and the ruinous law that the Democrats and Scharzenegger pushed (thanks, Maria!) will be just one more factor that irretrievably sinks the state’s economic prospects.

[Late morning update]

Al Gore — idiot Malthusian.

As bad as Bush was, we really dodged a bullet in 2000.

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

Former Astronaut Bernard Harris

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An interesting interview. He’s being a little too politically correct here, though:

…in the 21st century we need teachers who teach math and science to have expertise in math and science. So there needs to be an upgrade there, and refocus on how much we value those teachers. As you know, in this country, we don’t pay our teachers all that well. We need to rethink that.

The problem isn’t that we don’t pay teachers well, at least on average. The problem is that we don’t pay the valuable ones enough, and we pay the worthless ones far too much, thanks to the unions. We need to be able to adequately compensate the teachers who have actual useful knowledge to impart, and get rid of the ones who don’t. This would all start by eliminating the worthless, or to be more accurate, negative-value, “education” major.