TCS Daily is on Al Gore’s case.
Gregg Easterbrook (who seems to be better at this stuff than he is at space policy) pans the “documentary” as well.
[Update on Thursday morning]
How Kyoto held back progress in solving the problem.
[Another update]
Al Gore’s penguin army.
[Late morning update]
Editor Nick Schulz responds to “rebuttals” to the TCS Daily piece.
For those who think that Intelligent Design is a “conservative” (as opposed to a religious) fetish, Anthony Dick has a review of what sounds like an interesting documentary, Flock Of Dodos, over at National Review. No new arguments in support of science, but he puts forth the old ones well.
Smart cooks know they can ferment beans, and make them less gas-inducing, by cooking them in the liquor from a previous batch. But Granito’s team wanted to find out just which bacteria were responsible for this.
When the researchers fermented black beans with the two bacteria, they found it decreased the soluble fiber content by more than 60 percent and lowered levels of raffinose, a compound known to cause gas, by 88 percent.
I haven’t seen a lot worth reporting since the wireless came back up, but I did run across this piece, in the “bears use the woods as a toilet” category, which claims–hold on to your hats, now–that men influenced by attractive women don’t always make great decisions:
“We all think we are rational beings, but our research suggests … that people with high testosterone levels are very vulnerable to sexual cues. If there are no cues around, they behave normally, but if they see sexual images they become impulsive…”
What would we do without researchers?
Here’s an interesting article on perceptions of bias. It turns out (not surprisingly) that we underestimate our own, and overestimate others’.
Here’s an interesting article on perceptions of bias. It turns out (not surprisingly) that we underestimate our own, and overestimate others’.
Here’s an interesting article on perceptions of bias. It turns out (not surprisingly) that we underestimate our own, and overestimate others’.
From Paul Hsieh, on global warming.
I don’t expect this one blog post to immediately change many minds on this contentious issue. For now, I’d be satisfied with making the point that the issue is not the simple slam-dunk as is typically portrayed in the usual news media. Nor are the opponents of global warming hypothesis/Kyoto treaty necessarily stupid or corrupt.
It doesn’t look like it. Cathy Young writes about religious zealots on both the left and the right, attempting to pervert science to their own ends.
Via John Rennie (who seems to be blogging at Scientific American now) comes this sad story about “Dr. Dino” (aka Kent Hovind) and his dinosaur Bible park:
Escambia County authorities this week locked up a museum building at the theme park on North Palafox Street in Pensacola after Circuit Judge Michael Allen ruled the owners were in contempt of court.
Owners of the park, which shows how dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth just a few thousand years ago, did not obtain a building permit before constructing the building in 2002. They have argued in and out of court that it violates their “deeply held” religious beliefs, and that the church-run facility does not have to obtain permits.
Did I say sad? I meant hilarious. What a bunch of scam artists.