We need an FDA commissioner who sees it. That also would apply to criminally terrible government dietary advice.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Paleo Diet
Gee, so it turns out that it won’t kill you after all:
Even short-term consumption of a Paleolithic-type diet improved glucose control and lipid profiles in people with type 2 diabetes compared with a conventional diet containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes.
The biggest nightmare for Big Pharma is that we can treat Type 2 diabetes (which seems to be a diet-related “disease”) with an improved diet.
Lawsuit Update
Tomorrow is the deadline for filing amicus briefs on our behalf. Judith Curry has filed another one. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be good.
[Update a while later]
Reading through it, it would seem to make a strong case for her own defamation, though she’s above that.
[Update late morning]
Some thoughts on “alternate facts” in the climate debate:
My tweet asked the climate scientists on my feed whether they agreed with the statement specifically the use of the word “all”. My expectation was that a reasonable core of climate scientists would agree that Dr. Mann had overstepped the science. This was not the case. Instead, what I got was overwhelming support for Dr. Mann with not a single non-skeptic initially commenting negatively. It was as if Dr. Mann was the pope and the climate community his congregation. Nothing he said could be considered to be anything less than the truth, even if it took huge convolutions of logic to make it true. In the last couple weeks the term “alternative facts” has entered our lexicon. Well in the next few paragraphs I want to unpack Dr. Mann’s “alternative fact” and see if it is indeed defensible. Then I will go into what I feel this means for the climate change debate.
RTWT.
First-Amendment Rights
..of public employees: A quick cheat sheet.
What I found amusing about the tweets from Badlands National Park yesterday (which were cheered by the supposed fans of “science”) were how either they weren’t “scientific facts” (no, it is an opinion, not a fact, that last year was the “hottest on record”) or trivial and irrelevant chemistry (“A gallon of gasoline puts X pounds of carbon into the atmosphere when burned). But I was also amused at the concern that the employees who had done so had probably been fired.
One of the many reasons federal employee unions are terrible. It's almost impossible to discipline people. https://t.co/quxjqIG9t6
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 24, 2017
@michelelfrost A high-level friend of mine tells stories about how he couldn't get rid of bad secretaries, except to promote them.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 24, 2017
Badlands National Park, fully sentient now, lumbers towards Washington, DC to exact its revenge. pic.twitter.com/ZLoL6ajq6t
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 24, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the story for those who don’t know what I’m talking about.
Russia’s ICBM Program
I wonder if this, combined with recent problems with their space systems, are an indication of a much deeper systemic rot?
High-Speed Rail
Unlike the California plan, this might make sense. No serious mountains between Dallas and Houston.
Scott Pruitt And The Environment
Yes, this is an argument about what constitutes “pollution” and how best to deal with it, not whether or not we are indifferent to it. But of course, if the Left had no strawman arguments, they’d have no arguments at all.
The Space Shuttle
Amy Shira Teitel explains why she’s not a fan:
“I Heard Them Scream ‘Get Me Out Of Here.'”
“…then there was silence from the pad.”
Eric Berger writes about Apollo 1, on the fiftieth anniversary. I remember it, the day before my birthday. It was a huge wake-up call for the Apollo program, which ultimately resulted in beating the Soviets in the space race less than two years later, with Apollo 8.
Site Problems
We had a corrupt data base that was confusing MySQL, but things should be fixed now.