Science Education & Policy
Hank |
There are some places where food is easy to grow and some where it is not. Nature is not fair.
Expecting companies in countries with food to ship it everywhere for free is not practical and the poorest people don't have the money to import food, so they are stuck in a hunger Catch-22. There are differing schools of thought on how to solve the problem.
The positive approach - science - is to make it possible for food to grow in areas where food cannot grow now. Plants can be optimized scientifically to thrive in areas where they ordinarily would not. Then there is a less positive approach;…
Hank |
Responsible energy production would seem to have an obvious positive roadmap; have energy companies include environmental groups in guiding pollution standards and participating in studies about natural gas extraction.
But for entrenched constituencies, that is unacceptable.
Hydraulic fracturing - fracking - has been around since the 1940s, it's actually far safer today than it was in the past, but it has replaced nuclear power as ground zero in the anti-science culture war and now various groups claim it causes ill health, cancer and even that it may cause the earth to deflate. Fracking is a…
Hank |
Everyone should have a home where they feel comfortable. If you want to carry a six-shooter on the street, move to Kennesaw, Georgia, outside Atlanta - Gun Town, USA (bonus: only 4 gun murders in 30 years, so you will be safe)(1) and if you like to ban everything and hang out with anti-science crackpots, there's always San Francisco.
San Francisco has always been a little envious of other places - like New York City, and every city in Europe, really. So when Europe began adopting guidelines for warning labels on cell phones, San Francisco tried to do the same.(2) Since then, things have…
Hank |
Bob Geldof, former singer with The Boomtown Rats, is better known today for his work with poor people. Long after it stopped being fashionable, he has continued to help starving people in Ethiopia.
It's not the only way he is unfashionable - so is his old-school liberalism, which doesn't care about labels or circling the wagons for Big Tent left-wing causes or being against anyone on the other side by default. When he spoke nicely about George W. Bush in 2003, it was stunning because we were all told to hate George Bush. Liberals in America were not allowed to say nice things about…
Compare the following situations:
1 - You dial the number of a call center, and the automated system informs you that the estimated waiting time is eight minutes.
2 - You dial the number of a call center, and the automated system tells you that the estimated waiting time has a uncertainty of plus or minus one minute.
Which automated system is providing you with a more informative answer in your opinion ? Could you base on the information provided by the first one your decision to hang the phone and go for a beer or stay on the line ? Or would you be more confident of your decision (…
Hank |
In America, only two political parties can win the presidency. For that reason the two parties tend to have a 'big tent' mentality and embrace a lot of fringe members in return for votes. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good, the saying goes.
Due to that structure, and that a tiny percentage of 'swing voters' determine a winner, the opposing sides tend to vilify and stereotype each other as much as possible, including in ways that are tailored to the audience. For example, Democrats hate business and are anti-science, while Republicans hate minorities and are anti-science. …
Hank |
The adage that 'there is a sucker born every minute' has always been true. Organic food? Homeopathy? Social psychology? I am cool with all of those unless poor people who think they are accepting science are being exploited for financial gain.
And so if a company claims they will name an asteroid after you for five bucks, or a star, and you don't want to do the creative design work of making your own certificate and printing it off, I suppose that's harmless enough, but if you ask I will still tell you how meaningless it is.
Recently, companies have asked the public to spend some money…
Hank |
The Environmental Protection Agency has always been a political beast - it is political appointees accountable to whatever administration is in power, not the electorate. President Richard Nixon created it, that should tell you something.
But the EPA of the current administration has been truly spectacular in its blatant scientization of politics. If the administration wants to penalize natural gas in order to make its $72 billion in squandered green energy corporate welfare look good, the EPA is happy to blame everything on fracking - until a judge orders them to knock it off. And if…
Hank |
For an administration that promised to 'restore science to its rightful place' and that is run by a man who calls himself 'scientist in chief' there is sure a lot of anti-science activity going on. I won't go into all the details, someone was already smart enough to write a whole book about the rampant science denial of progressives, but in everything from editing science reports that don't conclude what he wants to flat out denying his own government scientists when their findings don't match his agenda to refusing to fund biology that could save a lot of lives, like somatic cell nuclear…
There has been much activity in the news by those who have been promoting various ideas on paths to a manned presence on Mars. In some ways the approaches are all similar, except for one where volunteers are sought for a one-way trip to Mars with enough supplies for a sufficient amount of time to become self-sufficient ... or, well, that's too bad, but it was a good try.
The initiative is by a Dutch firm and is called Mars One, with the goal of people to Mars by 2022.
This debate both inside and outside the space community has been raging for decades, and it has reputable people on both…