Science & Society
Hank |
There are times when being a communist dictatorship has its advantages. Without having to worry about jobs or elections, you can enact a plan and stick to it until it works and, if a million or so peasants get displaced to build a dam, they don't vote anyway.
China recently announced the world’s fastest supercomputer, bullet train and completion of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam. In addition, they mapped out plans for a new space station and satellites for Mars.
What has the US done? Scrapped plans to Mars and replaced it with a visit to an asteroid. …
The Climate Insiders - Their Goal Is Doubt
I BRING fraternal greetings from the Mother of Parliaments to the Congress of your “athletic democracy”. I pray that God’s blessing may rest upon your counsels.Viscount Christopher Monckton.Testimony to The Energy&Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives,Washington, DC, Wednesday, 25 March, 2009. http://energycommerce.house.gov/.../testimony_monckton.pdf
The bringing of "fraternal greetings from the Mother of Parliaments" is only possible if one is a Member of Parliament or a member of the House of Lords. Since Viscount…
antunes |
This week I agree to give an invited talk at the AGU, soldered some more of my satellite, advised a student, gave several short lectures, and edited some papers. All of these are things professors get paid for-- except the editing. Yet, ironically, the editing was my only paying work.
I am a reverse professor. I do many of the career tasks an academic does, but I only get paid for the private sector component. And that's the part that a 'true academic' would do for free.
In practice, this means I have traded any form of job stability for complete academic freedom.…
«There are two main ways in which policymakers are insidiously interfering with the usual rules of supply and demand for raw materials, and myriad different smaller ones. . . . One is the policy of ultra-cheap money in advanced economies to fight the economic crisis; and the other, more commodity-specific one, is massive public subsidy for the production of bio-fuels. Food is being elbowed out by pursuit of "clean fuel". »So writes Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor of the Telegraph, in an article entitled
The Fed is fuelling the catastrophe of fast rising raw material prices
Now one may…
The USA Science&Engineering Festival ended on Sunday October 24th, after six months of working us all 24/7. But it was worth it. We had more than 500,000 people come through and on the lawn of the National Mall on Sunday I overheard a parent telling her five year-old, "Yes we can stay all day. And you can see all the robots."
Kind of like a science Disneyland, minus the bored actors and plus hundreds of college students and grown-ups explaining why planes fly, why NASCAR goes at such fast speeds, hands buried deep in green goo that represented something scientific. I just thought the…
On the day after Squid Day, I got mail from the publishing company Immedium*, letting me know they'd just come out with a new children's book: Sid the Squid and the Search for the Perfect Job. It might be of interest to me and my readers. Would I like to preview a pdf?
Flattered beyond all reason by the suggestion that I have "readers," and obsessed as I am with both squids and literature, I answered with a swift affirmative. (Apparently I was not the only cephaloblogger thus recruited.)
On the first page, we meet our hero: "Sid was a giant squid who lived in the depths of the…
Let it be clear on this publically, to show I am not kidding: there is a scientology ad on the right column today. If that is not gone by tomorrow from here, I will.
I get unsolicited mail:
ProEvo: Pro Evolution - Guideline for an Age of Joy
Being on a variety of evolution vs creationism mailing lists, I wasn't initially surprised to receive an apparently evolution-related book in the mail. I'd never heard this author, someone going by the name of Tomotom, so I flipped to the back cover to see what this thing was about.
There I found the most prestigious set of anonymous blurbs I've ever encountered on a book cover. A number of famous people and institutions went on record endorsing this book. Prof. Dr. L. K. (world-famous scientist) called ProEvo "an…
Wait. Which one?
Three, yes three, separate books with kraken in the title came out this year:
China Mieville's Kraken, fiction of the New Weird literary movement. I understand it does legitimately contain a giant squid. Comes highly recommended by an English major friend of mine.
HP Newquist's Here There Be Monsters: The Legendary Kraken and the Giant Squid, apparently a chronological account of giant squid in myth and science over the years. No personal recommendations one way or another.
Wendy Williams' Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid, a tale of…
Think feminists are angry? Many zealots in any movement come across as bitter to outsiders but Professor Germaine Greer is giving a talk at the Literary Leicester Festival at the University of Leicester and intends to discuss what enormous fun she has had being a fearless international feminist icon and an academic through four decades of change - witnessing the change from the vaguely "Mad Men" period of the '60s, through the bizarre unisex beliefs of the '70s to today, where women get more PhDs than men but still like to have doors opened for them.
As an author, Germaine Greer…