I don’t know what it is, but there are tons of interesting articles coming out this week. More than I can possibly right about at right-thinking.
While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.
Lance Amstrong is embracing the anti-vaccine garbage. How disappointing.
God, this sort of ignorant nonsense infuriates me:
If you had $147,000 to spend on scientific research, would you rather try to find a cure for cancer or see whether women get sexually aroused while watching pornography?
Or how about this: How much would you spend to learn whether men or women are more likely to sleep with a stranger?
Or maybe you want to learn whether athlete’s muscles feel more relaxed after getting a massage. Seems kind of obvious, right?
Each of those questions has been studied by academics, and in most cases taxpayers have foot the bill, sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.
“Oftentimes academic researchers will get government grants to do things that you’ve got to wonder: Why are they doing that?” said Merrill Goozner, director of the integrity in science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “There’s plenty of research out there that doesn’t need to be done, and why somebody funds it is one of the great mysteries of life.”
This is an agency that has funding of tens of billions of dollars. It’s funded research is peer-approved (obviously a bad things since 535 lawyers clearly know better which issues should be studied). Read the comments for lots of insight. It’s heartening to see people not cowed by this garbage.
I can think of perfectly valid reasons to study all of these things. Studying porn’s effect on women may provide insight into understanding female sexuality, a subject woefully understudied. Americans spend billions of dollars on massages and it is of scientific interest to see if this actually works.
But never mind. Let’s just publish a hysterical article.
All right, raise your hand if you’re surprised that Prince Charles is an idiot in the way he talks about GM crops. No one? OK. Didn’t think so.
I’m reminded of the words of the Misanthropic Bitch when she spoke about the royal family. We have inbred people in America too; we just confined them to trailer parks and the Springer show.
The Environmental Protection Agency rejected on Thursday a request to cut the quota for the use of ethanol in cars, concluding, for the time being, that the goal of reducing the nation’s reliance on oil trumps any effect on food prices from making fuel from corn.
I am extremely dubious about both the practically and the usefulness of “energy independence”. But this is beyond the pale. The EPA is essentially saying that they don’t care if anyone starves or if tens of millions are pushed into poverty. ADM needs its subsidies, God dammit!
Of all the ideas to combat global warming, Freeman Dyson’s idea of genetically engineered trees that put carbon the ground is among the worst. Apart from the environmental impact and cost, there’s this: what happens when we stop using fossil fuels? That’s right. Those trees keeping pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and we get global cooling.
It’s amazing how dumb really really smart people can be.
I exaggerate not a bit when I describe the prevailing politics of L.A. to be roughly as follows: Wal-Mart and big box stores = evil, and need to be stopped at all costs. Also, we need more cheap supermarkets! Mom and pop stores need to be defended from Big Corporations, unless they sell fried chicken or used tires, or get in the way of a big development project. We have an affordable housing crisis, which is why we need to raise property taxes, limit the footprint of houses on their lots, and bulldoze thousands of affordable houses to make way for schools that we don’t need!
I find this fascinating. Apparently, the gender gap in math achievement has vanished. So much for the idea that men’s brains are more abstract than women’s.
I do think the physical sciences will continue to be heavily male. Because while it is now very clear women have the ability to do effective science, it’s less clear that a career in science is of overwhelming interest to them.
On the other hand, maybe, in time, that will also prove to be false.
I’m fascinated by this map, showing average lifespan. I have no idea how this is measured, so some helping of salt may be in order. There is clearly a pattern of northern states having longer lifespans — which somewhat corresponds to obesity rates. But why does Minnesota have such a long lifespan? What’s with that little squiggle in southern Texas? Or that blob in southwestern Florida?
It’s been a while: