NASA study says that sun is contributing about 0.1 degree of warming to the planet — a fraction of the warming we have seen; NASA study says the trend is cyclical, not increasing. Global Warming Denialist headline? “NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming.”

Whatever gets you through the day, I guess.

The neuroscience of magic is incredibly cool. A must-read.

A great article explored the connection between self-discipline and accomplishment.

Orac takes on Jenny McCarthy again on vaccine. Worth a read at least, although Orac debating science with Miss 36-24-34 is about as even as me playing checkers against my cat.

Hey, it’s not surprise to me that the earliest human sculpture was essentially caveman porn. As Steve said in Coupling, when man invented fire, he didn’t say, “Hey, let’s cook!”, he said, “Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!” Now we know that when sculpting was invented, he also said, “Great! Now we can carry naked bottoms around with us.”

A plot of sin, although I disagree with their methodology in a lot of cases — STD incidence, for example, tracks ignorance better than lust.

The reports that the internet is running out of space seem needlessly hysterical to me. It’s again the fallacy of the unbroken trend and the assumption that human beings will not adapt by improving the infrastructure or by finding more efficient waves of moving information on the internet — or by pricing content and bandwidth more efficiently.

I was cooking up a post on Arne Duncan’s destruction of the DC voucher program. But George Will’s hits the high points:

The president has set an example for his Cabinet. He has ladled a trillion or so dollars (“or so” is today’s shorthand for “give or take a few hundreds of billions”) hither and yon, but while ladling he has, or thinks he has, saved about $15 million by killing, or trying to kill, a tiny program that this year is enabling about 1,715 D.C. children (90 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic) to escape from the District’s failing public schools and enroll in private schools.

The District’s mayor and school superintendent support the program. But the president has vowed to kill programs that “don’t work.” He has looked high and low and — lo and behold — has found one. By uncanny coincidence, it is detested by the teachers unions that gave approximately four times $15 million to Democratic candidates and liberal causes last year.

Not content with seeing the program set to die after the 2009-10 school year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan (former head of Chicago’s school system, which never enrolled an Obama child) gratuitously dashed even the limited hopes of another 200 children and their parents. Duncan, who has sensibly chosen to live with his wife and two children in Virginia rather than in the District, rescinded the scholarships already awarded to those children for the final year of the program, beginning in September. He was, you understand, thinking only of the children and their parents: He would spare them the turmoil of being forced by, well, Duncan and other Democrats to return to terrible public schools after a tantalizing one-year taste of something better. Call that compassionate liberalism.

After Congress debated the program, the Education Department released — on a Friday afternoon, a news cemetery — a congressionally mandated study showing that, measured by student improvement and parental satisfaction, the District’s program works. The department could not suppress the Heritage Foundation’s report that 38 percent of members of Congress sent or are sending their children to private schools.

The failure of the Obama Administration to support the program was a punch in the gut. And it’s telling that, in true government-worshiping fashion, their idea one education is more input. Longer school days and a longer school year.

Which I’m sure delights their campaign contributors no end.

I find this story, if true (check the date stamp), to be utterly fascinating. According to them, a stroke made a woman think she had a third arm.

So much of what we think happens in our eyes, our ears and our limbs actually happens in our brain.

I thought I had posted about the show UFO Hunters but can’t find it in the archives. Short story — while I was home for the holidays, I caught some episodes and it was easily one of the stupid most pseudoscientific shows I’d ever seen. They spent an entire episode making noises about what was obviously an F-16 making a sonic boom. They probed an “impact crater” that was clearly a sinkhole. It was hilarious.

Which is why this story, about some guys faking a UFO incident, warms my heart. It’s completely with clips from UFO Hunters.