Tonight on “Tech Nation”, Dr. Moira Gunn spoke with the Chairman and CEO of Invitrogen, Greg Lucier [1]. Mr. Lucier spent his time speaking out about the importance of public funding of science. Despite his position in a private company, he advocated that more public money needs to be spent […]
Politics
277 posts
AIDS. It’s a great equalizer. Transmitted by body-fluid-to-body-fluid contact (by needle sharing, or sexual contact), the HIV virus can lay dormant for years before finally suppressing the human immune response and inducing AIDS. Typically, victims die from usually harmless diseases against which they have no defense. It is an entirely […]
Today, the Supreme Court ruled on a number of cases that have piled up as its current term comes to an end. One of the issues the court ruled on today was whether funding President Bush’s “faith-based programs initiative” is a constitutional use of taxpayer money. The court didn’t rule […]
It’s been quite a week for federal funding of science. There has been movement on the energy bill, which is critical to also funding fundamental science. The most news-grabbing event of the week was, of course, the second stem cell bill veto by the President in as many years. I […]
A friend of mine recently sent me a summary of a relevant portion of H.R. 2641, the FY2008 House Energy and Water Appropriations bill. In the more common tongue, this is the budget proposal from Congress for the Department of Energy, an agency that funds much of the U.S. basic […]
I’ve been quiet again lately – take that as a sign that there has been a lot of physics to do. However, I’m compelled to jot a few things down after the barrage of messages coming out of Washington today. One of the first things that we teach each other […]
Tonight, on the Lehrer News Hour, Bjorn Lomberg was interviewed about climate change. Mr. Lomberg accepts climate change, but doesn’t buy the argument that we have to reverse it. He thinks we should also be trying to adapt to it. Of course, from a purely evolutionary viewpoint he is right. […]
Last year, right-wing pundit and flapping head Ann Coulter published a book entitled “Godless”. In it, she raised yet again the tired accusations that all Democrats are godless politicians, hell-bent (is that the right phrase?) on creating a society that crushes religion out of every private life. Sigh. Of course, […]
In the spirit of Senator Inhofe’s definition of alarmists as “scientists who support the evidence for human-induced global climate change”, I propose that physicists who support the Standard Model as an acceptable description of nature be called “alarmists”. That makes string theorists, supersymmetrists, MONDians, “skeptics”. Now, doesn’t that sound silly? […]
Over a year ago, The State Board of Education of Kansas revised science education standards, and admitted supernatural causation as part of science. This was part of a concerted effort by so-called socially conservative members of the board to revise science standards to make them more religiously correct. Science is […]
Inevitably, when the weight of evidence starts to crush the ribcage of your opinion, liquifying its organs and causing massive internal hemorrhaging, opinion starts to cry for momma. That seems to be what’s happening now, concerning much of the U.S. opinion on the “reality” of human-induced global climate change. This […]
Today, Secretary Bodman came out in defense of U.S. policy toward global climate change. He said that the U.S. spends more on this issue than the rest of the world combined (not sure on what we’re spending it, I am afraid – barely anybody even knows there’s an office of […]