What do science media and politics of 2013 share in common with 2006?

Anti-science beliefs among the public? Check.
Scientists willing to call them out? Check.
Scientists and science media noting the common political affiliation of anti-science offenders?  Not check.

The anti-GMO movement has far more representation on the left than the anti-hESC contingent ever had on the right. Ditto for evolution. Only global warming comes even close.

Alerted by a link on Real Clear Science, I turned to an article on Slate.com, namely

Felony Science

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot’s curiosity was apparently piqued when a friend told her that if you mixed hydrochloric acid and aluminum, an exciting reaction happened. . . . . . She was expelled from school and now faces felony charges.

Social and evolutionary psychology studies get a large share of media attention despite being primarily based on surveys of psychology undergraduate students.

It was only a matter of time before others mimicked that process to add their own claims of scientific validity - and so Burger King has taken its war with McDonald's to a new level with a study finding that men who prefer grilled burgers are considered more attractive than men who like 'em fried.

How To Build A Perpetual Magnet Woo Generator

    "The general public sees perpetual motion inexactly. Probably they view each machine as a special case. The physicist or engineer, on the other hand, is very precise and classifies perpetual motion machines according to which law of thermodynamics they violate."

Kevin T. Kilty

Riff-Raff = Woo

In light of some recent posts that have introduced an increasingly diverse set of viewpoint through music links, I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of music surfaces.  So, I don't have any specific criteria, except that whatever song you post it should be one that has somehow impacted your thinking, or been something you consider influential on yourself.

Perhaps it will introduce some new music to people, or help in conducting an informal study about what the general themes are that people post.

I'll begin with four that I have always felt were a significant influence [yeah ... today is a Rundgren kind of day].

Trouble Coming Every Day
Lyrics

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is distancing itself from the the American Psychiatric Association and its upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

While they acknowledge that the goal of DSM "is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology" they are no longer convinced that approach has value if we are going to solve 21st century cognitive science problems.  It is, paraphrasing the statement  of Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, more of a dictionary than a manual.  He uses the term "Bible" instead of 'manual' but I would have used 'glossary' rather than 'dictionary'.

Is Google On The Level?

I have often complained about the way that Google search behaves.  For instance, try looking up the capacitance of a lead-acid battery.  Good luck with that - Google positively insists that you ought to want to search for capacity.

"A detailed study of four-jet hadronic events at LEP 1.5 has been reported by the ALEPH collaboration. From selected four-jet events, the invariant masses of jet pairs are computed, and out of the three jet combinations, the one with the lowest difference in jet-pair masses is retained. [...] Not only is the total number of four-jet events observed by ALEPH at 130-140 GeV larger than expected from QCD, but this excess is contained in a narrow window around 105 GeV for the sum of jet-pair masses. In this window, about two times the width of the estimated resolution, nine events are observed with only 0.8 events expected from QCD."

J.Mnich, "Recent Results from LEP", SLAC XXIV Summer Institute, 1996.

This is another of my poems for children of all ages.

It is very fortunate for me that the grammar police have never been issued with tazers.
.
.
.
.
Paddles At The Beachside

The rains is gone
the sand are dry
The sun is shone
the bird is fly.

The wavies flow
just like heart beat
I think we go
and paddle our feet.




Image courtesy: Trevor Edwards (Lucky Trev) Sheppey Pictures And Postcards.

Last weekend I participated in a chess tournament in Mogliano. This year the event was not as strong a tournament as this used to be - only 24 players, two of them international masters.  Anyway there was room for fun, since the time control was of 90 minutes for the whole game, with 30 second increments per move. This fostered a livelier play with lots of blunders especially during the second half of the games: of course the quality of the games was low with so little time to think, and younger players were favoured with respect to older ones like myself.