People may complain about tax breaks for successful energy companies but the one thing worse is spending real money on lousy ones. Yet it has happened because advocacy is taking precedence over science.
The recent Solyndra LLC collapse is not the first time this has happened, nor can it be blamed solely on the Obama administration simply due to his zeal for alternative energy - the Department of Energy began the loan guarantee program in 2006 when there was a Republican Congress and a Republican senate and in 2005 the wasteful ethanol subsidies and mandates were put into law.
Apollo 11 and giant leaps for mankind get all the love now but the missions leading up to it brought their own excitement - and a mystery.
In May 1969, two months before man walked on the Moon, Commander Thomas Stafford, Command Module Pilot John Young and Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan made a 'dummy' run and successfully returned from the Moon and landed their Apollo 10 command module, dubbed 'Charlie Brown', in the ocean, after setting a still-existing human speed record of 25,000 MPH. They basically did everything except land on the Moon.
Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that causes urethritis and pelvic inflammatory disease. Before AIDS, this was what you got for having promiscuous, unprotected sex with many anonymous partners in a consequence-free environment (a period known as "The 1970s" yet often assumed to be the '60s) and when you contracted it you took some antibiotics and then it was back to Studio 54.
2012 is coming and, with it, kooky end-of-the-world fables.
If the Asgardian calendar and its earthquakes doesn't get us, maybe the Mayans will. Some people even like to combine Doomsday prophecies - the LHC might bring the end of the world
by opening a black hole and out pop Mayans armed with strangelet-powered weapons.
Twitter, in its quest to supplant Facebook among literate people and stave off a threat (or not) from GooglePlus, seems to have recently made some changes to its image utility - namely, you can now see images you have Tweeted before.
That's good. Maybe it has been around for a while, I have no clue, I never use the actual Twitter.com interface because it is horrid. Yet GooglePlus is pretty terrible also and they do not have an open API yet, which basically put Twitter on the map, because the user base could improve the Twitter experience by bypassing it. No one can figure out Facebook.
Far be it from me to consider anything designated by Oprah Winfrey as, perhaps, maybe, not always evidence-based, but I had always hoped some skepticism was in order yet consistently instead found Oprah viewers were not only ready to believe, they were willing to migrate to other shows and believe there also.