Living in northern California, I have enjoyed one of the nicest summers I have ever had anywhere.  It's been spectacular.  Of course, climate instability can be a very bad thing - next year it could be heat winds like vorpal blades, dogs and cats living together...real mass hysteria.  But this year was pretty good, since I did not live in the southern or eastern US.

The Champagne region of France is also loving life.  They say climatic shift has made their lives easier and their Champagne better. Recently, the Champagne harvest ran from mid-September to early October, but it has progressively crept earlier, late August through mid-September.

Obama Foodarama, the public portion of the digital archive of record about Obama Administration food and nutrition initiatives from the White House by Eddie Gehman Kohan, has this nifty article on President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama's mark on culinary.  They served homebrewed White House Honey Ale, made with a pound of honey from the White House Beehive, to guests at last year's Super Bowl party. 

Turns out no one, not even Thomas Jefferson, had done it before.  This won't make any campaign speeches in 2012, but it should.

A study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs says what you already knew - if you get drunk and pass out, you are more likely to die in a fire you could easily have escaped, if you weren't hammered drunk and sleeping on the floor.

Bonus: they manage to take shots at smokers too. 

The researchers' recommendation; have a designated house sitter.  Yes, if you are going to pass out drunk, have someone sober staying at the house. Because all sober people want to watch you get smashed.

I thought it was a joke when Alex Berezow of Real Clear Science sent this to me.  You know, someone sets up a spoof site for laughs because the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks naturally lends itself to humor.

Even the .ico file for the subdomain is a big ol' heart - and it is a subdomain so it must be real.

Science 2.0 fave Cam Neylon has some thoughts from a recent conference panel, namely that the thought process did not go beyond the usual "Institutions should do X" stuff.   Obviously we all agree, there would be no Science 2.0 if we waited for the NSF or a university or bloggers to create it.

Stalin hated independence, he hated religion, he hated culture, and he hated 'Girl With An Oar', a statue by Ivan Shadr.

Well, it's a 23 foot tall nude so I imagine plenty of people in the West would hate it too, murderous savage dictators or not.  A gigantic naked chick in Gorky Park in 1934 was a tough sell.

Young people like retro, and that includes young people in Russia, who really know little about the USSR and what it stood for so they have recently embraced it - that's okay, we have idiots in America sporting the hammer and sickle as well.   And young people like sticking it to convention, so it's no surprise they have been fascinated by a giant naked girl Stalin hated and shipped to Siberia.

It is sometimes said that top people in their fields are 'a mile deep and a yard wide' because they lack perspective about the broader world.

Dr. Judit Nadal, 47, director of the Proteomics Facility at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, was politically correct - she was driving an electric car, a blue G-Wiz, when she died.  It basically disintegrated when another car hit it because she pulled into traffic without looking.

Things sure have changed now that a Democrat is in power.  The New York Times, once proud to publish anything that might make Pres. George W. Bush look bad, has criticized WikiLeaks for publishing unredacted U.S. State Department cables, the kind of thing everyone there used to love printing.

The change has been coming for a while.  When the so-called ClimateGate scandal was happening, the New York Times also dismissed the content because it had been illegally obtained, just like every piece of WikiLeaks information.

We keep being told Americans want more government but Gallup polls tell a different story.  What Americans want are more computer companies.

The semiconductor industry, which gets nothing at all from academia, the many overlapping science funding agencies or mandates and subsidies from the government, ranks at the top of 25 business and industry sectors in this new poll.  Yayyy, capitalism.