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.

James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was arrested outside the White House as he joined protesters in urging President Barack Obama to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s $7 billion pipeline.

It's all fine to protest but we have to find out if he took yet another leave of absence to engage in advocacy work.   If climate scientists want to be regarded as trusted guides for complex science issues, they need to stop being kooky shills.  Hansen goes to all of these things because he leverages the NASA brand - he isn't a climate scientist by degree, he is an astrophysicist.

What, no comparisons to Hitler or Nazis?

There are some people, left and right, who are never going to accept climate change, just like there are some people on the left and right who think vaccines are bad for kids.   The percentages skew more toward right for the former and more left for the latter.

But is it constructive to compare them to racists?  

The discovery of a new civilization, named al-Maqar after the site's location, will challenge the theory that the domestication of animals took place 5,500 years ago in Central Asia, said Ali al-Ghabban, Vice-President of Antiquities and Museums at the Saudi Commission for Tourism&Antiquities in Arabia.

The site also includes remains of mummified skeletons, arrowheads, scrapers, grain grinders, tools for spinning and weaving, and other tools that are evidence of a civilization that is skilled in handicrafts.

Josh Rosenau at Scienceblogs tackles some criticism leveled at people who don't think all religious politicians (and voters) should be met with scorn and derision, a la the Richard Dawkins way.

The topic is, of course, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who plays to the fundamentalist base among Republicans by noting that evolution 'has some gaps', a wink to religious folks who don't believe in it at all (though they are few, and nearly as many Democrats, as I noted).

In 1963, Jerry Gretzinger began doodling, a rectangle with a crosshatch that looked like a top down view of a housing plan.   Then he began expanding it until he created an entire fantasy world, composed of nothing but hand-painted maps he has created for no reason at all, other than loving it.

It's alive to him, it changes.

See this amazing story and you'll be wondering just like we all are; "Will Ukrainia be saved?"