Urban legend says that alcohol is a social icebreaker - and we want to believe, given our preference for commercials where impossibly attractive young people converge on some beach and all have a fantastic time, which is in contrast to actual beer gatherings
where a lot of fights and arrests occur.(1)
Want to look like this? Drink alcohol. Credit: Shutterstock
Whenever 'the poor' and 'minorities' are invoked in the same headline, it's good to set your skepticism filter extra low or you will likely never get through the first paragraph of an article (umm, including this one) because the issue is rarely science or even policy, it is instead advocacy.(1)
China, as you would expect with all those people, is the world's biggest energy guzzler. They are also the world's biggest polluter.
Nothing wrong with being the biggest energy user, it would be elitist to declare a hard stop on air conditioners now that Chinese people can afford them, but with 75% of that energy coming from coal, which is cheap but dirtier than natural gas, they would like to see about ways to get cleaner. Solar is fine for selling to the West, who happily subsidize it to make Chinese companies rich, but for their own needs fracking is probably the way to go.
Don't like Paul Ryan? You're not alone. When he was an outsider, Democrats gushed over how rational and amazing he was but now that he is a Republican Vice-Presidential contender, all they can talk about is how poorly he dresses.
Funny how you can go from darling of the intelligentsia to pariah in a short amount of time. As I have mentioned before, when he was at Scienceblogs.com and then Wired.com, a few of us used to joke that whatever we wrote was going to end up in a Jonah Lehrer column next week. Now its August of 2012 and even the rumor that Lehrer (who resigned from The New Yorker last month) was back at another Conde Nast publication,
Wired,
got a hasty disclaimer from them.
That's a legendary,
Jayson Blair kind of plummet.
If you've seen the rash of 'open late' advertisements for junk food, you probably thought it was appealing to some long-tail demographic of fat people who absolutely must have a taco at 1 AM.
Nope, and it isn't for the usual 'males ages 18-54' or whatever demographic package advertisers usually go on about. It's stoners.