Most people do not want war in their backyard.  In geopolitics, people claim to love their neighbor but they still prepare to fight; Switzerland, the home of neutrality, still has hundreds of forts built into their mountains and young men are required to own a gun(1). 

Why do clowns freak us out?  And why are robots cute until they look too much like people, and then then they creep us out?

It's our old friend the Uncanny Valley and it basically postulates that the more realistic something gets to a human likeness, the more repulsive it is.  I don't mean like realistic special effects as in "Wrath Of The Titans" - that giant, flaming lava hand of Chronos looks cool - but rather likeness when it comes to humanoids, be they zombies or robots.  

Sometimes Science 2.0 has to swim against the stream. The stream, in this case, has been the long-standing irrational belief that America 'needs' more scientists.

It's no secret that an alarming number of left-wing people hate science - and scientists.  But why do far-left anarchists really hate science, enough to get violent about it? And why don't the right do anything more than be Freedom of Information Act pests?

Sure, more people on the right than on the left deny evolution, but they aren't shooting evolutionary biologists, we just have to be embarrassed that fringe sectarian zealots in backwater counties try to teach children how God planted fossils as some sort of faith-based head fake. There is no physical danger.

But science is deadly if you get a left-wing group after you.

Want to get into a bar fight at a physics conference? Argue that quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes. Or argue the opposite.

A new paper argues that quantum mechanics is close to optimal in terms of its predictive power but even if all the information is available, the outcomes of certain quantum mechanics experiments generally can't be predicted perfectly beforehand. Optimal but unpredictable? The best but often not good enough? Quantum mechanics is a confusing dichotomy, basically the LeBron James of the physics world.