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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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If I ask a science audience to guess, off the tops of our collective heads, which state would hold an irrational science position that was not only boneheaded but downright dangerous to each other and all of America, would you guess Alabama or Washington?

Alabama is the South and everyone in wealthier northern and western states equate that with stupid - but highly educated, wealthy, progressive, organic-loving Washington state thinks that Big Pharma is is exploiting the American children and those of us who got our kids vaccinated are just part of the stupid bourgeois without any intellectual independence or healthy skepticism.    Alabama just accepts the science.
People still believe in secret societies because there are secret societies - some groups just don't want attention, even if they do anonymous charity work - but secret cabals that control a nation or the world are irrational, yet belief in them persists.

Go ahead, ask some left wing kook about George Bush and they will trail off into gibberish about the Skull&Crossbones and list all all these other people that were in it, as if being in a dinner group made them successful as opposed to being smart enough to get into an Ivy League school.   Really, if I am believing some secret Yale cabal is controlling America, I am going with The Whiffenpoofs.   Nothing else explains the popularity of "Glee".
"Physicists seek simplicity in universal laws. Ecologists revel in complex interdependencies. Together, these two approaches may help solve the problems of global warming," wrote John Harte, professor at Berkeley, in Physics Today.

Republicans are more skeptical of global warming than Democrats yet about the same when it comes to acknowledging climate change.   And global warming skeptics conserve energy just as much as believers.
Othar Hansson, Software Engineer at Google.com writes:

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Today we're beginning to support authorship markup -- a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.
Sydney Morning Herald columnist Richard Glover jokes it is time to put a special mark on global warming skeptics - I assume he is joking, since he recognizes that is a little too Nazi creepy even for a progressive.

But he doesn't like their intransigence and outright denial.   He doesn't like the climate change fetishists all that much other - the ones hoping the world will be ruined so they can be right.  
Not that the other side isn't frustrating. There's a type of green zealot who appears to relish climate change. Every rise in sea levels is noted excitedly. Every cyclone is applauded and claimed as a noisy, deadly witness for their side.
Americans spend what I consider a long time getting breakfast, though nutritionists say it is "the most important meal of the day" - 13 minutes a day, it turns out.   I say a long time because mine takes 30 seconds; during the week I eat Raisin Brain or some wheat things or whatever else my wife purchased that doesn't have hearts, moons or diamonds.(1)