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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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Quick, have you heard of Professor Curie?  How about Marie Curie?

If you're reading this article, you may have known who I meant with the first one, but how many of you instinctively thought of Pierre Curie, co-discoverer of Polonium and Radium, when I used the term 'professor'?  You all knew the name Marie Curie but to the bulk of the world, one of the most iconic scientists of the 20th century is known instead as "Madame Curie".
Young people always think the previous generations were more conservative, repressed, etc.  Two years ago one young dummy in journalism even referred to 'the more conservative 1970s', which is meaningless to anyone with any knowledge of cultural history. As David Crosby of the pop band "Crosby, Stills And Nash" replied when he was asked the one thing people did not know about the 1960s that he knew; "they happened in the '70s."

Thus you will be forgiven if the think the 1930s were some post-Victorian repressed era because it was 70 years ago or it was during the Depression. Nothing is farther from the truth; if you are a fan of horror movies, it was a golden age, far superior to the modern torture porn we get foisted off on society today. 

For millenia, science and technology have been mobilized toward a Utopian dream; making food so plentiful and cheap poor people could afford to be fat.

Well, they can, and because we have freedom (sort of - some states ban trans fats for your own good) a lot of people are fat; so fat some advocates even insist we should go back to making food too expensive for poor people to eat.  Others contend people should just eat less and keep government out of it.

For people who seek a third alternative, there is the awesome power of science.  Maybe taking a pill would do the trick. 

If you are in the Denver area, I am on KOA 850 radio with Mike Rosen in about one hour - they have an online tool to listen.

Edit: I finally got around and looked for the archive.  You can listen to it here by clicking the little arrow thing on the screen.
A new climate group sought to replicate findings from recent analyses - and did - and Richard Black at the BBC seeks to spin that as stating Phil Jones of East Anglia University needs an apology.

Did anyone really doubt the numbers would match?   While the 'hockey stick' was an unfortunate Frankenstein-ed series of graphs to make a point, the data was not fraudulent, no one says it was (well, no one not a partisan kook) but they instead say that the researchers had a bunker mentality and sought to block freedom of information requests and to pressure contrarian findings out of journals - which the emails showed for anyone to see.
False equivalence was the big deal two weeks ago, with political advocates Googling for evidence that there might be a Republican with a science Ph.D. (and then ostracizing any found, in the name of tolerance and diversity) and generally out to debunk the notion that the left might have its own kooks.