On March 30th, Josh Witten
told us about a new site, The
Jenny McCarthy Body Count. He's apparently not a fan of Jenny, no matter what she looks like. I am not sure I understand that kind of thinking but whatever...
On April 2nd, uber-blogger of Discover
Phil Plait/Bad Astronomer tackled the same issue.
Okay, I am going to do something that will cost me my Republican voter card - I am going to recommend we reopen a government agency, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
As I briefly laid out in
The Science Of Baseball: Coefficients And Happy Haitians, people like home runs though baseball purists don't necessarily think much of them - unless their team gets one.
Important business has taken me out of sunny California and across the country to the slightly warmer March days of Florida; baseball spring training.
I maintain an affection for spring training even though I no longer live in a winter climate where a few days of sunshine after 5 months of cold can truly be appreciated. But I spent my childhood in Florida, in a baseball haven aptly called Dodgertown, so cold climate or not baseball in spring is a necessary ritual. It gives me a reminder I haven't seen my family in a year and spring baseball is somehow both better and worse than regular season baseball, when it becomes more of a business and obviously played by the best of the best.
Discover jumped into science blogging on a national scale last year when they hired the awesome Phil Plait, our favorite Bad Astronomer, to be their anchor and then boosted their credibility when they lured respected journalist Carl Zimmer from Seed Media's Scienceblogs.com property, along with the Cosmic Variance folks and others.
If you're in the racism industry, an icy chill has gone down your spine in 2009, with an African-American president and both major political parties run by black people.
As always, a psychologist will find an answer for how society can do those things and still be racist; it turns out you will be less biased against people of other races in your social group but you will still be prejudiced against people of other races you don't have beer with. Likewise, if you voted for Obama he is not the black person you automatically dislike the way you automatically dislike all other black people.