Self-righteousness is a form of addiction?  Bags of urine in interstellar commerce? An autism plague?

Astrophysicist, futurist and author David Brin gets interviewed in the Wired Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast and you can read a transcript here.

He goes after George Lucas, the kind of succinct evisceration we all imagine in our minds but lack the clarity to pull off, and clobbers Yoda too: 

Writing on Scientific American blogs, Maria Konnikova makes a point numerous scientists have made, yet one that makes science journalists and many psychologists bristle with irritation.

Say what you want about former President George W. Bush, he was good for science.   Sure, he had a moral position against human embryonic stem cell research, but President Obama has only been different, and no better.   Where they stand apart is funding research.

Supporting science is more than flowery prose.   "Is it what anyone says or is it where money gets spent?" asked astrophysicist and Science 2.0 fave Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's funding, plain and simple and in funding, Republicans are more pro-science than Democrats.

Medical science has done miraculous things - namely saving billions of lives.  But anti-science activists are driving workers who develop new drugs out of research, by attacking them and and smearing them as pedophiles to introduce a 'chilling effect'.

One female Harlan Laboratories worker told the Observer: "When you arrived in the morning, you would have to queue for up to five minutes to get through the gates. Their loudhailers were deafening. They would scream at you that you were a puppy killer and would bang on your car. It was horrible. I was left shaking for hours afterwards."

India suffered the worst blackouts in history this week, leaving over 600 million people without power and providing evidence of deep problems in a sector teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for the second time in a decade.

People with an agenda usually blame cultural stereotypes of black men for why white police officers mistakenly shoot unarmed black suspects more often than white ones during computer  simulations. 

There's just one problem; psychology undergraduates in simulations do the exact same thing. New research points to another factor: how individuals view threats from outside groups, independent of culture or race. Across two studies, participants with strong beliefs about interpersonal threats were more likely to mistakenly shoot members of outside groups versus members of their own groups. 

Two gray literature studies (translation: good enough for the IPCC, but Science 2.0 should be skeptical until they are peer-reviewed) have different answers on how fast the planet is warming. The first,  from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project run by physicist Richard Muller, agrees with earlier findings about the pace of global warming, while the second, by Anthony Watts and colleagues, argues that half of the recent warming in the U.S. is artificial.

Anti-science activists in a war on genetically modified organisms are for more pervasive than right-wing types who limited federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research 10 years ago - because right-wing people just wanted to let taxpayers opt out and left-wing zealots want things banned if it violates their naturalistic world view.

Ireland is, by heritage, a potato culture - and nothing is worse for potatoes than blight.  Who wouldn't want a science solution that could safely prevent blight? Scientists agree, and so does Ireland's environmental protection agency because they understand, you know, science.

Irish anti-science hippies are outraged. 

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical, says Berkeley physics Prof. Richard Muller, who still says that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. He has analyzed some of the most alarmist claims and his skepticism about them hasn’t changed. 

What has changed is his doubt about the very existence of global warming. And he is now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause, he says.