Cosmos, hosted by Science 2.0 fave Dr. Neil Tyson, is wrapping up and it seems to have found its niche.
Its 3,450,000 viewers yesterday is way down from its debut but it is nowhere near the crash-and-burn Seth MacFarlane has just experienced with A Million Ways to Die in the West. The good news is that, like with his western comedy, Cosmos did not have a high budget and people who stuck it out this long are going to buy the DVDs - but it has already made a lot of money.
Imagine this as a business model: You own a large potato farm. You have workers who grow and process the potatoes, you hire people to pay them, you have a sales force to sell them and then you pay trucks to ship them and have people to collect the money. You have fixed and variable costs and you charge enough money to pay those and make a profit. You have created jobs.
The government decides that it wants to encourage everyone to grow potatoes. So they pass a law saying that if people will grow their own potatoes, they will subsidize it using tax dollars generated by other companies and workers. Then they mandate that in order to make growing potatoes appealing to more people, you will have to buy potatoes from individuals at the same price you sell them.
How dare biologists create something not found in nature!
Well, mankind has a lot of experience in trying to keep nature from killing us - the war between man and nature is a grudge match whose history and resentments run deep. When scientists stop trying to keep nature from killing us is when we should worry.
Not horrified by PETA's graphic images of food processing or
titillated by their penchant for exploiting naked women enough to stop eating meat?
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have opened a new front in their culture war;
they have declared that increased Autism Spectrum Diagnoses are due to milk.
The Deadliest Catch details the work travails of Bering Sea crab fishermen, but African wives of fishermen may be having adventures of their own.
The authors of a recent paper estimated that up to 60% of men and 50% of women report extra-marital partnerships in their lifetime - and they believe those numbers are under-reported, especially among women, due to cultural constraints. In reality, range estimates are so broad as to be almost meaningless but even if it's 20% it's a lot.
Friends of the Earth, most famous for being
against nuclear energy and every other bit of modern science and technology, now thinks most scientists are unethical - unless they are hand-picked by Friends Of The Earth.