Science 2.0 fave Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently sent a funny thing
across his Twitter feed:
Q: What do you call Alternative Medicine that survives double-blind laboratory tests?
A: Regular Medicine.
And that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? There's no Big Pharm conspiracy against homeopathy, for example. What multi-national conglomerate wouldn't love to slosh some magic water in a bottle and sell it for 10 bucks or more? It just doesn't work.
If you watched the new "Star Trek" reboot, you had to chuckle when two heroes were plummeting toward terra firma at terminal velocity and were beamed aboard the Enterprise in the nick of time, suffering barely a bump. And that business about hiding behind Titan...okay, maybe that could work.
But that was science fiction, it gets a free pass. Superhero movies, though, had better get it right.
In "Batman Begins", Batman's cape solidifies when a current is passed through it, and it enables him to glide from tall buildings, but that would simply make a big splat, say physicists from the University of Leicester whose paper's press release made it to my inbox just in the nick of time.(1)
How soon after the claim that the Higgs discovery is 'international' did self-loathing Americans and Europeans ridicule the American institutions that issued press releases noting their part in the work?
About a day. The smug intimation was because America did not want to fund the whole LHC completely - understandable given the fiasco of the Superconducting Supercollider - that we somehow 'lost out' on the discovery and made no contributions worth mentioning.
When the only organization who thinks continued funding of your technology is the United Steelworkers union, you may have a business problem.
Gamesa Wind Corporation has announced a layoff of 165 workers at plants in Fairless Hills and Ebensburg, Pa. The United Steelworkers (USW) says non-renewal of the the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which expires on December 31st, 2012, is the problem.
When
I wrote about watching the Higgs discovery, I chided scientists on Twitter for over-reaching regarding what was being said and lauded science journalists for showing some moderation, but that does not mean all journalists could resist being silly. And it doesn't mean all scientists were over-reaching.
I stayed up late (California) to watch the Higgs announcement and posted various thoughts of my own, and comments from the presentations, on my Twitter feed.
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