Earlier this year, the US government opened a new front in its war with China over solar panel manufacturing - tariffs designed to close the gap between U.S. and Chinese labor costs.

Tariffs don't work, we have known that since the Depression of the 1930s was prolonged due to economic tinkering and boosting tariffs. Creating higher costs for a non-essential product, especially a non-essential product for a market that is only in existence due to government subsidies, drives down demand.

The day after the American presidential election, the U.S. International Trade Commission voted to saddle Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd. with a tariff of 35.97% on their silicon module imports from China, which are made by the parent company.  

Marriage counseling is so 20th century.  The 21st century may belong to relationship neuroinformaticians because they can create a mathematical model for efficient communication in your love life. 

The dynamics of love can look like a sine wave, with smooth, repetitive highs and lows.  That's probably not too bad.  We certainly try for a flat line but that is difficult to achieve.  What you want to avoid is having your other half begin to vibrate weirdly. When that happens, couples oscillate without any harmony, the waves go out of control and soon you are forced to get back down to dating weight.

We all love paradoxes, those seemingly consistent logical brain-teasers where we sort out what can and should and might and must happen and that invariably lead to self-contradictory arguments.

If you are like me and my friends, there is nothing you enjoy more than sitting around during half-time of the Steelers game and arguing over Maxwell's Demon - the many ways to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely that heat transfer happens, from warmer to colder, until equilibrium is reached.  If I put an ice pack next to Ben Roethlisberger's blazing hot 145 third down QBR (Total Quarterback Rating), for example, the ice pack will not cool down, it will warm up.  So it has always been, so shall it must be. It is common sense. 

Sometimes when things catch the attention of the kookier segments of the public, they really take off. Fracking is a good example.  Though it's been around since the 1940s, once it got really popular people started inventing fake illnesses to get into the mainstream media Scare Journalism of the Week pieces.

The most startling thing to me about the election of 2012 was how spookily accurate polls were.  Social scientists in one camp want to dismiss determinism while the other camp has biology-envy but either the deterministic side got a big boost on Tuesday or the opposing sides in this election were so entrenched there was virtually no reason to vote, other than to see who had the best Get Out The Vote campaign. As I discussed in How Accurate Are Those Political Polls?, that is where the magic happens.  Could polls predict how successful a Get Out The Vote campaign is?

Maybe. I know one party is scrambling to see what went wrong.

Energy companies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are required to buy some solar power each year. 

They are required to overpay for that solar power.

In return for overpaying, they get Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) which let them  pass the extra cost onto local families and taxpayers.