As Yogi said, "You can observe a lot just by watching."
Science and Technology
Bugged!
Watch out. The next time you step on a bug, you might be costing the taxpayers a couple of million dollars.
In Praise of… “Functional” Technology
Writer Thomas Hayden has made quite a stir in the blogosphere recently with his provocatively titled post “In Praise of Crap Technology” on the site The Last Word On Nothing. Acting as a sort of modern day Martin Luther going up against the seemingly unassailable papal fortress of the Steve Jobs legacy, Hayden eschews high-end toys like the iPhone in favor of cheap, sturdy stuff that actually works. He cites his $20 Coby MP3 player, his Roadace 404 bike, his durable-but-unlovely pair of eyeglasses, and his son’s hand-assembled wooden garbage truck as examples of the “crap” technology he so loves. “I’ve stepped off the escalators of feature creep and planned obsolescence, and all the expense and toxic e-waste that come with them,” he says. “Crap technology, it turns out, is green technology.” Hear-hear, I say. I too am interested in a phone that functions primarily as a device for making and receiving calls. I refuse to buy a Kindle because I think the centuries-old invention of the book works just fine. My go-to guitar is a $100 ($75 on sale) Rogue acoustic that may have been thrown together in China but plays really damn well. Additionally, I have to confess
Prisoners of an Unnecessary Paradox — Left-Right Political Bipolarity As a “Device of Ambidextrous Politics”
The religious impulse seems to be ineradicable in humankind, which explains why so many new "faiths" are always bubbling up.
Getting ‘Expelled’
All atheists aren’t Darwinists, but nearly all Darwinists are atheists. Why? Ben Stein’s film. With Polish subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes 5 seconds.
Get ‘em While They’re Hot — You Have a Month and a Half Left to Buy 100-Watt Edison Light Bulbs
Soon, if the Obama administration has its way, we’ll move seamlessly from the diminished light bulb to the energy-efficient vacuum that will take 90 minutes to clean a carpet that now takes five, and an energy-efficient hair-dryer that will require an hour to dry a head of hair now dried in three — in order to “put more dollars in your pocket” as Secretary Chu likes to say.
Germans Discover Dubious ‘Beauties’ of Going Green—A Glimpse of America’s Future?
In Germany, the Green Party exercises a huge amount of power—and coercion. Their policies sound suspiciously like the energy policy "initiatives" incessantly promoted by the current American political establishment. And their willingness to ignore the scientific, economic, liberty, and aesthetic objections to green mandates are endemic here as well.
The Archbishop of Sydney Gets It — Man-Made “Global Warming” Is Yet to Be Proven
Here's some proof religious people can often speak more wisely about science than many scientists The jury's out, says Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, on what's really happening with the climate, and precipitous action is ill-advised, at best:
"My appeal is to reason and evidence," he says, "and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues."
Any "appeal to the consenual view among qualified scientists . . . is a category error, scientifically and philosophically. In fact, it is also a cop-out, a way of avoiding the basic issues. The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm."
Indeed, "he complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy."
Finally! Heat Wave Explained
Who says scientists aren’t on top of things? This article clears up a long-standing mystery.
Steve Jobs, American Dreamer
By Ben Domenech The career of Steve Jobs exemplifies the American dream. It is jarring that death strikes Jobs at a point so young – at 56, he barely had half the professional years of Edison, Ford, and Carnegie, who all died in their eighties. It means the world will miss out on the latter days of career, whether he would’ve stretched out for more incredible goals, or turned to more philanthropic pursuits. In his time, he touched so many areas of cultural life, not just through consumer products, his effect on communication and education, but also the creation of some of the best films of the past decade. So much work in such a compressed period of time. In the beginning, he seemed so young. And at the end, he seemed old beyond his years. Jobs was and will remain a cult-like figure, the confrontational counterculturalist, the turtlenecked Buddhist who lived in empty mansions. His products bore his imprint in incredible ways—the original iPods had volume and gain problems almost entirely due to Jobs’ personal hearing loss – and his ruthless expectation for perfection in design is evident – that things should not just look beautiful, but work beautifully.
You’re More Likely to Survive a Hurricane If You’ve Got a Fat Wallet
At least, that’s what a study from the Reason Foundation seems to imply: Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact. To that end, it is instructive to examine trends in global mortality (i.e. the number of people killed) and mortality rates (i.e. the proportion of people killed) associated with extreme weather events for the 111-year period from 1900 to 2010. — Indur M. Goklany and Julian Morris With more people than ever before roaming the planet, you’d think there would be more deaths proportionally. However: Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate declined by 98%, largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas: * Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for
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