John Stewart at the Oscars last night: "Normally when you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty."

Seeping through - Beauty: An automated multi-instrumental orchestral machine.

Seeping through - Technology: The Pros and Cons of a Google Brain Implant.

Why eating a Big Mac is cheaper than eating a salad.

Follow-up on previous post, an earlier NYT article about Susan Jacoby: 'Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.'

The Dumbing Of America: 'The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse.'

Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight. What she ought to be able to say is, "I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced." But what she will often be told is, "Your problem is better handled within the community."

This is England ?

Ladies and gentlemen of the public and the press... (Text of video here.)

Congress just mandated the production of 36 billion gallons of bio-ethanol for transport fuel by 2022.
But is the current selection of bio-fuels a net good for our planet?
It's complicated, to say the least (and I'm not even getting into the economics of government mandates like that here). Excerpt:

The new studies examine a different part of biofuel equation, and both suggest that the emissions associated with the crops may be even worse than that.

One analysis looks at land that is switched to biofuel crop production. Carbon will be released when forests are felled or bush cleared, and longer-term emissions created by dead roots decaying.

This creates what Joseph Fargione of The Nature Conservancy and colleagues call a "carbon debt". Emissions savings generated by the biofuels will help pay back this debt, but in some cases this can take centuries, suggests their analysis.

If 10,000 square metres of Brazilian rainforest is cleared to make way for soya beans – which are used to make biodiesel – over 700,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide is released.

The saving generated by the resulting biodiesel will not cancel that out for around 300 years, says Fargione. In the case of peat land rainforest in Indonesia, which is being cleared to grow palm oil, the debt will take over 400 years to repay, he says.

Super Tuesday woke me from my mild election stupor a little bit, and I paid more attention to the primaries since I found out Ron Paul was a little too skeptical on evolution and finally convinced me he was crazy...
I watched some returns, saw CNN make some early predictions, and got to hear Huckabee, Romney, and Clinton preach to their choirs a bit.
Interesting similarities between Clinton and Romney - both talking about responsibility in the same breath as promising a new bevy of goodies for us. Romney says we shouldn't look to Washington to solve all our problems just before offering to do so. Hillary talks about fiscal responsibility before listing a bunch of programs more expensive than anything in American history.
Call me skeptical about these solve all problem attitudes...

Wow, these Biblical charts are great!

February 10: Anon protests Scientology IRL. More here.

Anonymous vs. Scientology.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent.

Part of the Problem: According to the Beverage Marking Corporation, carbonated soft drinks account for one-third of total U.S. beverage consumption--more than bottled and tap water combined. A recent Boston University study (with 10 years of data collection) suggests that middle-aged individuals who drink one or more sodas per day were twice as likely to develop "metabolic syndrome"--a set of risk factors leading to heart disease and diabetes. (PDF link to Cleveland Clinic Magazine.)

Harry Shearer: 'The theft of US nuclear secrets, the diverting of them to Pakistan (and, according to Edmonds, Saudi Arabia), the involvement of Israel in the scheme -- all of these would justify as jaw-droppingly newsworthy in a rational journalistic universe. Clearly, that's not where we live.'

Aside from my concerns of claustrophobia, catching strange airborne diseases, sinking, questionable labor practices, food consumption logistics and freshness, and my complete failure to grasp the appeal of cruise ship vacations, there's another thing to worry about: sewage.

Norway is attempting to go "carbon neutral" by 2030 by reducing emissions at home and investing abroad in environmental projects that will give the country CO2 reduction credits.

'Like other impoverished urban neighborhoods, Clay/Arsenal was entirely devoid of good quality food stores, and their residents experienced hunger, obesity, and diabetes at rates that were two to three times the national average. This group was comprised exclusively of Hispanic and African American residents. ... the group expressed an immediate consensus that fresh, inexpensive food -- the food they generally preferred -- was unavailable in their neighborhood. Everyone agreed that traveling to a full-line supermarket was a hassle because it required one or two long bus rides or an expensive taxi fare.'

Jim Kunstler is a cynical poet: 'On the ground out in the heartland, in the anxiety-drenched, over-valued beige subdivisions of California and the ennui-saturated pastel McHousing tracts of Florida (not to mention the pathetic vinyl outlands of Cleveland and Detroit) a mighty keening welled forth as mortgage rates adjusted upward, and loans stopped "performing," and "for sale" signs failed to turn up buyers, and sheriff's deputies showed up with the rolls of yellow foreclosure tape, and actual ownership of the re-poed collateral entered a legal twilight zone somewhere north of the Florida State Teacher's Pension Fund and south of the Norwegian Municipal Councils' investment portfolios. What a mighty goddam mess was left out there by the boyz at the Wall Street genius desks, who engineered a magical system for eliminating risk from the capital markets -- only to see it leak back in from a million holes and seams and collapse the greatest bubble ever blown.'

'A new survey of U.S. adults who don't go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists." But just as many (72%) also say the church is "full of hypocrites."'

Chinese farmers are launching aggressive protests against polluting factories.

A simple exhortation:

Don't we all love arbitrary milestones? Turns out the 'historic' event of a $100 per barrel oil price was caused by a single trader on a vanity mission.

Actual analysis of the differences in the policies - both proposals, and even outlook - between Obama and Clinton. Shocking! Actual analysis of candidates ideas!

Abstinence and gun safety: "We don't want them to actually KNOW how to use them. Someone might get hurt!"

Peace on Earth? Impossible.

It's the end of the year, what happens next year prediction time... or is it recap time?

Who pays for the government, and who benefits? Two posts from the exceptional economics blog Marginal Revolution tackle this.

Mathematicians have developed a model that explains traffic jams which occur with no apparent cause:

"The team developed a mathematical model to show the impact of unexpected events such as a lorry pulling out of its lane on a dual carriageway. Their model revealed that slowing down below a critical speed when reacting to such an event, a driver would force the car behind to slow down further and the next car back to reduce its speed further still.

The result of this is that several miles back, cars would finally grind to a halt, with drivers oblivious to the reason for their delay. The model predicts that this is a very typical scenario on a busy highway (above 15 vehicles per km). The jam moves backwards through the traffic creating a so-called ‘backward travelling wave’, which drivers may encounter many miles upstream, several minutes after it was triggered."