Comment Re:America's Dumbest Congressman (Score 1) 347
Esquire? Well, I am sold. They do know who looks smart.
Comment so? (Score 1) 347
It's not usually customary to invite those under investigation to the investigation... or did I miss something? They are not on trial. What's being looked into is whether the overall process is broken. That's a behavioral question. Maybe they could have invited some psychologists, economists or ethisists to the inquiry. But why invite the scientists who are under the investigation?
Comment Re: The question is (Score 1) 416
Why would getting a reactor into orbit be particularly difficult and why would it be difficult to design one that doesn't kill the crew?
I'll assume that you're thinking it will irradiate them, but with no need to carry any propellant for the trip, there is suddenly a huge allowance for shielding for the reactor. That sort of addresses the second point, too.
Comment Re:Scientifically driven politics (Score 1) 347
This gives me an idea...
Let's hold a hearing on scientifically driven politics, and don't invite the politicians!
Better still, let's just leave out the politicians altogether. Only problem is, then suddenly scientists would become politicians.
"scientifically driven politics"?
No, I don't think such a meeting would have scientists either. It would all be science fiction writers.
Comment Re:Money! (Score 1) 347
That makes little sense. If money is what you're after, the very LAST thing you should do it try to dig into climate change. Let alone finding proof for it. If money is what you want, you should slap together some research in a field that is under less scrutiny and where there are bigger stakeholders willing to pump money your way as long as you prove them right. Genetically altered crops, and how safe they are would be a great field. Less controversy and big players with deep pockets that would certainly love to have "scientifically proven" how their stuff is great for you and your health.
Comment Re:Scientifically driven politics (Score 2) 347
You mean sanity and logic in politics? Laws that make sense and are rooted in reality instead of panic?
No, we can't have that! That could be sensible, and we can't have that in our legislative.
Comment So, essentially, (Score 2) 49
It's the same kind of self-censorship going on that we have here. With the difference that here you're just being inconvenienced 'til you go out of business or bend over instead of being shot, of course. So, yes, we're still "more free" than them.
But it's also a reminder that "more" is not necessarily more than "much"...
House Panel Holds Hearing On "Politically Driven Science" - Without Scientists 347
sciencehabit writes: Representative Louie Gohmert (R–TX) is worried that scientists employed by the U.S. government have been running roughshod over the rights of Americans in pursuit of their personal political goals. So this week Gohmert, the chair of the oversight and investigations subpanel of the U.S. House of Representatives' Natural Resources Committee, held a hearing to explore "the consequences of politically driven science." Notably absent, however, were any scientists, including those alleged to have gone astray.
Comment Re:Suicide mission (Score 1) 1097
As if that was any different here. Even if dressed more nicely, the US justice system is still built on revenge.
Comment Re:All the devout know.. (Score 1) 1097
72 virgins... sounds like a LAN party of the late 90s.
Why Scientists Love 'Lord of the Rings' 179
HughPickens.com writes: Julie Beck writes in The Atlantic that though science and fantasy seem to be polar opposites, a Venn diagram of "scientists" and "Lord of the Rings fans" have a large overlap which could (lovingly!) be labeled "nerds." Several animal species have been named after characters from the books, including wasps, crocodiles, and even a dinosaur named after Sauron, "Given Tolkien's passion for nomenclature, his coinage, over decades, of enormous numbers of euphonious names—not to mention scientists' fondness for Tolkien—it is perhaps inevitable that Tolkien has been accorded formal taxonomic commemoration like no other author," writes Henry Gee. Other disciplines aren't left out of the fun—there's a geologically interesting region in Australia called the "Mordor Alkaline Igneous Complex," a pair of asteroids named "Tolkien" and "Bilbo," and a crater on Mercury also named "Tolkien."
"It has been documented that Middle-Earth caught the attention of students and practitioners of science from the early days of Tolkien fandom. For example, in the 1960s, the Tolkien Society members were said to mainly consist of 'students, teachers, scientists, or psychologists,'" writes Kristine Larsen, an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University, in her paper "SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science." "When you have scientists who are fans of pop culture, they're going to see the science in it," says Larson. "It's just such an intricate universe. It's so geeky. You can delve into it. There's the languages of it, the geography of it, and the lineages. It's very detail oriented, and scientists in general like things that have depth and detail." Larson has also written papers on using Tolkien as a teaching tool, and discusses with her astronomy students, for example, the likelihood that the heavenly body Borgil, which appears in the first book of the trilogy, can be identified as the star Aldebaran. "I use this as a hook to get students interested in science," says Larson. "I'm also interested in recovering all the science that Tolkien quietly wove into Middle Earth because there's science in there that the casual reader has not recognized."
"It has been documented that Middle-Earth caught the attention of students and practitioners of science from the early days of Tolkien fandom. For example, in the 1960s, the Tolkien Society members were said to mainly consist of 'students, teachers, scientists, or psychologists,'" writes Kristine Larsen, an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University, in her paper "SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science." "When you have scientists who are fans of pop culture, they're going to see the science in it," says Larson. "It's just such an intricate universe. It's so geeky. You can delve into it. There's the languages of it, the geography of it, and the lineages. It's very detail oriented, and scientists in general like things that have depth and detail." Larson has also written papers on using Tolkien as a teaching tool, and discusses with her astronomy students, for example, the likelihood that the heavenly body Borgil, which appears in the first book of the trilogy, can be identified as the star Aldebaran. "I use this as a hook to get students interested in science," says Larson. "I'm also interested in recovering all the science that Tolkien quietly wove into Middle Earth because there's science in there that the casual reader has not recognized."
Comment Re:Yawn. (Score 4, Funny) 62
Well, 50 shades of green.
Comment Re:Until... (Score 1) 317
those putting in solar are just blowing money.
Unless Solar provides another benefit that can actually be worth more than the added cost, for example: backup power to run the building if the aerial wires connecting the grid get taken down by bad weather or other act of nature during/after a natural disaster.
Comment Re:Wow ... (Score 1) 263
The legacy Unix system, was expensive due to the fact that it required high end hardware. NT would run on your consumer PC as well. So Unix systems did work better because of the whole architecture not just the OS.
Nope. It was just worse. When I was in telecoms we tried to build a "router" (big iron) on our own custom hardware, with full vendor support (as in source code if we wanted it), based on windows NT instead of Solaris. (And of course we built the hardware to suit the OS/application. Not the other way around).
Crashed and burned leaving not as much as a flake of soot behind. Couldn't be done. What the Redmond people told us turned out to be simply not true as in "didn't work the way it was documented to work". And nothing much else worked either.
So, building on VAX/VMS worked. Industrial strength. Building on Unix/Solaris (and a few others), worked as well. Also industrial strength. WIndows NT. Not even close.
Today it's based on. You guessed it; Linux.
.
Comment Re:Transphobic assholes (Score 2) 161
Once Bruce Jenner is done transitioning, do you think it would not be considered both insulting and exploitative to make a statue of how he used to look?
If the statue was for something he did before the change, it would be odd if it didn't.
You don't go around aging statues either just because the people they portrait has aged and changed.
