For a look at what really happened to America's jobless when manual labor jobs disappeared, check out a collaborative NPR Planet Money/This American Life expose on this invisible economy: "Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America" The program's podcast "Trends with benefits" is well worth listening to.
In summary, what happens is that manual labor jobs disappear from small American towns and they're replaced with lawyer and bureaucratic desk jobs in large cities, state capitals and Washington D.C. A look at trends in unemployment during the great recession gives us a glimpse of this. But Americans on disability don't appear in any labor department unemployment or employment statistics. What's more, people on disability almost never get off the program. Unlike welfare, people on disability are discouraged from working, their kids are discouraged from doing well in school. Even in comparison the obvious economic mess made by programs to promote debt until death (aka mortgage), the non-productive trillions in the derivative economy, this 200+ billion dollar hole in the US economy is significant specifically because of its social fallout. Uncovering this is the first step in adjusting our economy to a new reality of labor and employment.

Look at this little planet Earth, its moon is HUGE. Only Jupiter and Saturn have bigger moons. Luna is nearly as big as Mercury, half as big as Mars but its home planet hasn't colonized it. Obviously there's no intelligent life there. Let's claim them both for the queen of the galactic empire.

Obama's plan is beyond daft. Asteroids are unstable, there is no place to hide from cosmic radiation or Bremstralung X-rays from solar wind. A mission failure in the lunar capture plan could lead to a global disaster. Could Columbus and Magellan have discovered the New World before they had ever sailed the Mediterranean? Could the Polynesians have found Hawaii and New Zealand if they weren't already experienced navigators amongst the nearby islands of Polynesia? What if the first of England had decided to capture Sumatra and bring the entire island home for the British crown before the British Navy had ever ventured as far as Ireland, would you have considered that to be a good plan? Its better than Obama's plan.

I think you mean that this doctor's careful observation published in the British medical journal and cited by the NIH is not a large double-blind peer-reviewed study of the sort that the likes of Merck can afford to commission for such things as its propecia baldlness "cure" (now known to cause permanent side-effects). Are you saying that off-label usage by AMA-approved doctors has not been made with weaker evidence than this? What about Lipitor and other statins? Medi-pushers commission studies to prove statins lower cholesterol. And because cholesterol is an easy to measure stat for the insurance industry, few bothered to study whether these drugs actually reduce the risk of heart disease, strokes and death. The stats are all that matters so taking a cue from Lance Armstrong, pharmabusiness earns millions of dollars on health statistic fakery that would make Lance Armstrong blush.

I like Feynman's definition: Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself, for instance that we already know everything about the connection between our mind and bodies which has evolved for hundreds of thousands of years should be completely discarded in favor of the medical industry's latest pill.

At first I was going to ignore this post as a simple troll or respond in kind but I see that there is something more here. Your attitude is widely held in the American medical industry and is one of the reasons billions of excess dollars are spent with shorter lifespans and lower quality-of-life than much of the developed world.

I don't know who you think I am. I've always advocated that the best scientific and medical research should be applied along with a healing tool that is millions of years older. You and many in the medical profession seem to be stuck in an unquestioning and blind faith in current medical technology. This arrogance is the opposite of science and impedes scientific progress. This lack of respect for the complexity of the biochemical entity previously known as "a patient" is responsible for far more pain and death than even the worst of non AMA-approved faith-healers.

Modern medical science isn't terribly far ahead of the placebo effect when it comes to many chronic diseases including advanced pancreatic cancer. It's reasonable to try to separate the efficacy of a new medicine from the efficacy of psychosomatic healing when qualifying a drug. But to ignore the later entirely is not good medicine. Here is a graphic example of the effect of hypnosis on Congenital Ichthyosiform Erythodermia, a disease which did not respond to any recognized treatment and is barely touched by modern medicine. It was considered to be incurable and yet substantial and long-lasting healing took place 5 days after a hypnotic suggestion specifically on the side of the body suggested by the hypnotist. And yes, potatoes really do cure warts if your child believes they do.

Probably any of the cheap Chinese imports you find on Ebay but don't buy one. Unscrupulous con artists remove the InfraRed filter so a laser power meter shows it as being "bright", hoping the buyer is ignorant of the fact that most of that brightness is in invisible but damaging wavelengths.

They'll probably do what the MPAA did to retiree Fred Lawrence when he was sued over $600,000 for 4 movies his grandkid downloaded that the kid already owned! First knock the fine down to the point where it only bankrupts her (not several times over, only fair ya' know.) Then make her into RIAA's "community service" slave warning others not to do what she did.

Light pollution is a clear and easy to understand example of tragedy of the commons. Individuals each acting in their own self interest each causing a relatively small amount of environmental degradation can collectively damage the environment for everyone. Solving this problem is key to solving all sustainability issues and Earth Hour's instantaneous (though temporary) reduction in light pollution is a clear demonstration that small, painless actions by a large number of people can have a positive impact on the environment. The US's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign did the same for litter but it took a decade. Earth Hour has a more immediate, positive and measurable impact on the night sky environment than decades of cleaning oil from beaches and rescuing sea turtles have on these aspects of our environment.

Light pollution to the level it has reached in many western cities is not an unavoidable side-effect of industrialization. It is, in fact, an indicator of technological inefficiency. Several billions of dollars worth of energy spilled into outer space every year does no one any good.

No I won't, nor do I need to. Too many people believe that environmentalism means a return to the past. As I said in an earlier post, the modern LED light bulb uses 1/10th the energy of an Edison bulb and is 4000 times more efficient than the ancient oil lamps they replaced. Environmentalists should celebrate this and paint those obsessed with Edison incandescent bulbs, internal combustion engines and an oil-based economy as the Luddites they are. Sadly, many in the green movement do not have the technological, scientific or media savvy to clarify this point and seem to embrace the "return to the past" meme which will not work. A true environmentalist has a long view of time. What can we learn from the past, what of value will we use by using this technology? What will be the long-term impacts of using this technology. True environmentalism weighs the past and future along with the present. Its understandable that our "now" focused culture would not value the long term educational benefits of Earth Hour.

Earth Hour has a symbolic element but it also has a real and profound positive environmental effect which lasts for exactly 1 hour. Like air pollution, light pollution is a "slow boiled frog" problem. Ask a kid in Beijing what color the sky is and he might say brown or yellow-orange or grey but probably not blue. If things don't improve, the next generation of kids have no idea that the sky is supposed to be blue. Ditto for kids in NYC, Los Angeles, Brussels and thousands of other cities where people have seen stars on TV and movies, maybe even planetariums but never in real life. A well organized Earth Hour can temporarily change that giving the next generation a glimpse of what the night sky is supposed to look like. After seeing that, they'll be less likely to accept McDonalds Laser french fries and other pollution of our night sky with moving, flashing gyrating annoying projected night sky advertising which is sure to come unless enough people say "Not on MY planet!".

When approaching air pollution, energy dependence, light pollution, anthropogenic climate change and other tragedies of the commons (a simple concept some true Americans mightn't get until Family Guy explains it), it's important to know which of your neighbors don't give a shit. So while yahoos here can hide behind "Anonymous coward", during Earth Hour all we have to do is look for the redneck with camo gear, "I lov Sarah Palin's intulekt" bumper sticker and a 3 million candlepower Wal-mart floodlight.

Finding the source of any problem is the first step in solving it.

While writing a story about Hannukah and other lighting miracles, I found that modern LEDs can run for 6 months on the equivalent of 1 day's supply of menorah oil. So if you were to attempt to illuminate your house with candles for Earth Hour, you'd consume 4000 times as much oil. Thankfully we don't do that.

Beyond Earth Hour's temporary abatement of light pollution in participating cities, earth hour is symbolic. It is also a talking point. "Wow, look at that comet, I wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't turned off the barn light." "The building's landscaping is a bit too bright, I think it looks better against a natural sky.", "Hi neighbor, would you like me to show you Jupiter and the Pleiades through this telescope." , "Hey this is fun, why don't we do it once a week?"

One approach which would encourage companies to do the right thing would be to tax products based on the amount of e-waste they produce but then allow for a small discount if the product is open and repairable. And no I don't care about Apple's and similar company's greenwashing "recycling" campaigns, their 8-12 month planned- obsolescence cycle is an enormous and unnecessary impact on the environment. All I ask is that the companies which benefit enormously from irreparable short-lived products pay for this necessary damage.

I'd vote for truth in advertising laws making it very clear that much of what you "buy" you don't really own. When consumers are treated as criminals and not trusted the use of the products they"buy", call it what it is, rental. So you don't own your Wii, Xbox, Playstation or any of your video games, Blue Ray disks (can't play them overseas), iTunes downloads, Android apps, iPhone apps, your car, your TV, your Windows 8 laptop, your printer. And you certainly don't own your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macbook or any other Apple products.

Now that Joe sixpack has happy bent over and submitted to this state of affairs, corporate giants are free to expand this subscription model to everything from your refrigerator to your clothing. And if you're a citizen of the US, your tax dollars are paying for FBI and other law enforcement agencies against the likes of you. As Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan put it, "We have billionaires to protect!"

I've done a lot of sailing on the Great Lakes and Irish Sea and I can tell you that cold water often brings a kind of dense low fog. There are times when we can see the tops of masts and blue sky above but because the sun is often low at these latitudes, we can't see where the sun is. But sometimes the fog was so bright, I'd wear sun glasses and then I did notice that the zenith blue sky was polarized. What's more, the digital watch we used for sailing was an LCD watch-- which means it polarized display. And the display did darken noticeably when turned at certain angles, so the reflected sky polarization was also discernible. At the time I wondered whether it could be used as a practical form of navigation, but we had a compass. A few years later Loran-C became popular addition to the compass as and then GPS. But when I heard about the theory that an Iceland spar sunstone might have been used for navigation in the high arctic, I'd give it the nod of plausibility. No it isn't as good as a compass, unless you're above 70 degrees magnetic latitude. No it wouldn't work well under conditions of total cloud cover or rain, might not work at all. But I'm sure this kind of low fog is at least as common in the arctic as it is at my latitude and if I were lost without a compass, GPS, Loran-C on a foggy day, you'd better believe I'd break out the sunstone if I had one.

We don't have to follow the "fight fire with fire" methodology. If the weakest force in the universe is pulling an asteroid towards the earth, we needn't use the weakest force in the universe to steer it away. The electromagnetic force is 10^36 times more powerful. Superconducting magnets require only the energy to get them started and keep them cool. Most asteroids are more than one part in a undecillion feromagnetic. So make use of it. And if threat happens to be composed of a diamagnetic material (e.g. comet water), use that to repel it away. Using gravity is just daft unless you have no alternative.