From Jesus Diaz @ Gizmodo:
After the crotchbomb there has been a lot of noise about airplane security again—you can see how stupid the leaked new flight rules are here. But what’s the actual risk of an airplane attack? Here’s the definitive chart: http://gizmodo.com/5435954/the-true-odds-of-airborne-terror-chart
The stats are from Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com
During this time of campaining, we’re asked to make choices. The candidates tell us who they are and what they’ll do. It’s very easy to just be cynical and say that it doesn’t matter who’s elected, but it does. The next president will be faced with many tough choices, and the direction of his choices will affect us for a long time.
How about the choice of spending $1,000,000,000,000 of cash (certainly of less value than the lives of 4,500 US Soldiers and thousands of others) in the Iraq war? What could we have done with that TRILLION dollars? A writer provides a few choices…..
When the Sunday morning political pundits began talking last year about the tab for the war in Iraq hitting $1 trillion, Rob Simpson sprang from his sofa in indignation.
“Why aren’t people outraged about this? Why aren’t we hearing about it?” Simpson said. And then it came to him: “Nobody knows what a trillion dollars is.”
The amount — $1,000,000,000,000 — was just too big to comprehend.
So Simpson, 51, decided to embark “on an unusual but intriguing research project” to put the dollars and cents of the war into perspective. He hired some assistants and spent 12 months immersed in economic data and crunching numbers.
The result: a slim but heavily annotated paperback released, “What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We’ve Spent on Iraq.”
Simpson is no geopolitical, macro-economic, inside-the-Beltway expert. He’s an armchair analyst and creative director for an advertising agency, a former radio announcer and music critic in Ontario and a one-time voiceover actor.
His alternative spending choices reflect his curiosity and wit.
Read the whole article from CNN here. Access Simpson’s web site here.
Sam Harris, in an article for Newsweek, defends the concept of being elite and questions our political system where mediocrity is rewarded. From the article:
Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.
Harris echos my thoughts that the idea that Governor Palin might have input to, or even one day direct US foreign policy is very scary. It’s not the inexperience that worries me — it’s the experiences she has had up to this point.
I want to see our “best and brightest” get into politics, but unfortunately, there is no motivation for them to do so.
A friend of my daughter just reported that her boss said that he wasn’t going to vote for Obama because his middle name is Hussein, and he (the boss) doesn’t vote for Muslims.
Come on people! It really doesn’t hurt that much to use your brain every now and then.
Why is it that only evolution is under attack? There are other scientific theories…..
Part of the problem is that a lot of people didn’t pay attention in their high-school science classes — they never learned what a scientific theory is. Read how Brian Denning explains the concept of a theory from his Skeptoid essays and podcast:
Evolution is just a theory, not a fact. [argues the creationist] This is an easily digestible sound bite intended to show that evolution is just an unproven hypothesis, like any other, and thus should not be taught in schools as if it were fact. Actually, evolution is both a theory and a fact. A fact is something we observe in the world, and a theory is our best explanation for it. Stephen Jay Gould famously addressed this argument by pointing out that the fact of gravity is that things fall, and our theory of gravity began with Isaac Newton and was later replaced by Einstein’s improved theory. The current state of our theory to explain gravity does not affect the fact that things fall. Similarly, Darwin’s original theory of evolution was highly incomplete and had plenty of errors. Today’s theory is still incomplete but it’s a thousand times better than it was in Darwin’s day. But the state of our explanation does not affect the observed fact that species evolve over time.
You, dear reader, are one in a thousand.
So begins an article at space.com
The fact that you’re confronting this column on a web site devoted to space science and astronomy makes you roughly as rare as technetium. Despite the fact that astronomy is one of the two most popular science subjects in American schools (the other is biology), it’s really not that popular.
Read the rest of this entry »
