Check out the article by a
climate survivalist from the February 27, 2011 Washington Post. (I’m going to
go out on a limb and treat the article as if it’s not a satire or hoax, but
maybe the joke’s on me.) The author
describes how he’s buying solar panels and generators and laying in food and supplies
and putting extra locks on his doors and windows in anticipation of the coming
climate apocalypse....
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Posts by Daniel Sarewitz
I think it was in the spring of 1988 that I visited
Washington, D.C., to explore the potential for moving from academic science into
public policy. I had set up an
informational interview at AAAS and was sitting in their library waiting for my
meeting to begin. After browsing the
shelves for a few seconds, and guided only by karmic randomness, I pulled down
a book called Lost at the Frontier,
by Deborah Shapley and Rustum Roy.
An interdisciplinary team of scientists and comedians
have concluded that there is an enormous discrepancy between the amount of
observed humor in the world, and the amount of humor predicted by fundamental
physical laws and statistical principles.
These
days, they say, military personnel in Virginia or Nevada make decisions about
whether to launch predator-based missiles against specific targets thousands of
miles away in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an extraordinary distancing of the
fighter from the target.
In 2003, Tommy Chong, a comedian who made a career out of acting (and presumably
being) stoned, got sent to federal prison for nine months for illegally selling
beautiful custom-made blown-glass bongs ( “drug paraphernalia”) over the Internet.
I want to focus on the government
rationale for busting Chong, because it pertains to many difficult social
problems.
As aggravating (and common) as it is when
scientists use illogical or unscientific arguments to promote science, it’s
perhaps even more irritating when they employ bad or deceptive scientific arguments.
I sing the honor of our fallen soldiers; and
their final sacrifice on behalf of country, freedom, security; And technological
innovation.
May is National Museum Month so I forced my 7-year-old
son to accompany me to the Museum of Human Frailty. Housed in a restored
factory building in a depressed mid-sized rust belt city in upstate New
York, the MHF's promotional brochure describes the museum’s mission as
helping "children of all ages understand their own emotional and rational
contradictions and limitations."
A famous psychology experiment presented five-year-old children with a
choice: take one marshmallow now, or wait twenty minutes and get two marshmallows.
The children who chose to wait for two seem to be more likely to turn into
more socially and intellectually successful adults than the kids who chose
immediate gratification.
So yesterday Beyonce and I sang “America the Beautiful.” Oh, and did
I mention the other 400,000 people on the Washington, DC mall who
joined in? Yeah, fine, it’s a bit of a stretch to say “Beyonce and I”
since actually I was watching her on the Jumbotron, and besides that
her lips were about five bizarre seconds out of sync with the sound
blaring from the speaker tower, but it was a wonderful experience
nonetheless.
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