Dog snouts...

Dog snouts...  The definitive collection, by Elke Vogelsang...

Anecdata...

Anecdata...  I'd never seen this word before reading this article.  It's formed from “anecdotal data,” one of the major sources of skepticism about science.  Google has over 36,000 hits for it.  Who knew?

Curiosity is exploring...

Curiosity is exploring...  Last week I called out some interesting looking rocks that Curiosity had espied on Mars.  This week, its moved right up to them and is photographing a montage of the entire formation.  I'm guessing that it's getting ready for some more detailed studies...

What's wrong with this sentence?

What's wrong with this sentence?  “Young men often have to deal with unwanted sexual attention from women.”  Really?  I was a young man once, though that was quite a few years ago.  I cannot imagine any “sexual attention” from a woman that I'd have called unwanted.  The world is apparently changing in ways that I'd never have anticipated...

Beautiful science images...

Beautiful science images...  A nice collection.

29th delay...

29th delay...  for the ObamaCare individual mandate.

Can we just repeal this pile of crap, please?  Any Congressional candidate who wants my vote, listen up: promise publicly that you'll immediately move to repeal ObamaCare, and you've got my vote.  This year, I'm a one-issue voter.  I don't care if you support mandatory union membership for retirees, a 10 hour work week, censorship of non-progressives, doubling the income tax rate, and federal welfare for same-sex gopher marriages – if you promise to repeal ObamaCare, I'll vote for you!

IPCC admits...

IPCC admits ... that the economic costs of global warming have been grossly overestimated.  Reality is biting them.  Hard.

California leads the way!

California leads the way!  In gun-running government officials who strongly advocate gun control.  Wait - what?

The eastern U.S. is tired of snow...

The eastern U.S. is tired of snow...  My mom sent along this photo (click to embiggen), part of a collection of snow-related visual humor.  Everyone I know who lives more than a few hundred miles north or east of San Diego is very, very tired of cold and snow.  This global-warming-induced extended cold snap is getting old!

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  From an interview with Freeman Dyson:

Interviewer: You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

Dyson: Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

I've been a Freeman Dyson fan for years.  He's full of interesting ideas, a clear thinker, and he writes prolifically in a style that's easy for non-scientists to understand. In all those years, somehow I never knew that he didn't have the standard credential of a scientist: the Ph.D.  Awesome!

The executive branch is too powerful...

The executive branch is too powerful...  G. W. Bush and B. H. Obama have expanded the power of the executive branch to the point where it spends as it pleases, obeys (or disobeys) laws at its whim, and routinely exercises powers that the Constitution never gave it.  Here's the latest example.

This has happened twice before in American history: with Abraham Lincoln and with Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In both cases, subsequent administrations managed to significantly reign in the executive branch's powers, assumed during wartime or economic crisis.  Let's hope the next U.S. administration can start that process again... 

This is...

This is ... strange.  But also compelling.  If you've been a credulous consumer of advertising, this may contain some surprises for you...