Not My Definition of Charity

OK, I just don’t know how to express what I feel about this little cesspool written about by the Washingon Post. I strongly suggest you read the whole article. So let’s just list the highlights, shall we?

Charles Reichers is appointed to a Bush Administration job with the Air Force and gets a “fake” job with [...]

Lies, damned lies and economic statistics

Angry Bear and The Big Picture both post about this Bloomberg article. Basically it calls the government on using questionable methods when coming up with the CPI. The numbers don’t even come close to accurately accounting for some of the biggest costs of living for the average American. It doesn’t reflect medical costs or housing [...]

Another Thing to Doubt

There are questions about whether the EPA is doing its job and if it is even capable of doing so since the agency currently has fewer investigators than the number called for by law. And that number is only 200 investigators for the entire country. The questions come about because of a drastic drop in [...]

Of Course the Socialists Aren’t Coming!

Of course that’s not what the New York Times OpEd piece is titled. It is in its way more accurately titled The Socialists Are Coming! The Socialists Are Coming! to highlight the empty rhetoric that is used in attacks on any government involvement in health care…except for the avoidance of attacks on those programs that [...]

But is it an Election?

So…the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are neither happy with states that are playing games with primary dates. It would appear that the Democrats are deeper into this problem, though. They’ve told their fellow party members in Florida that they’ve just gone too far by moving their primary all the way to January 29. [...]

Seeing in the Dark

That is the title of a show on PBS I had DVRed and watched this afternoon. It is Timothy Ferris’s ode to amateur astonomers and it is a wonderful show. One part of it was about the Bisque brothers, who founded a company called Software Bisque that produces astronomy software and equipment for the enthusiast. [...]

Ouch! I feel sort of sorry for Rather but…

…bad reporting on science or technology always annoys me. I hadn’t even heard of this article because I don’t have HD-Net, Dan Rather’s new employer. But a blogger on Wired examines a piece that he did on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The article even has a stinker of a title, Plastic Planes. To use [...]

Yep, lots of things change

Even physical characteristics of things you wouldn’t think would change over just a relatively short time. But that’s what’s happening to the object that has served as our definition of the kilogram. That object is a cylinder of platinum and iridium that was cast 118 years ago. Unfortunately if you have an insistence on the [...]

There’s the way it’s supposed to work and then there’s the way it works

If you read blogs and hear the views of American political conservatives it’s hard to miss the philosophy that says that government should be limited and in the more extreme positions doesn’t believe in government social programs at all. This ideology says that people can and should take care of themselves. If something happens and [...]

Well, they won’t all be gone.

Not right away, at least. Well, not in the next 50 years or so. As we warm up the planet and melt the polar ice caps the current estimate is that by 2050 two thirds of the polar bears will be wiped out. Only two thirds of them. Gee, what might we accomplish by the [...]