Bill Nye explains Top Kill

Science is cool.

BP to scientists asking to study spill: "The answer is no to that”

New York Times

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

This will come back to you BP. This will not be forgotten.

Liberal and conservative defined, they're not what you think

Huffington Post has an excellent article by Timothy Ferris about liberal and conservative, arguing that liberal is not the opposite of conservative, but rather a position open to both conservatives and progressives (the true opposites of conservatism). I've cut out, for brevity, the parts relating to science, but you really should read the whole thing here.

Liberalism (as defined by John Locke and embodied in the Bill of Rights) is based on the hypothesis that people ought to be maximally free, with the government intervening only to the extent required to protect their freedoms against abridgment by their compatriots or by enemies abroad. This was a radical idea in the eighteenth century, when few people had much education and the general public was routinely slandered as ignorant and untrustworthy. Locke himself feared that the public was so mired in "passion and superstition" as to be apt, as Voltaire put it, to act irrationally and "speak without thinking." Sharing such qualms, many of the American founders described the newborn United States as akin to a scientific experiment. "No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1804, "and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth."

Liberal democracy--the form of government in which a majority can elect leaders but not constrain human rights--has survived innumerable social experiments to become the choice of more than a third of all humanity and the stated preference of most of the remainder. (Even outright despots feel obliged to pay lip service to its inevitability, if only as a distant prospect to be realized once the populace is "ready.") Yet in the United States--and, increasingly, in parts of Europe as well--the term liberal has come to mean the political Left. This has served only to cloudy the political waters. Those on the Left are free to call themselves anything they like--such as progressive, a term many have been taking up lately--but they ought not to be called liberals. Liberalism is an independent political philosophy, with no inherent connection to either the Left or the Right.

Political dynamics become a lot clearer if we replac(e) the old, one-dimensional, Left/Right political spectrum--a relic of the way delegates happened to be seated in the National Assembly circa 1789--with a two-dimensional diamond:

Such diagrams have the virtue of putting opposing philosophies in opposite positions, rather than trying to squeeze them all into a one-dimensional line. The opposite of conservatism, which cherishes practices that experience has shown to work in the past, is progressivism, which looks to the future. The opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but totalitarianism, the elevation of state power at the expense of human rights.

The Republican War on Science

(via Bob Cesca)

This is beyond stupid. The utter cynicism embodied in this spot is staggering. The Republicans are taking their voters for drooling, mouth-breathing nincompoops who will be easily tricked (ed note: are you sure they're not?) into believing "snow storm in Virginia" equals "cold everywhere on the planet."



To repeat, just because it's snowing on the east coast of the United States this weekend doesn't mean it's snowing and cold everywhere and for all time. Just so we're clear on that.

Republican voters -- if you have even the slightest brain in your head, please realize that your party is attempting to trick you.

Adding... It's cold in my basement. Does that mean global warming is a myth?

The known universe

From the American Museum of Natural History. Makes our problems, and our lives, seem incredibly insignificant, doesn't it?

Obama restores science to it's rightful place

(Huff Post)
President Barack Obama urged researchers on Monday to follow science and not ideology as he abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research. "Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," Obama declared as he signed documents changing U.S. science policy and removing what some researchers have said were shackles on their work.

"It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda _ and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology," Obama said.