I’m not proud I laughed at this, but I did, especially the question about The Arabian Nights:
Link: http://youtu.be/6LBjxupipMU
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by by Bill Maher responds — sarcastically but mostly seriously — to the notion that not voting is somehow a commendable way of expressing a wish for better candidates. (Superfluous warning: Clip contains cable TV language.)
Updated: The original link I had here longer works, but this one does (though it has technical problems):
Link: http://youtu.be/j3VmzfHTXms
I don’t by any means always agree with Bill Maher, but here he’s pretty much right. Anyone who thinks not voting will “send a message” and make the System cough up better candidates is delusional. For one thing, we have one political party that’s actively trying to reduce turnout. Giving them what they want isn’t going to make them change their ways. For another, just where are these better candidates? In hiding? In captivity? I admit this is a sad thought, but what if the candidates we have are pretty much the best available that stand any real chance of getting elected? Look over the list of U.S. presidents. There aren’t so many Washingtons or Lincolns or Roosevelts.
And look at other countries, especially if you think the problem is our two-party system. There don’t seem to be all that many great examples out there.
An old friend of mine liked to say that the problem with voting for the lesser evil was you still got evil. Alas, that’s true. But not voting for the lesser evil doesn’t magically get you not-evil. It just makes it that much more likely that you’ll get the greater evil.
by As you’ve almost certainly heard by now, Glen Larson died Friday. He was the creator or co-creator of a number of television series in the 1970s and 1980s, including Alias Smith and Jones, Battlestar Galactica, The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew Mysteries, Switch, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Sword of Justice, B.J. and the Bear, Trauma Center, Quincy M.E., Manimal, Masquerade, Automan, Cover Up, Knight Rider, The Fall Guy, Magnum PI, P.S. I Luv You, One West Waikiki, and NightMan. He started his career as a singer and songwriter with The Four Preps in the 1950s and 1960s and wrote the theme music for several of his series.
One of his better themes was the one he did for his adaptation of the Buck Rogers comic strip. You can find it with and without lyrics on YouTube. Here’s the music in a parody of the opening credits featuring South Park’s Eric Cartman:
Link: http://youtu.be/m8cHYvf7Mms
by Healthcare policies offered through the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) exchanges have been in effect for nearly a year. So how satisfied are the people who have them?
Today Gallup released results of a poll that indicates, “Over seven in 10 Americans who bought new health insurance policies through the government exchanges earlier this year rate the quality of their healthcare and their healthcare coverage as ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’ These positive evaluations are generally similar to the reviews that all insured Americans give to their health insurance.”
Also, “In addition to newly insured Americans rating their coverage and the quality of their healthcare positively, they are more satisfied than the average insured American with the cost of their health coverage.” Most plan to renew their policies.
For more on this, see this piece by Jonathan Cohn for The New Republic. As he points out, a survey by The Commonwealth Fund last summer found similarly positive reactions.
The sign-up period this year begins today and is a bit narrower than last; see Healthcare.gov for details. Even if you’re reasonably happy with your current coverage, it doesn’t hurt to compare it with what’s now available. In most places the premiums are very similar to last year’s, and that’s even more likely if you qualify for a tax credit, which most people do.
by In the video below Dr Aaron Carroll talks about some of the surprising things known about the placebo effect. For example:
- Apparent name-brand placebos are often clinically more effective than generic placebos.
- Higher doses tend to make placebos more effective.
- Patients who don’t miss doses of their placebos do better than those who do.
A placebo is of course a pill or other treatment with no actual clinical effect, such as a sugar pill. (The word placebo is Latin for “I please.”) As Carroll points out, even a real drug can amount to a placebo if it doesn’t have any actual curative effect. An example of this is prescribing antibiotics for viral infections. Some people claim to benefit from that and they very possibly do, but as a result of the placebo effect. That might be fine if there were no side effects and it didn’t lead to antibiotic resistance, which is a serious problem. (See this earlier post).
Link: http://youtu.be/9sAM7a_OLE4
by An op-ed published last week in the Austin Texas American-Statesman is worth a read for its insight into how politics distorts science education.
The authors are Camille Parmesan, a University of Texas at Austin geology professor, and Alan I. Lesher, CEO of the the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general science organization. (I say “general science” because the American Chemical Society is slightly larger.)
Following is an excerpt. Click the link in the first line for the full article.
Some proposed Texas textbooks would badly misinform K-12 students by falsely suggesting that scientists do not agree on what is causing climate change and by incorrectly suggesting a future cooling trend. Two draft textbooks — astoundingly — even confuse climate change with the ozone hole, which is a completely separate concern and driven by different human actions.
In fact, the vast majority of climate scientists agree that rising temperatures, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and increased frequencies of drought and ferocious storms have resulted largely from two human activities: fossil-fuel burning and deforestation. The consensus that humans are causing climate change has been bolstered again and again by scientific evidence published in thousands of peer-reviewed studies and in public statements by virtually every leading scientific organization. From the scientific perspective, there are simply no longer “two sides” to the climate-change story: The debate is over. The jury is in, and humans are the culprit.
Physicists have known for more than 100 years that carbon dioxide is an insulator and that any increase in its concentration should warm the globe by reducing heat loss to outer space. We know this is happening because warming has been greater by night and in winter, even though the Earth receives less energy from the sun then.
There is indeed much room for argument about what should be done about climate change. But the textbooks in question are purportedly teaching science, not political theory. They need to get the scientific facts straight.
It’s instructive to note the comments on the American-Statesman website posted in response to the op-ed, which sound science-y enough to likely mislead the unwary. This is the same approach developed by the tobacco industry to create doubt about the evidence linking smoking and disease, and it’s equally bogus.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll note that I’ve been a member of AAAS for 35 years and of the National Center for Science Education (cited in the article) for about 20, but otherwise my only connection is heartily agreeing with what they have to say.)
by Once again John Oliver (on HBO’s Last Week Tonight) is both very informative and funny. This isn’t his funniest bit (in fact, parts of it are more likely to make you scowl or weep than laugh), but the information is worth a listen, and as unlike a bad documentary it won’t bore the crap out of you. (It’s like eating a mix of fresh, healthy vegetables somehow made to taste like bacon.)
Link: http://youtu.be/9PK-netuhHA
Oliver mentions that the North Carolina lottery was introduced with a promise to provide additional funds for education, while in fact the state spends less today per pupil than it spent before the lottery was adopted. Also, while a percentage of corporate taxes were once by law dedicated to education spending, that’s no longer true and the states corporate taxes are being cut. (So, for that matter, are individual income taxes, with the tax burden shifted from higher-income to lower-income individuals thanks to our now Republican-dominated state legislature.)
But Oliver doesn’t mention that the lottery was passed over more than sufficient opposition in one house of the legislature to block it. Lottery supporters were able to sneak in an unscheduled vote while the opponents were not in the chamber, one of the single most blatant examples of corruption in the state’s legislative history, which is saying something. Having just bad-mouthed the GOP, I should note that the bad guys in that case were Democrats.
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Link: http://youtu.be/8wpzhcVh5wM
(CNC stands for “computer numerical control” and refers to controlling machine tools with commands from a computer program.)
by Here’s an extract from a BBC program(me) in which physicist Brian Cox (who is incidentally way older than he looks, the bastid) visits NASA’s Space Power Facility, which features the largest vacuum chamber in the world, and arranges to drop a bowling ball and a set of feathers at the same time.
Link: http://youtu.be/E43-CfukEgs
This was part of the series Human Universe.
With the chamber full of air the feathers float down far more slowly than the canon ball, but in a vacuum they fall at the same speed, just as Galileo predicted in contradiction to Aristotle. Galileo’s reasoning was straightforward: Two bricks weigh twice as much as one brick, but cementing them together wouldn’t make them fall faster than they would individually, so absent air resistance objects ought to fall at the same rate regardless of weight.
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