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The ice core data also shows that CO2 and methane levels have been remarkably stable in Antarctica--varying between 300 ppm and 180 ppm--over that entire period and that shifts in levels of these gases took at least 800 years, compared to the roughly 100 years in which humans have increased atmospheric CO2 levels to their present high. "We have added another piece of information showing that the timescales on which humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere are extremely short compared to the natural time cycles of the climate system," says Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in Switzerland, who led the research.

There have been several shifts from glacial to interglacial climates during that time. My view is that if massive methane releases were a threat now, then we would have seen something similar during one of these times.

"My question isn't so much "what could possibly go wrong", but rather "What right gives you to make such a decision for the whole world to live by".

The best source that I can find is Scientific American, and from what I've been reading over the last couple hours I wouldn't be surprised to see a book written on this project. It's got everything: oooh scary genetically engineered mosquitoes! Exotic and tropical locations! International intrigue in law, politics, academia! Skulduggery, intellectual theft, backstabbing! And possibly world-changing success in eradicating dengue!

The quick summary is that there are multiple parties involved: the Genetic Strategies for Control of Dengue Virus Transmission, an international and public-private organization that is behind the GM mosquitoes. Key members are Prof. Anthony James at UC-Irvine, and Dr. Luke Alphey at Oxitec, a UK-based biotech company. While sterile insect technique has been used in the past to eradicate one species of screwworm in the US, that same technique did not work on mosquitoes. James' group identified a gene specific to the female of the mosquito species that if targeted via genetic engineering could have a sterile insect effect analogous to the screwworms. Actual engineering of the mosquito was contracted out to Oxitec, who according to SciAm were the ones responsible for the release of the GM mosquitoes on Grand Cayman island without the knowledge of other members of the dengue control group. Prof. James apparently didn't know until Dr. Alphey publicly disclosed it 14 months after the fact. Where the regulations come in is complex. As a US-based academic researcher Prof. James is subject to ethical and biosafety guidelines of his department, UC-Irvine, the state of California, and the Federal government, plus that of the agencies that granted the funds for his research and the government of whatever country he is conducting research in. UK-based Oxitec has to play by the rules of the UK at least for work done in the UK, but the initial release of the mosquitoes was in the Caymans. Environmental regulations regarding GM mosquitoes didn't exist there according to one source I read, according to another they were brand new and it was implied that Oxitec had some involvement in their crafting. The other researchers are pissed, and Oxitec's actions threaten the extremely careful, conservative, and highly regulated GMO work that has been done in the US and other parts of the world.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-wipeout-gene&page=6

"Some people wonder if it is ethical—or safe—to eliminate an organism, even in just a small geographic area. Proponents argue that A. aegypti is an invasive species that has evolved to exploit a solely human niche. “Urban A. aegypti is not part of any significant food chain,” says Phil Lounibos, a mosquito ecologist at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory. Yet Lounibos doubts whether eliminating A. aegypti would stop dengue transmission permanently. “A previous campaign to eradicate this species from the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was the primary vector of urban yellow fever, failed miserably,” he says. The invasive Asian tiger mosquito—another good dengue vector—readily occupies niches vacated by A. aegypti. Moreover, both the Cayman and Tapachula mosquito strains, even if successful, are not permanent. Migration of mosquitoes from neighboring regions into Tapachula could foil eradication attempts and mandate frequent releases of the modified males to keep the population in check."

The current Scientific American has an interesting article on the path that manned exploration out of the Earth-Moon system might take. It employs aspects of the unmanned program to cut cots and to have a more flexible program. One interesting aspect is that the main spacecraft is parked in high earth orbit and human crews fly to it in a small craft. Once on the main craft, it does a swing by the Earth to get a speed boost. Its main engine is electric-power (off of solar arrays). While only part of the Scientific American article ("This Way to Mars," 12/2011 issue) is free, they do kindly provide links to its references at the bottom of the page. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=this-way-to-mars .

Apparently, you need about 100 tons in low Earth orbit for such a craft. That would be two launches of SpaceX's proposed Falcon Heavy. It seems way more likely to fly than NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS).

Safer than coal, anyway.

There is plenty of evidence of coal mine disasters, OK there are a few uranium mining disasters as well, but I don't want to minimise the mortality from either if I can help it: the simple fact of the matter is, you're 4,000 times more likely to die from a coal-related power generation cause and 1,000 times more likely from oil-related power generation than you are from nuclear-related power generation. It all carries risk, but the protocols and procedures surrounding uranium handling mitigates the risk to the point where people who actually work it tend to worry less. Fukushima was, in my opinion, unfortunate but avoidable; OK the tidal barrier was inadequate. It could have been higher and it might have diverted the tsunami but that wouldn't have helped with the ground subsidence. The location probably wasn't that well thought out, being that close to one of the deepest ocean trenches on the planet. It was probably the wrong type of reactor to have built there even if it was proved that the location was suitable for a power plant that could potentially (and as it happens, did) crack and go critical after just one good shake and a deluge of salt water. Lessons learned, we all hope, but I wouldn't like to try and assure the surviving families around the plant of that.

Amusing- how when people find themselves wrong they resort to the petty name calling.

Anyhow- quick google reveals many results... three below.

It is just rediculous that we continue to subsidize maize to a degree it deplaces vegetables from our diet. I'm sure you know better than Scientific American though that traces cattle feed to 90%+ maize.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=that-burger-youre-eating-is-mostly-corn

http://www.paulkienitz.net/enron/kingcorn.html

http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/2009/06/food-inc-the-review.html

meanwhile, Europe bans them. A lot smarter than these fools running the US, g*d damn them.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=europe-bans-x-ray-body-scanners

Europe banned the backscatter x-ray machines which are low level ionizing radiation. They still haven't decided on the millimeter wave machines which are not ionizing and present a neglible health hazard. The reason for their indecision is that the US has yet to catch anyone intentionally or even unintentionally trying to carry a weapon through, and the privacy concerns.

meanwhile, Europe bans them. A lot smarter than these fools running the US, g*d damn them.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=europe-bans-x-ray-body-scanners

You must bring that up.

Can't you just quietly eat your hamburger made with a GMO wheat bun and hormone & antibiotic loaded meat?

meanwhile, Europe bans them. A lot smarter than these fools running the US, g*d damn them. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=europe-bans-x-ray-body-scanners

You make a good point. We are by nature (literally) designed to deal with a very specific realm of dimension, time and environment. The minute the universe moves outside the range of our "evolutionarily engineered senses", the universe almost instantly ceases to be intuitive and/or predictable. Any of the universal phenomena that are mind numbingly large, extreme or ridiculously small, confuse and amaze the hell out of us. Even though our brains utilize quantum phenomena, understanding quantum mechanics is not at all intuitive. So trajectories for flying balls and golden means, no problem, we are hardwired for parabolas and the number Phi. the statistical nature of quantum mechanics, not so much. The chaotic mechanics in the frame dragging around a black hole, hell no. Dark Energy??? WTF! Brane Theory and CalabiYau Spaces... just leave it at, it hurts my head. Without the distinctions that rigorous mathematical abstraction make possible, these realms would almost certainly be completely inaccessible to human understanding.

drinking water wont be affected by anything

Try reading this article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=drill-for-natural-gas-pollute-water

One of the biggest problems is these people refuse to provide the chemicals they are using in their operations. How are we supposed to monitor for spills, or emergency crews respond, when they won't even give you that information?

You should know that the industry cares more about money than people, and will engage in propaganda, bribes, and secret settlements to make money.

You think it can be done safely? Fine, but take every damn precaution, monitor it religiously, and prove it out. No bullshit secrets. Also force them to hold back a percentage of profits for funds in case something goes wrong, as it inevitably does despite claims of safety.

I think this is more impressing: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cyborg-beetles

Three years ago, the story had much better pictures. Alas, Oct 2008 was not a great time to raise capital. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sticky-situation-gecko-toe-adhesive

Do we even care if he was right? As noted in other comments the fault would have already been under strain. If it was left up to its own devices, it would continue to build up until it let loose on its own. More stress released means bigger earthquake.

From Scientific American, there are parts of the San Andreas fault that seem to just move along slowly instead of building up to a big quake.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=auto-lube-keeps-parts-of-san-andrea-10-06-25

This might be the start of a good research project into figuring out how to get faults to trigger in a series of small, non-damaging quakes instead of one big one.

There is an informative write-up at scientific american . It says that three researchers who worked under his supervision found irregularities in published data and then notified the head of department.

> The nuclear waste problem still hasn't gone away. Building new COAL plants is insane.

There, I fixed that for you.

I agree. Coal plants spew out coal ash which is very radioactive. We should close all Coal plants immediately.

Seems a lot of the AGW Jackasses on /. need to learn a thing or two from Judith Curry.

Although you are basically right you lack the facts. Economic models are mistakenly based on the idea that you could generalize outdated physics equations to cover a concept called "utility." Total fucking bullshit. Economics is not science. SciAm had a short cutting and concise article on it. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-clothes

Virtually nothing since Earth is releasing over 44,000,000,000,000 watts of power continuously to space anyway. We use around 10TW of electricity for the whole planet.

By changing units, you make it seem much larger than it is. That's 44TW radiated VS 10TW of electricity.

Virtually nothing since Earth is releasing over 44,000,000,000,000 watts of power continuously to space anyway. We use around 10TW of electricity for the whole planet.

And the population density around Fukushima is far greater than that around Chernobyl . . .

How about this. If even the creator of the model "cautions that the resulting model is far from perfect," perhaps we, as a community, should heed the warning that there is still quite a lot of uncertainty on how much fallout there may actually be and this uncertainty might last for quite a while.

With so much uncertainty, does it really make sense to downplay? For instance, when someone relatively near to the event asks how to measure for contamination, does the community really have enough strong data to ridicule that individual? Even as the experts say that "ongoing ground surveys are the only way to truly establish the public-health risk?"

What do you lose if your downplaying is wrong compared to those actually within close proximity of the event?

And the population density around Fukushima is far greater than that around Chernobyl . . .

How about this. If even the creator of the model "cautions that the resulting model is far from perfect," perhaps we, as a community, should heed the warning that there is still quite a lot of uncertainty on how much fallout there may actually be and this uncertainty might last for quite a while.

With so much uncertainty, does it really make sense to downplay? For instance, when someone relatively near to the event asks how to measure for contamination, does the community really have enough strong data to ridicule that individual? Even as the experts say that "ongoing ground surveys are the only way to truly establish the public-health risk?"

What do you lose if your downplaying is wrong compared to those actually within close proximity of the event?

Not that I put much store in such things, but studies and surveys show your statement is totally backwards--republicans (or, more specifically, conservatives) tend to be happier than democrats (liberals):

http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/04/23/conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals-discuss/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=BABCDEA5-D180-499B-094168CBE5442468

On a purely anecdotal level, I would say that I would categorize more of my conservative friends as "happy people" than I would my liberal friends. There are of course dozens of exceptions, and, like I said, I don't put much store in this stuff anyway (especially non-scientific anecdotal).

NASA bought the pens for under $3 each starting in 1968. The Russians were using exactly the same ink pens in orbit a year later at the same price.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen

Would you feel better about eating doves?

Pigeons are domesticated birds brought here from Europe...for eating.

Here's a Scientific America podcast about it all: Superdove!: The Straight Poop on Pigeons.

Nope...take a look at Portugal. They decriminalized pretty much every single drug, 10 years ago.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006

This is so insanely obvious it's baffling why at least one government hasn't tried it.

Portugal already did.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization

>>about the myth coal plants would polute the world with radiactivity

It's not a myth. I'm surprised with your "35 years" of studying the subject you haven't read articles such as this one:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

The radiation is in the coal fly ash, which you're apparently building roads out of. Good for you.

>>Are you worried we take over the world with wind mills and solar panels?

Not particularly. I installed solar on my house, using Japanese (Kyocera) panels.

I'm more concerned about y'all building a whole new raft of coal power plants when you could switch to nuclear instead. I understand it's not your call, but my criticism is not of you (except where you're obviously misinformed), but of Germany as a whole. Look at how France has handled nuclear power in the last 40 years by contrast - they generate almost no CO2 from their entire energy sector, and are net exporters of power (including to places like Germany).

>>we don't know what to do with the waste

Again, if they're energetic enough to cause problems, they're energetic enough to burn for fuel. Hell, India simply tosses all its "waste" in a pit and runs a turbine off the heat it generates.

The only reason we don't have burner reactors is due to nonproliferation concerns, which recent events in Iran have shown to be sort of irrelevant.

That doesn't even include the radiation induced cancer caused by coal power plants.

It is a technology we should pursue with tremendous effort, and which should one day pay off in one form or another,

I disagree. Not everything is possible, and one can waste huge amounts of resources in things that will never happen. As it stands, there is no reason to believe fusion will ever happen in a halfway reasonable fashion within the next 500 years. Just like space elevators, warp drive, and so on.

There's a nice summary of the difficulties in this fine article, but unfortunately it is not for free:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn

The real Fallout from Fukushima is renewed fear of Nuclear power as if dumping tons of uranium into the atmosphere is LESS hazardous.

TFTFY

Homo sapiens has had more impact on biodiversity than any other species. The Great Oxidation Event lasted hundreds of millions of years and, while we have no means of establishing a survey of taxa from that era, it was most likely the result of a very large number of species, and indeed is such a long period of time that many speciation events could readily have occurred. Further, the autotrophs that released the oxygen in the first place had no means of affecting many of the anaerobes that live deep underground—and we do.

Here are your citations for humanity's impact. Suffice it to say that many of them will still be noticeable in a few million years:

• Climate Change, Human Impacts, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs
• Consequences of changing biodiversity
• A continent transformed: Human impact on the natural vegetation of Australia, which went on for something like sixty million years before we screwed it up.
• Tropical forest recovery: legacies of human impact and natural disturbances
• The Future of Biodiversity, the abstract for which starts: "Recent extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times their pre-human levels in well-known, but taxonomically diverse groups from widely different environments. If all species currently deemed "threatened" become extinct in the next century, then future extinction rates will be 10 times recent rates. Some threatened species will survive the century, but many species not now threatened will succumb. Regions rich in species found only within them (endemics) dominate the global patterns of extinction."
• Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
• Biodiversity inventories, indicator taxa and effects of habitat modification in tropical forest (PDF)

I don't know why you then decided to compare humanity's effect on biodiversity to that of mass extinction events, but let me explain to you why they are completely different.

When an extinction event occurs, there is a single source of pressure that living organisms must accommodate, or at most a couple: the sky is darker, the air is colder, the atmosphere is now filled with water rather than ammonia, et cetera. Humans have not been exerting this kind of pressure at all. We systematically destroy ecosystems, replacing hundreds of species of plants and animals with just one or two (which are, naturally, attuned to depend on us feeding, fertilizing, irrigating, and sheltering them) and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us.)

This is too much for evolution to handle. Especially due to chemical poisoning, many of the hardiest species most likely to survive a natural disaster have been snared by exotic and unexpected genetic vulnerabilities. DDT was found to act as a sex hormone in birds, for example, causing males to develop female genitalia. As a South African, I'm sure you're aware that it's still in use, combating Malaria, even though it has been banned in many countries.

We are whittling down biodiversity in ways that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe didn't. It selected one major branch of the tree, the organisms that depended on a reducing atmosphere, and marginalized them, creating room for the healthy and d

The first non-bird species of reptile? I've heard that it is also the first non-mammal species of reptile to have its genome sequenced. Seriously though, the Slashdot summary may sound stupid (shocking, I know) but the story is actually quite interesting. Of course this is not something to read about in the International Business Times! There is a much better article in Scientific American: Lizard Genome Unveiled: First non-avian reptile sequence helps explain vertebrate evolution by Lee Sweetlove. Highly recommended reading. I also recommend this article on PhysOrg: First lizard genome sequenced by Haley Bridger. Ths story is particularly remarkable that when we have successfully sequenced the genomes of the entire line of the fish - reptile - bird - mammal evolution then we will finally be able to prove the theory even beyond any reasonable doubt of intelligent designers. Hopefully this breakthrough will start an interesting discussion in the world of science about the exact details of the natural selection in general and the speciation in particular.

Whoa you're right, it is hard to find this stuff online. Here's one article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-tropical-cyclones-be-stopped

I've seen a few documentaries on the technologies involved. Off the top of my head, one of the ideas was to drop a cooling chemical onto the ocean ahead of one side of the hurricane. It would be sort of like "applying the brakes" to that side. There was some similar idea involving the use of algae.

Quote: "Researchers in Israel, Canada and France used brain imaging to observe the neural activity of eight blind subjects as they read Braille. They found that although the blind subjects were using their sense of touch, their brains showed activity in the same so-called visual region that sighted people use when they read."

More at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-reading-region

Then see if more people die from Polio, Measles, etc or Malaria (30 million and counting due to DDT ban in Africa)
Jenny McCarthy vs Rachel Carson: who is the bigger boob?

It's not just the category or just the rain. Other factors include:

• * How fast it moves--Irene was very slow-moving for most of its life
• * Size (that's what she said . . .)

To chill's point, those things obviously have an impact on how much rain falls, but they also are important determiners of the storm surge height, wave heights and wind damage; if a couple 75mph gusts blow over your house, you might lose a lawn chair and a shutter or two. If the wind blows on your house at 75mph for four hours, you might lose a lot more.

For most people who aren't weather geeks, the Saffir-Simpson scale has very little value. Some of the NOAA/NHC forecasters and others have said as much in some of their interviews about Irene and other recent storms. But whatever factors you want to cough up to rank hurricanes, what really matters is the ultimate impact of the storm, not how it was classified in the record books or by breathless (and brainless) reporters on CNN. We can argue about relative impacts of storms, but by most measures Irene has been a devastating event that makes the warnings and preparations seem pretty appropriate. Here's one way of slicing up the data.

BTW, whoever is on board with the "Irene was a joke"/"boy who cried wolf" meme is being as silly as those reporters standing on the beach in their rainsuits shouting into their microphones while getting "lashed" (seriously guys, can we come up with at least one other verb?) by wind and rain. Irene could've been much more severe along any of these physical measures of hurricane strength had it taken even a slightly different course as it moved up the east coast . . .

So I don't know about you guys, but I'd rather be inconvenienced and deal with some extra economic impact as a result of safety measures than to risk hundreds of lives and chaos in the streets of NYC. I think most people would agree with that–ultimately, anyway.

While there's an important lesson in the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, so is there in the story of the Three Little Pigs.

Actually the real interesting thing is that your brain only uses a couple more calories than when taxed. Physical labour requires vastly more calories yet doesn't cause near the same amount of hunger. So you are effectively over-eating.

Some more info in this article. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=science-of-snacks-thinking-makes-you-hungry

Why is it that teaching against religion is protected speech, but if the teacher were to favor religion then that is not protected?

Addressing the second part of your query first: to favor one religion is implicitly or explicitly to denigrate other religions and the lack of a religion, and thus would constitute a form of slander. It would also contravene (in any state-supported environment in the US) the Establishment clause of the first amendment to the US constitution. Favoring creationist viewpoints would be to favor a very narrow selection of religions, and to impugn others - some religions are anti-creatonist by their own dogma.

As to the first part of your query: that is not what the court decided. The teacher was not teaching against religion per se, but against the promulgation of self-evident nonsense masquerading as science and supporting a particular religious viewpoint. He apparently described creationism as "superstitious nonsense", which is neither attacking religion nor stating an untruth (incidentally, truth is an absolute defence against slander in the US). Here is a short summary of scientific viewpoints on various creationist arguments.

In fact, e. coli is already being used in research to convert cellulose into diesel and kerosene.

Wonderful, another source for oily discharge.

The real tricks with the hydrogen fuel cells are getting a reliable source of hydrogen with a low energy input (it's almost always found in compound with other elements) and storing it at high enough volumes to be really useful without using high pressures or exotic, expensive materials.

I rather prefer the cellulose to biodiesel bacteria, algae, and fungi that are being researched. It seems to be a more useful fuel, and cellulose seems a lot more readily available than loose hydrogen. Biobutanol from cellulose is being researched in Japan, and butanol is a fairly straightforward replacement for at least part of a diesel's fuel. There's a fungus found in a rainforest that converts sugar or cellulose into a number of hydrocarbons and can be urged to make more based on exposure to antibiotic compounds. There's talk of work to genetically engineer something to do this, which likely would be a bacterium like e. coli engineered to produce the same compounds from the same feedstocks. In fact, e. coli is already being used in research to convert cellulose into diesel and kerosene.

"There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity." (Source)

Between TemperedAlchemist, Doc Ruby and I: We've completely demolished every argument you've made.
It is clear to everyone that you are badly misinformed on the topic of the scientific theory of Global Climate Change.

What a bunch of self-absorbed attention whores.

Scientific American supports your assessment; Facebook lusers are indeed self-absorbed attention whores:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=status-update-im-so-glamorous

The majority of people on facebook are well adjusted, sociable people. [...] Methinks you're projecting.

Methinks you're deluded.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=status-update-im-so-glamorous

And I don't really trust an organization like Mozilla to be able to create something that meets the needs of most people. Their staunch opposition to H.264 is a prime example of this. H.264 is an non-negotiable requirement for me. If you won't support it, I can't use your product. Period.

Then the Web is not for you. It isn't some kind of Mozilla standard that Mozilla is worried about, it's Web standards. Most Web software developers disagree with the idea that closed, royalty bearing formats are an acceptable choice for the Web. Mozilla, as we know, disagrees with you. The W3C disagrees with you. Opera disagrees with you. Google disagrees with you. And Tim Berners-Lee, of course, disagrees with you.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies

A science show does not counteract Fox News. It's really very important, so it deserves repeating.

Actually, it's worse than merely "not counteracting" the manure shown on Fox News-- it is an attempt to give legitimacy to the stuff pumped out under the Fox aegis: "Fox hosts Cosmos! They must know about science stuff."

Divestiture is unsubtle. That contrast is good, since the harm done by supporting corrupt institutions is often quite subtle.

I avoid shows that I once loved just because they show up on FOX tv channel. I avoid movies at the theater if they come with the FOX studio logo. The misinformation deliberately promulgated by FOX news taints the whole institution. Doing the equivalent of "The More You Know" public service pieces does not erase the harm done by their other programming. You don't get to say harmful things and follow it immediately with "Oh, you know I'm just kidding, right?" You can't play both sides and maintain the high moral ground.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies

A science show does not counteract Fox News. It's really very important, so it deserves repeating.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies

Even if I am not personally polled by Nielsen, my participation in the culture that enhances/encourages viewing of FOX products still matters because it has a non-zero influence on the people around me. Eventually that influence does reach Nielsen as the herd slowly moves toward giving attention to any tv program. Higher Nielsen ratings translate to higher advertisement revenue for the institution. Divestiture is an effective political effort because it calls attention to this point of how seemingly unrelated things really do affect each other.

Divestiture is unsubtle. That contrast is good, since the harm done by supporting corrupt institutions is often quite subtle.

I avoid shows that I once loved just because they show up on FOX tv channel. I avoid movies at the theater if they come with the FOX studio logo. The misinformation deliberately promulgated by FOX news taints the whole institution. Doing the equivalent of "The More You Know" public service pieces does not erase the harm done by their other programming. You don't get to say harmful things and follow it immediately with "Oh, you know I'm just kidding, right?" You can't play both sides and maintain the high moral ground.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies

A science show does not counteract Fox News. It's really very important, so it deserves repeating.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies

Even if I am not personally polled by Nielsen, my participation in the culture that enhances/encourages viewing of FOX products still matters because it has a non-zero influence on the people around me. Eventually that influence does reach Nielsen as the herd slowly moves toward giving attention to any tv program. Higher Nielsen ratings translate to higher advertisement revenue for the institution. Divestiture is an effective political effort because it calls attention to this point of how seemingly unrelated things really do affect each other.

Excellent point.

You have a large business where lawyers and MBA's have made the rules, and IT is expected to implement the rules they wrote.

In a hospital in the US, you have to implement policies in line with medical privacy and records security policies that have a basis in federal law.

In a university in the US, you have to implement policies in line with student record privacy and records security policies that have a basis in federal law.

In most other places, you are bound by some level of law and PHB-level policy.

Think about it: crap like this happens. Or this. Or even companies like Apple can 'misplace' a secret prototype.

And yet, there are those out there who believe that it's the job of IT to "support" every personal device they might bring round to the office, whether it can meet the security and legal requirements of the business or not, and whether or not IT have had a similar device and any chance to research what might be needed to support it ...

The more I read about geothermal, the less I like it. Economically optimal locations are few in number and tend to be located far from population centres. As I continued to read, thoughts of of how the process of drilling could contribute to earthquakes, landslides and other forms of natural "disasters" ran through my head. Lo and behold:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geothermal-drilling-earthquakes
Now I Know the editors over at scientific american are a bunch of marxist hippies (most likely bearded), but still, it does make one pause for a minute.