First of all: scientific research for no relevant purpose at all should be done with DONATIONS not with violent attack on individual freedoms to deprive people of their property.
If you want your argument to be taken seriously, drop the hyperbole. Unless you live in North Korea or Turkmenistan or Cuba, no one is preventing you from leaving if you don't like the way your country is run.
Secondly I immediately thought of a counter example to your argument [wikipedia.org].
That isn't really a counter-example, because Corning pursued the project with the goal of near-term commercialization. The fact that it failed at the time is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's "basic research".
To be fair, the journal Science is run by a non-profit, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I think it's still behind a paywall, but I have less problem funding a non-profit that way.
There are a lot of other journals like this. I publish frequently in journals published by a specialist academic organization - they are read by everyone in our field, the organization does good work in general (it's truly community-run), and their policies are generally reasonable. But they do still have some overhead that has to be paid somehow. We usually cough up the $1000 or $1500 or whatever for the open-access fee (that makes the articles free upon publication, instead of having to wait the 12 months that the NIH specifies), which I don't mind. It would be a real shame if these publishers went out of "business".
Part of the problem with Elsevier and NPG however is that their open-access fees are insane - I read something like $7000 for an article in Nature, which is usually shorter than most of what I publish.
Private companies do science [slashdot.org] all the time [nytimes.com] because they need [bit-tech.net] to push their knowledge forward to stay competitive [cisco.com].
You're missing the rather large distinction between basic and applied research. Most companies do science with the explicit goal of advancing products to the market, and are very reluctant to spend time and money on anything that doesn't have a clear route to commercialization. (I'm not saying this as a put-down: their job is to make money, not publish journal articles.) But most basic research, at least in the field of biomedicine, can take decades before commercialization is feasible, if that ever happens - and there's no way to know in advance whether it will or not.
My favorite example is X-ray crystallography, which pharmaceutical companies use to study the molecular interactions between proteins and drug candidates. The first experiments were performed in 1937, the first atomic-resolution structures were published in 1961, and I believe the first application to drug design was sometime in the 1980s. It's not like those lazy academics were just sitting on their hands all this time; it took them decades just to work out the math involved, and there were multiple Nobel prizes awarded in the process. Now academics and companies solve thousands of crystal structures every year, but it still took the rest of the 1980s and 1990s for the technology to develop enough to support that pace.
There are actually a handful of companies that are so profitable (or so large) that they can subsidize undirected basic research: IBM is one, also Genentech, Novartis, and arguably Google and Microsoft. And smaller companies will publish bits and pieces of their directed research as well, if the lawyers let them. But for most, they can't spend decades developing a theory; their shareholders would never stand for it.
Only a few of the most common freshman introductory texts --- that will sell zillions of copies --- might be profitable
The author of one of the most popular college organic chemistry textbooks drives a red Ferrari - definitely the exception to the rule, however. Most of the time the payoff is largely just to the ego (which most tenured professors have no shortage of).
Much of their infrastructure is related to payment processing and restricted document delivery.
There is also a relatively huge overhead from the production costs of a dead tree journal, which few of the audience will even see at this point. (I can't remember the time I actually picked up a copy of Journal of Molecular Biology - I just download PDFs onto my iPad.) They have an entire staff whose job it is to reformat your Word document, arrange figures, etc. Some journals even charge a "color fee" if you have color images (essential for many biology articles), as if it were more expensive to generate colored PDFs.
The sick irony in this is that more and more of the content ends up in the supplemental material anyway, and that's usually just an unformatted PDF.
Congress just recently passed legislation saying that any papers produced and at least partially funded by the NIH must be made public within one year of publication. This, of course, is dependent upon the NIH making an actual database for this
This has been policy for several years now, and the NIH does indeed have an actual database for this. Apparently they are known to call up investigators who are tardy uploading their papers (some journals do this automatically, but usually not the big commercial publishers).
I think it depends on how you're counting. The 2% probably includes all photons hitting the leaf, which seems reasonable enough when comparing to a solar cell where nearly the entire surface is supposed to be converting photons to electricity. However, the individual proteins in plants that capture photons are indeed extraordinarily efficient. Nothing we can synthesize is as efficient on the nano-scale as Photosystems I and II - but of course since the plant is not made entirely of photosystems, the relative efficiency rate appears to be less.
I think it's a despicable thought process that's in desperate need of modification.
I think it's ridiculous that every time the subject of extraterrestrial life comes up, a dozen clueless people post the same objection as if it's some stunningly original insight that biologists have simply missed due to lack of imagination.
If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun
What makes you so certain that intelligent, technologically capable alien races don't go through the same problems that we do? At a minimum, it is likely that interstellar travel requires mastery of nuclear energy and metallurgy across the entire periodic table, with all of the environmental risks that implies. Additionally, just to get to the point where they could develop nuclear power would likely require a period of industrialization using cruder organic sources of energy. It's very hard to imagine accomplishing this without any environmental degradation. Given the number of possible ecological catastrophies that could happen along the way, I think we're actually doing reasonably well so far.
WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders
And a tiny fraction of the French population, much of which instead spent the war handing over their Jews to the Nazis, especially the (100% French) right-wing Vichy regime. Compare this to the Danes, who also pre-emptively surrendered and were generally nonviolent during their occupation - unlike France, they were not a military/industrial empire and would have been overrun no matter what - but helped nearly their entire Jewish population escape to Sweden and refused to cooperate with the Germans. After the war, France was treated as a "winner" in part because of the political smarts of de Gaulle, and in part to make them feel better and secure their cooperation against the Soviet Union, but in fact the war was won almost entirely by the US, UK (and affiliated nations), and USSR.
The "France surrenders" meme was around long before the run-up to the Iraq war, which is part of why it caught on so quickly (it didn't hurt that a large fraction of Americans are credulous morons happy to believe anything bad about everyone who opposed Bush's lunacy). WWII wasn't the last time France was completely embarrassed; the battle of Dien Bien Phu was another low point.
attempting to prevent the same populist leftist takeover from happening
Anyone who thinks the USA is in any danger of this - in particular, anyone who thinks Obama is representative of such a trend - needs to seek psychiatric help. I happen to live in one of the few places in the country where such far-left agitators (and cult-of-personality followers) group, and they're considered a bunch of nutters by their (overwhelmingly liberal) neighbors. They incite the occasional riot and commit petty vandalism, but their political influence and their ability to cause real damage is nil. The more mainstream leftists content themselves with waving signs whining about the 1% during rush hour; they present absolutely no risk of violent takeover. (Most of them freak out about guns anyway.)
The OWS crowd presents another good example - most people around here like their iPhones too much to want to "smash global capitalism" or whatever the goal is. Supporting nationalized health insurance does not equate to wanting to herd your fellow citizens into forced-labor camps, or summarily execute them. And again, I remind you: the left-wingers in this country are generally not the ones with large numbers of firearms. I think they have a childishly simple and idealistic worldview, and I find them generally incompetent at governing, but they're not the people I'm worried about forming death squads.
they lost half their value on paper, bringing down the accounts of investors foolish enough to invest in those "safe" things.
Maybe you weren't paying attention, but the entire stock market tumbled when the crash came. People who invested in much safer things like mutual funds also lost a huge fraction of their net worth - not quite half, but around 40% in my case. These may not be as conservative an investment as, say, CDs or (on the extreme end) savings accounts, but they're hardly irresponsible speculation.
Now, the good news is that my mutual funds have now climbed back to where they were in late 2007 - this is a big part of the reason why Obama is still president (not that I bothered voting).
Celera didn't come into existence until an entire decade after the public genome project started, and was able to take advantage of a decade's worth of technology development - as well as the initial results of the HGP, which were immediately deposited in a public database.
putting researchers to work on questions chosen by non-experts
That is generally a worrisome prospect, but it's not normally the case in the US. The government outlines broad areas that it wants to see studied (cancer, infectious diseases, etc.), but the specific questions being addressed are chosen by actual experts in the form of NIH grant panels. In this specific case, while the decision to push for funding for this initiative came from Obama (which definitely gives me pause), the project itself is, again, the brainchild of actual experts.
Took the words right out of my mouth... but I'll add "and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out". American citzens who whine about the government taking taxes "by force" need to think about what life is like in Cuba or North Korea where the citizens aren't even allowed to leave the country.
Craig Venter's private company was able to do similar work on the Human Genome Project, in a shorter amount of time, and for roughly 1/10 the cost of Francis Collins' gov't project.
In addition to the fact that Venter was able to take advantage of nearly a decade of technology development, you're leaving out a few important details:
1) Celera was able to use the HGP results, but not vice-versa. Which was convenient, since the HGP's more laborious process could cover parts of the genome that weren't well-suited for the shotgun assembly method.
2) The total cost of the HGP covered much more than simply sequencing the human genome - there were many preliminary and side projects covered as well, none of which Celera pursued.
3) The availability of a public, license-free genome meant that it could be used as a reference for future studies without restriction. This eliminates the need to perform de-novo assembly with each individual genome from the same species, which drastically reduces the cost and time required for further sequencing. Without this, the huge advances in comparative genomics and personal genomics over the past decade would have been hideously expensive, because they'd all have needed to pay Celera for a license (and not been able to publish their results).
But that was due to the technology advancing during the 8 years the public project had already been running. Venter was able to use the experience gained from that time.
Yes, and as you hinted at, the technology required for Venter's approach didn't even exist when the HGP started. Among other things, they'd have required a couple orders of magnitude more computer hardware to do the genome assembly.
A fair assessment of the HGP is that it was slow to adapt, and stuck to the older, tested methods several years longer than it should have. However, once Celera actually got running, the public genome centers changed relatively quickly and adopted a more efficient industrial approach. Within a couple of years their sequencing capacity increased massively, and basically eliminated the gap with Celera.
toss some money to some politically connected friends
Which friends would those be? People like George Church are not exactly politically connected, not in any way that matters. If a politician wants to hand out spoils to guarantee future party loyalty, giving money a relatively tiny clique of academic scientists is one of the least effective methods I can imagine.
they do have a lower infant mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than the US.
I see this statistic cited nearly every time the issue of Cuba comes up, but it's extremely deceptive. There are multiple reasons why the infant mortality rate for the US is higher, including a greater number of premature births, but one reason is that the statistics are calculated differently. In the US, where medical technology is very sophisticated (and very expensive, which is one reason why our health care system is so inefficient), many infants (usually premature) that would be considered stillborn in other countries can be resuscitated and kept on life support. Typically the survival rate isn't great anyway, unfortunately - but they are still recorded as "live births". So our mortality rate is effectively inflated compared to less advanced countries.
Now they have a better Literacy, infant mortality and healthcare than the US. I would call that a pretty heroic tale.
If Cuba is such a paradise, why did the government refuse to issue exit visas to its citizens for decades? Why did it even require exit visas in the first place, for that matter? Most governments don't use border controls to keep people in the country.
I really don't see anything they are currently doing which even comes close to the boundary pushing NASA was doing in the 1960's when things were really happening.
This may be a fair assessment, but I'd also argue that the unmanned exploration missions have been incredibly successful and relatively efficient, and a more sustainable future for NASA. Science and technology don't always need to be "boundary pushing" - sometimes iterative refinement and incremental advances are just as important. Sure, the rovers and probes aren't especially daring, but they're relatively cheap, they've accomplished real science, and NASA has an excellent track record for pulling them off successfully - and just as importantly, no other organization has done anything comparable so far.
I don't see any conflict between letting NASA focus on (unmanned) science - and giving it the funding it needs to really excel at it - and letting the private sector lead the way in exploitation and human exploration of space. In fact I think that's exactly how it should be. The public sector may not always be the most efficient, but it has one key advantage: it can think extraordinarily long-term, in comparison to private companies which need a return on investment in the near future. Current missions like Kepler are laying the groundwork for advancements many decades or (more likely) centuries in the future. Personally, I'd like to see NASA focus on two things:
1) More planet-finding, including (eventually) telescopes capable of imaging extrasolar planets directly. (Probably using the sun as a gravitational lens, which makes Kepler look like a child's toy telescope, but that's the kind of long-term, far-out shit that I think NASA could rock.)
2) Continuing to probe (heh) every body in the solar system which might have life, or which is interesting for other reasons.
Missions like these will tell us what's out there; entrepreneurs and private investors can decide what to do with this information. One could also make a strong case for experimental propulsion research - let Elon Musk and others focus on making conventional propulsion affordable and routine (what the shuttle was supposed to do but didn't), and doing so quickly, and NASA can explore less conventional methods with a more open timeline.
If McCarthy was right it was entirely by accident. Many innocent people were smeared as Communists simply for advocating policies that McCarthy personally disagreed with. Among the many was George Marshall, the man responsible for the Marshall Plan and thus one of the people most responsible for saving Western Europe from a Communist takeover. The character of the McCarthy-like senator in "The Manchurian Candidate" is uncomfortably close to the truth.
Good point, and furthermore, while some of these controversies are not without merit, there is zero evidence that any of the science prizes (at least within my lifetime) were awarded for political reasons, unlike the Peace prize. (Some people have claimed that Raymond Damadian was denied the prize because he's a young-earth creationist, but I think it's more likely that we was denied it because he'd pissed off too many people in general.)
You mentioned Obama's Peace prize, not me. If you think the controversies surrounding various science prizes devalue the award, you should have said that instead of pointing to irrelevancies. I'm guessing you had never heard of these other controversies until you Googled them just now; they're generally of interest to science geeks and ignored by the general public. (Except for the time when Damadian made an ass of himself - buying a full-page ad in the NYT tends to attract attention.)
Perhaps the family of Dr. Crick reexamined the value of a Nobel Prize when a Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Barack Obama
What exactly is the problem with you people who can't tell the difference between the Nobel Peace prize and the prizes for Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine? What makes you think the two categories have anything to do with one another, either administratively or politically? They could give the Peace prize to Bashar Assad this fall and it would still have zero relevance to the worth of the chemistry prize.
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First of all: scientific research for no relevant purpose at all should be done with DONATIONS not with violent attack on individual freedoms to deprive people of their property.
If you want your argument to be taken seriously, drop the hyperbole. Unless you live in North Korea or Turkmenistan or Cuba, no one is preventing you from leaving if you don't like the way your country is run.
Secondly I immediately thought of a counter example to your argument [wikipedia.org].
That isn't really a counter-example, because Corning pursued the project with the goal of near-term commercialization. The fact that it failed at the time is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's "basic research".
To be fair, the journal Science is run by a non-profit, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I think it's still behind a paywall, but I have less problem funding a non-profit that way.
There are a lot of other journals like this. I publish frequently in journals published by a specialist academic organization - they are read by everyone in our field, the organization does good work in general (it's truly community-run), and their policies are generally reasonable. But they do still have some overhead that has to be paid somehow. We usually cough up the $1000 or $1500 or whatever for the open-access fee (that makes the articles free upon publication, instead of having to wait the 12 months that the NIH specifies), which I don't mind. It would be a real shame if these publishers went out of "business".
Part of the problem with Elsevier and NPG however is that their open-access fees are insane - I read something like $7000 for an article in Nature, which is usually shorter than most of what I publish.
Private companies do science [slashdot.org] all the time [nytimes.com] because they need [bit-tech.net] to push their knowledge forward to stay competitive [cisco.com].
You're missing the rather large distinction between basic and applied research. Most companies do science with the explicit goal of advancing products to the market, and are very reluctant to spend time and money on anything that doesn't have a clear route to commercialization. (I'm not saying this as a put-down: their job is to make money, not publish journal articles.) But most basic research, at least in the field of biomedicine, can take decades before commercialization is feasible, if that ever happens - and there's no way to know in advance whether it will or not.
My favorite example is X-ray crystallography, which pharmaceutical companies use to study the molecular interactions between proteins and drug candidates. The first experiments were performed in 1937, the first atomic-resolution structures were published in 1961, and I believe the first application to drug design was sometime in the 1980s. It's not like those lazy academics were just sitting on their hands all this time; it took them decades just to work out the math involved, and there were multiple Nobel prizes awarded in the process. Now academics and companies solve thousands of crystal structures every year, but it still took the rest of the 1980s and 1990s for the technology to develop enough to support that pace.
There are actually a handful of companies that are so profitable (or so large) that they can subsidize undirected basic research: IBM is one, also Genentech, Novartis, and arguably Google and Microsoft. And smaller companies will publish bits and pieces of their directed research as well, if the lawyers let them. But for most, they can't spend decades developing a theory; their shareholders would never stand for it.
Only a few of the most common freshman introductory texts --- that will sell zillions of copies --- might be profitable
The author of one of the most popular college organic chemistry textbooks drives a red Ferrari - definitely the exception to the rule, however. Most of the time the payoff is largely just to the ego (which most tenured professors have no shortage of).
Much of their infrastructure is related to payment processing and restricted document delivery.
There is also a relatively huge overhead from the production costs of a dead tree journal, which few of the audience will even see at this point. (I can't remember the time I actually picked up a copy of Journal of Molecular Biology - I just download PDFs onto my iPad.) They have an entire staff whose job it is to reformat your Word document, arrange figures, etc. Some journals even charge a "color fee" if you have color images (essential for many biology articles), as if it were more expensive to generate colored PDFs.
The sick irony in this is that more and more of the content ends up in the supplemental material anyway, and that's usually just an unformatted PDF.
Congress just recently passed legislation saying that any papers produced and at least partially funded by the NIH must be made public within one year of publication. This, of course, is dependent upon the NIH making an actual database for this
This has been policy for several years now, and the NIH does indeed have an actual database for this. Apparently they are known to call up investigators who are tardy uploading their papers (some journals do this automatically, but usually not the big commercial publishers).
Plants come in at about 2% energy conversion efficiency. The best solar cells are over 35% conversion efficiency.
I think it depends on how you're counting. The 2% probably includes all photons hitting the leaf, which seems reasonable enough when comparing to a solar cell where nearly the entire surface is supposed to be converting photons to electricity. However, the individual proteins in plants that capture photons are indeed extraordinarily efficient. Nothing we can synthesize is as efficient on the nano-scale as Photosystems I and II - but of course since the plant is not made entirely of photosystems, the relative efficiency rate appears to be less.
I think it's a despicable thought process that's in desperate need of modification.
I think it's ridiculous that every time the subject of extraterrestrial life comes up, a dozen clueless people post the same objection as if it's some stunningly original insight that biologists have simply missed due to lack of imagination.
If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun
What makes you so certain that intelligent, technologically capable alien races don't go through the same problems that we do? At a minimum, it is likely that interstellar travel requires mastery of nuclear energy and metallurgy across the entire periodic table, with all of the environmental risks that implies. Additionally, just to get to the point where they could develop nuclear power would likely require a period of industrialization using cruder organic sources of energy. It's very hard to imagine accomplishing this without any environmental degradation. Given the number of possible ecological catastrophies that could happen along the way, I think we're actually doing reasonably well so far.
WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders
And a tiny fraction of the French population, much of which instead spent the war handing over their Jews to the Nazis, especially the (100% French) right-wing Vichy regime. Compare this to the Danes, who also pre-emptively surrendered and were generally nonviolent during their occupation - unlike France, they were not a military/industrial empire and would have been overrun no matter what - but helped nearly their entire Jewish population escape to Sweden and refused to cooperate with the Germans. After the war, France was treated as a "winner" in part because of the political smarts of de Gaulle, and in part to make them feel better and secure their cooperation against the Soviet Union, but in fact the war was won almost entirely by the US, UK (and affiliated nations), and USSR.
The "France surrenders" meme was around long before the run-up to the Iraq war, which is part of why it caught on so quickly (it didn't hurt that a large fraction of Americans are credulous morons happy to believe anything bad about everyone who opposed Bush's lunacy). WWII wasn't the last time France was completely embarrassed; the battle of Dien Bien Phu was another low point.
attempting to prevent the same populist leftist takeover from happening
Anyone who thinks the USA is in any danger of this - in particular, anyone who thinks Obama is representative of such a trend - needs to seek psychiatric help. I happen to live in one of the few places in the country where such far-left agitators (and cult-of-personality followers) group, and they're considered a bunch of nutters by their (overwhelmingly liberal) neighbors. They incite the occasional riot and commit petty vandalism, but their political influence and their ability to cause real damage is nil. The more mainstream leftists content themselves with waving signs whining about the 1% during rush hour; they present absolutely no risk of violent takeover. (Most of them freak out about guns anyway.)
The OWS crowd presents another good example - most people around here like their iPhones too much to want to "smash global capitalism" or whatever the goal is. Supporting nationalized health insurance does not equate to wanting to herd your fellow citizens into forced-labor camps, or summarily execute them. And again, I remind you: the left-wingers in this country are generally not the ones with large numbers of firearms. I think they have a childishly simple and idealistic worldview, and I find them generally incompetent at governing, but they're not the people I'm worried about forming death squads.
they lost half their value on paper, bringing down the accounts of investors foolish enough to invest in those "safe" things.
Maybe you weren't paying attention, but the entire stock market tumbled when the crash came. People who invested in much safer things like mutual funds also lost a huge fraction of their net worth - not quite half, but around 40% in my case. These may not be as conservative an investment as, say, CDs or (on the extreme end) savings accounts, but they're hardly irresponsible speculation.
Now, the good news is that my mutual funds have now climbed back to where they were in late 2007 - this is a big part of the reason why Obama is still president (not that I bothered voting).
Protip: They were.
Celera didn't come into existence until an entire decade after the public genome project started, and was able to take advantage of a decade's worth of technology development - as well as the initial results of the HGP, which were immediately deposited in a public database.
putting researchers to work on questions chosen by non-experts
That is generally a worrisome prospect, but it's not normally the case in the US. The government outlines broad areas that it wants to see studied (cancer, infectious diseases, etc.), but the specific questions being addressed are chosen by actual experts in the form of NIH grant panels. In this specific case, while the decision to push for funding for this initiative came from Obama (which definitely gives me pause), the project itself is, again, the brainchild of actual experts.
Took the words right out of my mouth... but I'll add "and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out". American citzens who whine about the government taking taxes "by force" need to think about what life is like in Cuba or North Korea where the citizens aren't even allowed to leave the country.
Craig Venter's private company was able to do similar work on the Human Genome Project, in a shorter amount of time, and for roughly 1/10 the cost of Francis Collins' gov't project.
In addition to the fact that Venter was able to take advantage of nearly a decade of technology development, you're leaving out a few important details:
1) Celera was able to use the HGP results, but not vice-versa. Which was convenient, since the HGP's more laborious process could cover parts of the genome that weren't well-suited for the shotgun assembly method.
2) The total cost of the HGP covered much more than simply sequencing the human genome - there were many preliminary and side projects covered as well, none of which Celera pursued.
3) The availability of a public, license-free genome meant that it could be used as a reference for future studies without restriction. This eliminates the need to perform de-novo assembly with each individual genome from the same species, which drastically reduces the cost and time required for further sequencing. Without this, the huge advances in comparative genomics and personal genomics over the past decade would have been hideously expensive, because they'd all have needed to pay Celera for a license (and not been able to publish their results).
But that was due to the technology advancing during the 8 years the public project had already been running. Venter was able to use the experience gained from that time.
Yes, and as you hinted at, the technology required for Venter's approach didn't even exist when the HGP started. Among other things, they'd have required a couple orders of magnitude more computer hardware to do the genome assembly.
A fair assessment of the HGP is that it was slow to adapt, and stuck to the older, tested methods several years longer than it should have. However, once Celera actually got running, the public genome centers changed relatively quickly and adopted a more efficient industrial approach. Within a couple of years their sequencing capacity increased massively, and basically eliminated the gap with Celera.
toss some money to some politically connected friends
Which friends would those be? People like George Church are not exactly politically connected, not in any way that matters. If a politician wants to hand out spoils to guarantee future party loyalty, giving money a relatively tiny clique of academic scientists is one of the least effective methods I can imagine.
they do have a lower infant mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than the US.
I see this statistic cited nearly every time the issue of Cuba comes up, but it's extremely deceptive. There are multiple reasons why the infant mortality rate for the US is higher, including a greater number of premature births, but one reason is that the statistics are calculated differently. In the US, where medical technology is very sophisticated (and very expensive, which is one reason why our health care system is so inefficient), many infants (usually premature) that would be considered stillborn in other countries can be resuscitated and kept on life support. Typically the survival rate isn't great anyway, unfortunately - but they are still recorded as "live births". So our mortality rate is effectively inflated compared to less advanced countries.
Now they have a better Literacy, infant mortality and healthcare than the US. I would call that a pretty heroic tale.
If Cuba is such a paradise, why did the government refuse to issue exit visas to its citizens for decades? Why did it even require exit visas in the first place, for that matter? Most governments don't use border controls to keep people in the country.
I really don't see anything they are currently doing which even comes close to the boundary pushing NASA was doing in the 1960's when things were really happening.
This may be a fair assessment, but I'd also argue that the unmanned exploration missions have been incredibly successful and relatively efficient, and a more sustainable future for NASA. Science and technology don't always need to be "boundary pushing" - sometimes iterative refinement and incremental advances are just as important. Sure, the rovers and probes aren't especially daring, but they're relatively cheap, they've accomplished real science, and NASA has an excellent track record for pulling them off successfully - and just as importantly, no other organization has done anything comparable so far.
I don't see any conflict between letting NASA focus on (unmanned) science - and giving it the funding it needs to really excel at it - and letting the private sector lead the way in exploitation and human exploration of space. In fact I think that's exactly how it should be. The public sector may not always be the most efficient, but it has one key advantage: it can think extraordinarily long-term, in comparison to private companies which need a return on investment in the near future. Current missions like Kepler are laying the groundwork for advancements many decades or (more likely) centuries in the future. Personally, I'd like to see NASA focus on two things:
1) More planet-finding, including (eventually) telescopes capable of imaging extrasolar planets directly. (Probably using the sun as a gravitational lens, which makes Kepler look like a child's toy telescope, but that's the kind of long-term, far-out shit that I think NASA could rock.)
2) Continuing to probe (heh) every body in the solar system which might have life, or which is interesting for other reasons.
Missions like these will tell us what's out there; entrepreneurs and private investors can decide what to do with this information. One could also make a strong case for experimental propulsion research - let Elon Musk and others focus on making conventional propulsion affordable and routine (what the shuttle was supposed to do but didn't), and doing so quickly, and NASA can explore less conventional methods with a more open timeline.
If McCarthy was right it was entirely by accident. Many innocent people were smeared as Communists simply for advocating policies that McCarthy personally disagreed with. Among the many was George Marshall, the man responsible for the Marshall Plan and thus one of the people most responsible for saving Western Europe from a Communist takeover. The character of the McCarthy-like senator in "The Manchurian Candidate" is uncomfortably close to the truth.
Good point, and furthermore, while some of these controversies are not without merit, there is zero evidence that any of the science prizes (at least within my lifetime) were awarded for political reasons, unlike the Peace prize. (Some people have claimed that Raymond Damadian was denied the prize because he's a young-earth creationist, but I think it's more likely that we was denied it because he'd pissed off too many people in general.)
You mentioned Obama's Peace prize, not me. If you think the controversies surrounding various science prizes devalue the award, you should have said that instead of pointing to irrelevancies. I'm guessing you had never heard of these other controversies until you Googled them just now; they're generally of interest to science geeks and ignored by the general public. (Except for the time when Damadian made an ass of himself - buying a full-page ad in the NYT tends to attract attention.)
Perhaps the family of Dr. Crick reexamined the value of a Nobel Prize when a Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Barack Obama
What exactly is the problem with you people who can't tell the difference between the Nobel Peace prize and the prizes for Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine? What makes you think the two categories have anything to do with one another, either administratively or politically? They could give the Peace prize to Bashar Assad this fall and it would still have zero relevance to the worth of the chemistry prize.