Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
He officially becomes a Democrat: Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's decision to formally join the Democratic Party – making the announcement via Twitter after a fist bump from President Obama – suggests to his critics a savvy political chameleon prepping for a 2014 gubernatorial run against Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Few tears shed over this …
Continue reading "Charlie Crist: When Diversity Doesn't Quite Work Out"
Some people are trying though: A new petition gaining ground on the White House website calls on President Obama to cancel his estimated $4 million vacation and devote the money instead to helping victims of Hurricane Sandy. The petition, which was created just two days ago, had 872 signatures as of 8:45 am ET this morning and …
Continue reading "Please Don't Stop Barack Obama From Skipping Town"
When they're leasing public land, and that must be stopped: Kevin Lunny’s struggle to keep his family’s oyster farm running in Point Reyes National Seashore appears to be over, closing out an era of oysterman plying the park’s pristine waters and ushering in the nation’s newest ocean wilderness. U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s announcement Thursday …
Nothing to it, really: It's a message no one wants to hear: To slow down global warming, we'll either have to put the brakes on economic growth or transform the way the world's economies work. That's the implication of an innovative University of Michigan study examining the evolution of atmospheric CO₂, the most likely cause …
Continue reading "How to Lower Carbon Emissions: Tank the Economy!"
My regular readers are probably aware that, among my other activities, I'm pursing a PhD in Computational Engineering at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It's been an experience for several reasons. Starting such a degree in my superannuated condition wasn't an easy thing to do for that reason alone. Being both on the faculty …
He fields the usual trick question: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio declined to firmly answer a question of existential importance in an interview released Monday. An interviewer for GQ magazine asked the Republican, a Catholic and potential 2016 presidential candidate, how old planet Earth is. Rubio didn’t give a direct answer, but suggested children should be …
Continue reading "Rubio's Not a Scientist, but They're Not Either"
And not whine about it when people point out the obvious: So he (Mitt Romney) casts about, looking for some other explanation, and he lands on one: “gifts” that, to sway voters, the Obama Administration handed out to the President’s key demographic groups—“especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people.” “With regards to …
Continue reading "A Patronage Driven Political System Should be Called for What It Is"
For all the hoopla these days about being "scientific", the history of science still gets the short shrift. We are happier discussing the philosophical advances engendered by the Enlightenment and not the people on the STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) end who actually made those advances a reality. We're also happier lionising those who …
Continue reading "The Men Who Saved the Computer From the Hippie Radicals"
Well, we're here again. Four years ago after the 2008 debacle I wrote my piece The Party’s Over: A Post-Election Reflection, and that's as good of a point as any to start from. It’s fair to say that the Republican Party is history as a national party in the U.S. Oh, it’s true that it …
Continue reading "The Party's Over, Once Again: Another Election, Another Reflection"
For students of Latin American history, the serious question: President Obama’s response to the Great Recession and then a pallid recovery has been guided more by “fairness,” a thinly veiled code for redistribution, than by free-market principles. As it stands now, the top 1 percent of Americans generate 16 percent of the nation’s income but …
Continue reading "Do We Really Want to Go the Way of Argentina?"
Positive Infinity 