Author: Dave

Interesting, and if they detected the Industrial Revolution we might catch the departure ceremonies of their flight here: According to a paper Siemion authored last fall, a five-year campaign by the first phase of the SKA could allow scientists to survey more than 10,000 stars. When completed, the SKA could detect signals as faint as…

We now know what it must have been like reading Caligula’s biographer Is it possible server-gate will achieve the opposite of what Republicans want and make Hillary Clinton seem more personable—and popular? So far, at least, the emails released this week seem to evoke less a Foggy Bottom Machiavelli at work than a fairly ordinary…

“The President of the United States doesn’t respond to taunts.” Mostly he issues them. And then denies issuing them. Sometimes on the same day! “At no point have I ever suggested, for example, that someone is a war monger meaning they want war,” Obama asserted. .. During the White House press briefing this afternoon, Obama’s…

Poetic to see the lollipop pacifist countries find out first-hand how much worse things get when US troops aren’t around to keep the craziest militants in check. Probably Europeans like to forget Normandy wasn’t that long ago, and we were still minding the Fulda Gap just 25 years ago. It’s always something.

The real gap in this country isn’t race, or income, or gender, or sexual orientation, or politics.

The fight over the Ex-Im bank is something almost no one has heard of, and yet it’s sort of a pivotal ideological struggle of our time.  Ex-Im basically exists to hand money to U.S. exporters, on the basis that hey, other countries hand money to their exporters, so we should too (you don’t want Chinese…

This Fourth of July, I’m officially changing my race (I heard we can do this now). Unlike Rachel Dolezal, I won’t need to alter my appearance, because from this point forward my ethnicity will be one that goes beyond appearance and speaks to what I believe: American. Unhyphenated. Indivisible, you might say. While we all…

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” — Albert Einstein “The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades… I could go through a dozen more examples… And we can get a good match to the data… Models are not right…

So, it turns out there’s an obscure anti-skeptic website out there with the amusingly misleading name of Skeptical Science.  Unlike its more mainstream skeptical counterparts, this site has a permanent format that lends itself to citing, perhaps better than more popular news-driven global warming websites. While the information on the site is at best tendentious, some readers…

Over at WUWT, commenters attempt to answer the Great Question of global warming. No, it’s not what sea levels will be in 2100, how to model water vapor and other feedbacks, or why the 18-year pause — no, this question is far more important: given their failure to model anything on Earth, what should we…

There’s been a lot of criticism of this choice, but if Klain can do for Ebola what he did for Solyndra, I’m sold. I’ve personally been wondering if it might be a good idea to stock up on lysine, which has some data (and a lot of anecdote) supporting use as an antiviral. Hopefully more…

Now more than just a convenient assumption for casting in old sci-fi movies: In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai’s robot…

As they say. Finally: lab on a chip, coming to Walgreens. A few dollars for lipid panel, a few dozen for fertility test, one-day turnaround. Wow. Hope we get one here soon. P.S. Bill Ardolino still owes me some respiroctyes (seriously, why are we all living three minutes from brain death? it’s insanity) UPDATE: Apparently…

China has made the leap from N Korean-style basket case communism to banana republic crony-kleptocracy, and we should all applaud the fact that liberation has lifted several hundred million people out of grinding poverty and into middle incomes. But is the Party over? If you think we saw bad things out of China this week,…

So it appears Scotland may actually go independent this month. Irrespective of how this particular vote unfolds, hyperlocalization is one of the most promising trends in our global political evolution. As much I disagree with most of the Yes crowd’s policies, which include some of the most retrograde statist notions, independence for Scotland means government…

Yes, we’re up to three asterisks now.  We already knew Obama illegally used the IRS to suppress the Tea Party during the  2012 election, and that he flat-out lied about being able to keep your doctor or insurance (who thinks Obama would have won re-election if Obamacare took effect in 2012?  Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?), now…

A stirring defense of McCarthyism.  Not sure Randall quite realizes everything he’s implicitly condoning, which easily covers the Hollywood Ten blacklist and openly political firings as well as having people remove your books from libraries and burn them. I always wonder how these people would have reacted to, say, firing people for criticizing the military…

No, the Tea Party is not going to abandon the GOP, sorry to disappoint you WaPo readers. They’ve been building GOP officeholders at the state level for several years now. Hey kids, remember when the WaPo reported the Tea Party could “just as easily” fade away… in 2010? Remember the Coffee Party? Good times, good…

So, Ezra Klein is going to make news better. He’s going to do that by assiduously avoiding the sort of problems that plague data analysis, leading to incorrect conclusions because of politics.  Great news for libertarians, right?  After all, we’re slaves to neither tradition nor feelings — libertarians, moreso than any other political orientation, are…

Sumner on what fiscal policy really does: Fiscal policy can’t really do anything in the AD/NGDP area. So what do people like Larry Summers mean when they talk about a preference for using fiscal policy? They aren’t advocating the use of fiscal policy to get the right level of NGDP growth; you can do that…