Shrimp and Grits

We often hear that businesses prefer the government to step out of the way and let them run things.  Regulations, policy, and so forth merely get in the way of business.  So this quote from Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris is interesting:

“For years, Washington has failed to address the issue of rising energy costs, and as a result, the country now faces a true energy crisis, one that is causing serious harm to America’s manufacturing sector and all consumers of energy”

What makes the CEO of Dow say such a thing?  They’ve had to raise prices across the board because of skyrocketing energy costs.  And that’s bad news for all of us.

Occasionally, the current administration releases some potentially useful information … when forced.

The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, has released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impact of human-caused global warming in the United States.

So, why wouldn’t Bush release this report earlier?  I suppose he didn’t like the conclusions.  The summary, which you can grab here, describes what’s likely to be in store for us in the future:  We can expect more heat - more than the global average - with more and longer heat waves and excessively hot days.  We’ll see more intense summer droughts.  We will experience more intense “extreme weather” - hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like.  We can expect more illness and death from heat-loving pathogens, and so on.  It’s not a very pleasant forecast.

I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about John Kerry’s presidential campaign a few years ago, but he’s exactly right:

“The three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement. “In these lost years, we could have slowed global warming and advanced clean energy solutions, but instead America’s climate change strategy has been at best rhetorical, not real.”

This explains a lot about the last few years.  This administration’s response to any crisis has been to simply deny that a crisis exists.  And that’s never a good long-term strategy.

Posting’s been rather light here recently, and that’s because I have been busy with five week summer classes.  We cram a full semester’s worth of freshman chemistry into five weeks.

But if I wanted to pick up a little extra money this summer, I could apply for some extra work over in the business office.  Here’s a job posting I saw this morning:

If I work all summer, I might just be able to buy a burrito at Taco Bell!

There’s some discussion on the net about whether Barack Obama’s defeat in Kenturcky really means a whole lot.  Clinton supporters, obviously, think it means something.  But Clinton’s Kentucky win was so lopsided because of one issue:  race.

Obama’s problem was with these white voters overall. His greatest losses among whites, by 40 points or more, all have been in Southern states – Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia. Reflecting their discomfort with Obama, nearly half of Kentucky Democrats said they would not support him in a November election against John McCain, again similar to the result in West Virginia.

Look at Kentucky.  This is a state whose Democrats won’t back their own party’s candidate because he’s a black man.  So Obama will lose big in Kentucky in a matchup against John McCain.  But Hillary Clinton won’t win there either.  Why not?  Racism and sexism are often traveling companions.

Naked women and the Confederate flag.  Yee haw!  This kind of voter will just as easily turn out against Clinton as against Obama when the opponent is a white guy.

I didn’t see this commentary at first because, well, I don’t make it a point to pay a lot of attemtion to CNN gasbag Glenn Beck. But sometimes, you’ve got to call out stupidity when you see it:

The Gates Foundation is working to cure malaria, develop new tuberculosis vaccines, and stop the spread of AIDS. Most of our colleges and universities are only working to spread the radical political views of some of their professors.

Really, Glenn? You think that’s all that our colleges are doing? Laughable.

It’s true that some colleges have different missions. Research universities focus a lot of their resources on … research. (Where does Glenn think that lots of this AIDS research is done, anyway?) Two-year colleges focus more on job-related education, etc. But colleges that exist “only to spread the radical political views of some of their professors”? I can’t say that I’ve run into too many of those.

Here are Rusty and Ash enjoying their new beds.  Just don’t tell them that the beds are actually supposed to be for dogs!

Uh oh … it looks like Ash might have heard me!

What?  This is a dog bed?

I’ve just sent off all the final grades for the spring semester, and suddenly I no longer have giant stacks of papers to slog through. It makes me feel a little … well … dazed.

Of course, I can’t get too used to the lack of grading.  Summer semester is just around the corner!

One thing that most new science students have trouble doing is keeping proper track of units.  Beginning students will write down numbers, assured that they and everyone else will just know what units the number has.

Ten minutes later they’ve forgotten what the units of their numbers were and completely mess up their calculations.

Well, here’s yet another bad thing that can happen when you don’t pay attention to units.

OPP said the U.S. woman’s Mercedes Benz was clocked at a speed of 140 km/h heading west on Highway 401 just before 10:30 p.m. Sunday.

[...]

The total fine amounted to $405.

According to police, the Californian’s explanation for speeding was that the speedometer in her Benz only gave readings in miles per hour and she wasn’t familiar with the metric system.

She was driving in a 100 km/hr zone.  If we’re to believe this woman’s excuse, she saw the “100 km/hr” sign and thought “Whoo!  100!  That means I can drive 100 miles per hour here!  Floor it!”

(Now if she really didn’t understand the system, she might have considered using a little common sense.  Her speedometer at the time would have been reading about 87 miles per hour, which is enough to get a ticket most places in the US.)

So here we have a case of mistaken units costing a woman a lot of money.  Something to think about if you’re a new student feeling a little lazy in the lab …

Well, what do you know, it really is “turtles all the way down“!

This is a group of sliders (I think! Someone correct me if I’m wrong) I saw while on the way to work. This group was actually difficult to photograph, for the simple reason that they are incredibly easy to spook. Getting even a little close to them results in them, well, sliding off their log and disappearing into the water.

This is in fact the second time I stopped at this little pond to photograph these turtles. The first time, they were gone the moment I set the tripod down. I suppose if I want better pictures of turtles in the future, I should invest in a better telephoto lens?

On Yahoo news, we have yet another confirmation that water is still wet abstinence-only sex education does not work.

“Vast sums of federal monies continue to be directed toward these programs. And, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that some of these programs are even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active,” Dr. Margaret Blythe of the American Academy of Pediatrics told [Congress].

When we’re faced wit ha ton of evidence against a position - say the position that abstinence-only sex education is beneficial - the rational course would be to abandon the position. As PZ Myers highlights, that’s just too difficult for some members of Congress. Take, for instance, John Duncan (R-Tenn):

it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding

Just stop and think about that assertion for a moment. It’s “elitist” to assume that people who have dedicated a significant amount of time researching and studying the outcomes of various types of sex education might actually know more about these outcomes that people who haven’t? The stupid! It burns! Representative Duncan, people who have actually researched and studied things generally know more about these things than those who haven’t. Since when did stating the obvious become elitist?

Sadly, this attitude is one I often have to battle as an educator. A big part of my job is to make people more knowledgeable. But I can’t do that if students think that someone’s gut feelings somehow trump reproducible observations and actual knowledge. That’s exactly what Representative Duncan is pushing; his gut feelings are supposed to somehow carry more weight than real data.