Some useful thoughts from Walter Russell Mead. It’s always interesting to note that, contra popular myth, the manufacturing sector is quite strong, just as agriculture is. They just don’t employ as many people as they used to. In both cases, this is a good thing.
Category Archives: Education
It Is Not “President’s Day”
I agree. That absurd name elevates Buchanan, Pierce, the fascist dictator Wilson and the hapless Jimmy Carter (not to mention the present inhabitant of the White House) to the same supposed national esteem as George Washington. It’s absurd.
It Was Never About DADT
The mask is off — the leftists in academia intrinsically hate the military. I wonder what excuse they’ll come up with to continue to violate the law and keep ROTC off campuses now?
The Misnamed Blog Carnival
The latest Carnival of Space is up.
For anyone interested, I’ve never participated in this, primarily because in my experience, they’re not really carnivals of space — they’re carnivals of space science, a subject in which I have little more interest in than other kinds, except to the degree that it provides knowledge of how to develop and settle it. This is a specific instance of a more general irk — when many people learn that I’m an expert on space policy and technology, or I do a radio interview, they assume that I’m both an expert on and interested in space science and astronomy and (even more annoyingly) UFOs. It’s the same kind of general public level of (lack of) knowledge that leads to phrases such as “rocket scientist.”
Can’t Happen Soon Enough
Is the higher-education bubble on the verge of popping?
Who Would Have Thought?
There are documentation problems at NASA. It’s endemic to the industry. It’s one of the causes of high costs. And failures. Be sure to read the comments.
One of the advantages that SpaceX has is that with a tightly integrated co-located team, the knowledge is much more accessible, though individuals become more critical
Unbiasing Academia
Megan McArdle discusses a tough problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but it seems to have happened since the sixties, so to figure out how to fix it, we need to examine what broke it.
The Lesson For Schoolchildren
Good Question
In the midst of appropriately ridiculing Al Gore, Charles Krauthammer raises an interesting point:
Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…
[Laughter]
…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.
OK, so how is the global warming religion falsifiable? What would it take?
Why I Eat Saturated Fats
Because they taste good, and they have essentially no relationship with coronary risk:
Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol. If it’s a factor at all, it must be rather weak, which is consistent with what has been observed in multiple non-human species (13). I think it’s likely that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-interpretation of short-term controlled feeding studies. I’d like to see a more open discussion of this in the scientific literature. In any case, these controlled studies have typically shown that saturated fat increases both LDL and HDL, so even if saturated fat did have a small long-term effect on blood cholesterol, as hinted at by some of the observational studies, its effect on heart attack risk would still be difficult to predict.
Actually, I have a simpler explanation — it’s simply an appealing theory, from a common-sense standpoint. You are what you eat, right?
Of course, it’s always dangerous to rely on “common sense” when it comes to complex topics like biochemistry. And yet the FDA builds such murderous concepts as the food pyramid on such shoddy research and thinking. Not to mention agri-industry lobbying, of course.