Wow, light post, considering that it’s been a month. Maybe I _am_ slowly breaking the death-grip of RSS. Unfortunately, for you, that means links will be far less timely. It was hard picking a top 5 6 this time, but here they are. Real post coming soon. Just gotta deal with that pesky real life thing first…
- Politics: Killing the (public) career of a judge near you.
- Bad News: Roundup Ready Resistant weeds proliferate (NYT)
- Oil Slickonomics
- The Economics of Climate Change Reduction (NYT, Krugman)
- The Dollar ReDe$ign Project
- Vietnam, revisited (photos, warning: graphic)
Government
- Politics: Killing the (public) career of a judge near you.
But Estrada never made it to the bench. The same qualities that had earned him a nomination—his youth, political leanings, and minority background—perversely worked against him: Fearing that Estrada would sit atop a list of possible Supreme Court picks once he became a judge, Senate Democrats waged a harsh two-year campaign against him. In 2003, Estrada removed himself from consideration and returned to private law practice.
Today, another judicial nomination is following a route strikingly similar to Estrada’s. Goodwin Liu, whom President Obama has nominated for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is 39, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, a Rhodes Scholar, and one of his generation’s sharpest legal minds. Yet he has already drawn heavy fire from conservatives, largely because they see him as a potential Supreme Court nominee later in Obama’s presidency.
Science
- Obama’s new space policy
The New Space Policy Plan
1) As before, NASA’s budget will be increased in the new plan. Let me repeat that: NASA’s overall budget will go up. And not just a little; we’re talking $6 billion over the next five years. A lot of that goes into scientific research. So far from it being doom and gloom, that’s good news.
2) A new heavy-lift rocket will be developed. Let me repeat that as well: funding is provided for NASA to create a new heavy-lift vehicle. So yes, Constellation will be canceled, but a new system will be developed that (hopefully) will be within budget and time constraints.
3) The Orion capsule, based on Apollo capsule legacy, will still be built. Initially it will be for space station operations as an escape module, but can be adapted later for crewed space missions.
4) He wants NASA to plan manned missions to near-Earth asteroids in the 2020s, and to Mars in 2030s, but no return to the Moon.
OK, so what do I think of all this?
- Journey to the ISS (Photos)
- Apollo 11 lift-off slow motion capture
- Antarctic Research Bases
- Bad News: Roundup Ready Resistant weeds proliferate (NYT)
Oil Spill
- Why you can’t just burn the oil spill
At roughly 9.4 kilograms of CO2 per gallon of crude oil, burning the already-spilled 1.6 million gallons (estimate as of 5/2/2010) would theoretically turn it into 15,000 metric tons of greenhouse gasses. This is equivalent to the estimated daily emissions from yesterday’s news: the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland.
- Oil Slickonomics
Three scenarios lie ahead. They rank as bad, worse, and ugliest (the latter being catastrophic and unprecedented). There is no “good” here.
The Bad.
Containment chambers are put in place and they catch the outflow from the three ruptures that are currently pouring 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf every day. If this works, it will take until June to complete. The chambers are 30-foot-high steel configurations that must be placed on the ocean floor at a depth of one mile. This has never been done before. If early containment is successful, the damages from this accident will be in the tens of billions. The cleanup will take years. The economic impact will be in the five states that have frontal coastline on the Gulf of Mexico: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
- Long-range oil spill politics
Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.
- Gulf Oil Spill (photos)
Economy
- A libertarian FinReg proposal (Cato)
- Improving Finreg
- 47% of US Households owe no federal income tax (Leonhardt)
The 47 percent number is not wrong. …
But the modifiers here — federal and income — are important. Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and capital gains taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.
- Buy vs Rent Calculator
(NYT) - The Goldman Scandal (Taibbi)
- The Economics of Climate Change Reduction (NYT, Krugman)
Weitzman argues — and I agree — that this risk of catastrophe, rather than the details of cost-benefit calculations, makes the most powerful case for strong climate policy. Current projections of global warming in the absence of action are just too close to the kinds of numbers associated with doomsday scenarios. It would be irresponsible — it’s tempting to say criminally irresponsible — not to step back from what could all too easily turn out to be the edge of a cliff.
International
- US Trade Sanctions and Human Rights Violations
- Shanghai World Expo (Photos)
- China’s war on Engrish. Oh, and FYI, NYT, Engrish != Chinglish.
- Vietnam, revisited (photos, warning: graphic)
- Twitter is being archived by the Library of Congress
- Teenagers text more in a day than I text in a year….
The study found that a full 3/4 of teens from 12 to 17 own cell phones today and that girls in the group typically send 80 texts per day and boys typically send 30 texts per day.
- Revolutionizing school lunch foods
- The Dollar ReDe$ign Project
- Being Middle Aged isn’t so bad after all. (NYT)
The thing the middle-aged brain shares with the teenage brain is that it’s still developing. It’s not some static blob that is going inexorably downhill. Scientists found that when they watched the brains of teenagers, the brains were expanding and growing and cutting back and shaping themselves, even when the kids are 25 years old. I think for many years scientists just left it at that. They thought that from 25 on, we just get “stupider.” But that’s not true. They’ve found that during this period, the new modern middle age, we’re better at all sorts of things than we were at 20.
…
[What are older people better at?] Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution. They found social expertise peaks in middle age. That’s basically sorting out the world: are you a good guy or a bad guy? Harvard has studied how people make financial judgments. It peaks, and we get the best at it in middle age. - A look at charter schools (NYT)
“If you look at the hopes and dreams from 1992, it didn’t pan out that quality would rise because of marketplace accountability,” said James Merriman, chief executive of the New York City Charter School Center. “It turns out you need government accreditation to drive quality, and the human capital to make schools go. The hard lesson is, it is so dependent on human capital.”
Society
Fun
- Vindication for my dislike of Cilantro (NYT)
- The Facial Hair — Moral Alignment Spectrum
- Surviving the High Five Zone
- Damien Walters Parkour
