Go Terk Yourself

Hillary Clinton and John McCain want to suspend the national gas tax for the duration of the summer, when travelers drive the most. And they’re jumping down Barack Obama’s throat for opposing the plan. The big reasoning for the suspension is to help Americans pay to fill their cars, but it won’t help very much even if it will seem like a big difference:

At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. Mr. Obama has previously dismissed Mr. McCain’s proposal as a “scheme.”

“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

Marc Andreessen makes his case for Barack Obama:

What about foreign policy – should we be concerned that you just don’t have much experience there?

Think about who I am – my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world – parts of the world that we really care about – when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.

Mark Hoofnagle on why Denialists (Intelligent Design proponents, Homeopaths, Holocaust Deniers, etc.) should not be debated.

Academia and science are critically dependent on debate, this is true, but the prerequisite for having the debate is having people who are honestly interested in pursuing the truth and operate using the same rules of evidence and proof. It’s not about censoring dissent, which the cranks insist is the issue in their eternal pursuit of persecution. It’s about having standards for evidence and discussion. This is why these debates, when confined to a courtroom, often fair so disastrously for the denialists. In the presence of standards that exist before evidence can be introduced, they are left with nothing.

PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula (one of the Science Blogs, check them out) is very entertaining:

People who think that merely believing in Jesus grants them redemption must also think that believing in evolution is a magic charm that grants them exemption from criticism of any nonsense they might hold. It doesn’t work that way. There is no get-out-of-criticism-free card.

My friends and I started a blog for our long running club of snobbery: Scotch & Politics. Brendan posted an excellent piece today entitled “Why I Don’t Like Blogs” and Mike brought his thoroughly engaging Daily Briefing into the mix. Check it out and let us know what you think.

From the why-kids-need-to-understand-natural-selection department: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good.

Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them.

When a bacterial population is placed under a stressor—such as an antibacterial chemical—a small subpopulation armed with special defense mechanisms can develop. These lineages survive and reproduce as their weaker relatives perish. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is the governing maxim here, as antibacterial chemicals select for bacteria that endure their presence.

Blatantly stolen from BoingBoing.

Kerri and I finished watching an American Experience episode about the Summer of Love this weekend. The main point of the program was that the Summer of Love in San Francisco was a great countercultural success at the beginning but eventually failed because there were too many people doing drugs and freeloading.

It occurred to me that simply saying that druggies and freeloaders showed up isn’t quite enough to explain why the whole big experiment failed. The Hippies wanted people to be able to do drugs and get stuff for free (the Digger soup line and the Free Store are good examples of this). The problem wasn’t that people were taking the things offered to them, it was that there weren’t enough people creating. Plenty was being sucked out of the system they created but not enough was added back in.

We can think of it as a sort of user created content system. Since the Hippies weren’t creating new wealth in the form of money, they needed to do so in the form of food, goods, etc. But when everyone is stoned instead of contributing to the community the whole system consumes itself in very short time.

I have a very unhealthy obsession with Conservapedia. The New York Magazine has a proposed (Conservative) People’s History of New York City for inclusion in the right wing wiki.

The Copyright Royalty Board, a panel set up by the US Copyright Office to decide on issues having to do with royalty payments by internet broadcasters, recently issued a new set of royalty rates for internet radio stations. From the report at RAIN and a blog post by Radio Paradise’s Bill Goldsmith it looks like the new rates could be as much as 125% of a large internet radio station’s revenues. No, that’s not a typo. For smaller radio stations the royalties could be as much as 200% or revenues or more.

This could be the end of Radio Paradise and other “traditional” internet radio stations, but it would also do away with more innovative services like Pandora, Tourfilter and The Hype Machine which, because they allow people to listen over the internet, would also be subject to these new royalty rates.

I’m not completely sure what we can do about this yet but I figure that sharing these facts with the meager readership of these blogs is a good step.