From a fascinating email exchange between Independent science editor Steve Connor and Princeton scholar and climate change skeptic Professor Freeman Dyson: From: Steve Connor To: Freeman Dyson …You have written eloquently about the need for heretics in science who question the accepted dogma. There are a number of notable instances in science where heretics have indeed been proven to be right (Alfred Wegener and continental drift) but many more, less notable examples where they have been shown...

The Maryland Senate has approved legislation to give same-sex couples full marriage rights. The vote was 25-21. “We can take nothing for granted in the House,” said Del. Heather R. Mizeur (D-Montgomery), an openly gay lawmaker. Yesterday Hawaii became the seventh state to create the new legal status of civil unions, providing all of the benefits of marriage under a different name. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Obama administration’s announcement that it will no longer defend DOMA,...

Rand Paul on GMA this morning commenting on the USA Today poll finding that by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 Americans favor keeping union bargaining rights: I don’t think the Tea Party started this, I think circumstances did. You know, the circumstances are that we’re in a recession. There’s less money coming in to state treasuries, less money coming in to Washington. So I don’t think we started the battle but we’re the ones pointing it out…and I think it gets worse...

Last night in the question period after a speech at the University of Pennsylvania: “You adamantly oppose gay rights… but you’ve also been married three times and admitted to having an affair with your current wife while you were still married to your second,” Isabel Friedman, president of the Penn Democrats, said to Gingrich. “As a successful politician who’s considering running for president, who would set the bar for moral conduct and be the voice of the American...

The Color of Food report maps out the race, gender and class of workers along the supply chain. Download it here. The summary of its findings: People of color typically make less than whites working in the food chain.Half of white food workers earn $25,024 a year, while workers of color make $5,675 less than that. This wage gap plays out in all four sectors of the food system, with largest income divides occurring in the food processing and distribution sectors. Women working in the food chain...

Stephen Colbert poked some fun this week at Arianna Huffington and the news aggregation practices of The Huffington Post. Colbert complained that the HuffPo is embedding videos from his show without payment, “I have yet to receive my percentage of the Huff bucks.” With that he introduced his new site, “The “Colbuffington Re-post.” Arianna, every bit the shrewd pageview monetizing netizen, took advantage of the opportunity to launch “Huffbert Nation.” The CSMonitor says it’s...

Mathew Ingram summarizes a speech by Jeff Jarvis at the Reboot Conference yesterday: [A]uthor and media blogger Jeff Jarvis told a room full of corporate and government privacy advocates something many of them probably didn’t want to hear: that society needs more protection for what he calls “publicness,” and less focus on locking down our personal information or prosecuting companies that use that data. “Privacy has plenty of advocates already,” Jarvis said. “It is potentially over-protected,...

News of the biggest solar blast in years and the accompanying photos, are all over the news. Last year I posted this from New Scientist on what I thought was a credible space storm threat: IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting...

Well, actually, I don’t know if it’s a dinner. It’s been called an event, a meeting and a visit, but Mashable says “Obama is slated to sit down with Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs at a private dinner during his overnight trip to the West Coast.” The president is set to arrive in San Francisco at 5:45 (PST). The LATimes has the official list of attendees and these details: “This is a part of our economy that has been a huge contributor to economic growth in the...

Writing in Slate, Ken Jennings describes what it was like: [A]t IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York’s Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn’t the hero at all. I was the villain. This was to be an away game for humanity, I realized as I walked onto the slightly-smaller-than-regulation Jeopardy! set that had been mocked up in the building’s main auditorium. In the middle of the floor was...

NYTimes: In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly. Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a “Simpsons” episode. From now on, if the answer is “the computer champion on “Jeopardy!,” the question will be, “What is Watson?” Computer...

“Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak,” Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown tells 60 Minutes in an interview pegged to the release of his upcoming memoir, Against All Odds. Brown says this is the first time he’s told anyone about it. In the book he says that the abuse took place when he was 10 years old at a religious camp in Cape Cod, which he attended in the summer of fourth grade. WATCH: Brown also describes having been beaten by his stepfathers beginning...

So says Raj Patel in a NYTimes Room for Debate on the question of is the world producing enough food? Over the centuries, societies developed the tools of grain stores, crop diversification and “moral economies” to guarantee the poor access to food in times of crisis. Global economic liberalization discarded these buffers in favor of lean lines of trade. Safety nets and storage became inefficient and redundant – if crops failed in one part of the world, the market would always provide...

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is in the news today for commenting on his Google problem: Try it for yourself: Enter “Rick Santorum” into Google. In a fraction of a second you’ll have hundreds of thousands of results. But two of the top four cite a graphic definition for a sexual neologism. In this case, the neologism is a reference to anal sex. This, of course, is no accident. Santorum himself sounded slightly defeated when asked about it recently. “It’s one guy. You know...

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says so: By CREW’s estimation at least 32 members — and as much as a fifth of the freshman class — save on rent and sleep on cots, air mattresses or couches in their federal offices whilst in DC. Sure, most congressmen earn more than $100,000 a year, so you’d think they’d be able to afford at least a studio in Washington. But from that money they must provide for their families, pay for weekly flights home...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech today at George Washington University urging governments abroad to embrace internet freedom: “The United States continues to help people in oppressive Internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online,” she said. The secretary of state said the federal government hasn’t backed any single technology for the Internet...

The full statement from CBS News: On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy. In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual...

A lengthy review in Scientific America looks at the documentary, Transcendent Man, on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. Cleverly edited and entertaining, Transcendent Man is unfortunately also too starstruck and reverent toward Kurzweil for its own good. It wants in part to be a movie about ideas, but frustratingly, it refuses to truly challenge any of those it raises—whether supportive or critical of him. Given that the film’s theme is the salvation or destruction of the human race,...

The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on Feb. 15, 2005: The video-sharing site, founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, has, in half-a-dozen years, become one of the most-visited websites worldwide, trailing only Facebook, Google (YouTube’s parent company) and Google’s Gmail. With its slogan “Broadcast yourself” sounding a clarion call to exhibitionists the world over, YouTube was an instant hit, encouraging individuals to submit not only their...

James Joyner notes that Andrew Sullivan “has never supported the same man in consecutive elections.” I have no idea if that’s true, but the occasion for Joyner’s observation is Sullivan’s rant about the Obama budget. Sullivan says Obama’s budget says “Screw You, Suckers!” to anyone under 30 who helped get the man elected. I think it’s too early to tell. Marketplace, tonight, concisely explains: JOHN DIMSDALE: Obama’s budget director Jack...

MSNBC says everything you know about beating stress is wrong. One of 6 of their counter-intuitive suggestions on how to relieve stress: Hanging out with loved ones has long been touted as an instant mood-booster, but according to new scientific evidence, when it comes to managing stress, the calming effects of spending time with a furry friend trump those obtained by hanging out with friends and family. “Having your pet, whether a cat or a dog, with you during a stressful event turns out to...

Regular readers know I fancy myself a foodie — part locavore, part organic. And I have been known to be a harsh critic of the industrial food system. (See, for example, here, here, here and here.) So when, over the weekend, I finally got ’round to listening to Part 2 of the Freakonomics podcasts on food, Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup!, I was struck by the simple, obvious, bottom-line fact of the broad benefits of the modern industrial food system: DUBNER: Go back just a few...

Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman explains: While viewers in most of the U.S. were wrapping up the live broadcast of The Grammy Awards, viewers on the West Coast were just getting started with the tape-delayed version, airing at 8 p.m. PT. As is customary for many viewers now, many on the left coast opened their Twitter and Facebook accounts to chat along with the action — just in time to catch the East Coast updates announcing the album of the year. … The live blog on Grammys.com was even...

The NYTimes printed a piece yesterday titled, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. In it they detail how J. C. Penney achieved the top rank in Google search results through a black hat Search Engine Optimization scheme. The Times documented 2,015 pages from hundreds of sites scattered all around the Web that each linked directly back to JCPenney.com. J. C. Penney fired its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex, and spokeswoman Darcie Brossart is quoted: “J. C. Penney did not authorize, and...

An insightful post from Andrew Losowsky offers up 6 points on why sales of maglets (magazines on tablets – got it?) soured so quickly. Most of his points are undoubtedly true — charging twice, not enough iPads, the medium is still new. A couple highlight bad business choices — selling the same content twice, content held outside of the digital conversation. One, Separate App Syndrome, speaks more directly to the future evolution of the tablet platform: Imagine if, instead of...