Science 2.0

Once again, 500,000 students couldn't go to school due to a teacher's strike. Teachers are government employees, at least 40 percent and over 50 percent (if you count colleges) of the state budget goes toward education, but a lot of that has nothing to do with teachers. Much of the $129 billion is everything except education, it is nebulous state programs like $250,000,000 to "improve the quality of reading for students" which, like a 2014 voter mandate to add water storage, means years and years of proposals with little being done. 

A year after Governor Newsom bragged during his re-election campaign that his progressive policies were Making California Great Again, he says there is no money for teachers, but there is money for new government agencies.

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I am exploiting my column today to advertise a workshop that the collaboration I lead, MODE, is organizing at Princeton University this coming July. The workshop, the third of its series, aims to bring together physicists and computer scientists to join forces in the solution of complex optimization problems in experiment design.

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Assembly Bill 742 will limit the use of police dogs to search/rescue, drugs, and explosives detection, and ban their use in apprehension or crowd control. The reason is racism. 

Obviously dogs are not racist so Democrats who control the legislature, and the ACLU and NAACP groups behind the bill, think police dog trainers are racist -  dogs attack people of color twice as often as white people, they state.

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A new survey of 515 trans individuals found that 78 percent are happier since they transitioned from their biological sex. Transitioning means different things, though - only 16 percent report surgery, most changed their personal style or name while 38 percent had therapy. 

It's not all good news. Though they are happier now, in the past 41 percent have felt unsafe in a locker room, 64 percent have been verbally attacked, and 25 percent have been physically attacked.  43 percent reported suicidal thoughts.

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The anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety says someone is fatally shot or injured in a road rage incident every 16 hours.  Is that number real? Yes and no. The Gun Violence Archive they drew their claim from lumps criminals doing drive-by shootings and criminals being shot by police committing violent acts in with innocent victims. Even if it's only over half of the 500 they claim that is still over 300 per year.

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The DC Universe may have a harder time defeating evil in "Shazam 3" because the secret weapon of "Shazam: Fury of the Gods" will get banned if Democrats succeed in their latest front in the Forever War Against Science.

It is not just Skittles they are after, it is also Hot Tamales, pez, and others. The reason is because they contain chemicals.

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If you buy TheraFlu or some other product and swear it helps, you may be right. The placebo effect is real and while OTC "remedies" and supplements can be sold with no proof needed, to be called actual medicine it can't simply work as poorly as a sugar pill.

Yet about 30 percent of the time, people who take a placebo do feel better, the same way people who eat food labeled Non-GMO feel better taking a nocebo. Neither is improving health but a lot of things can sound like science or health if you look at statistics and create correlation.

That's epidemiology, an entry point to science, and epidemiology findings led to continued interest in various off-label treatments for COVID-19, such as ivermectin.(1)

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Expanded federal involvement in agriculture using expanded definitions of "waters of the United States" to cover tiny streams and even small ponds has led to a majority of US states fighting in court against Washington, DC.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown has granted an injunction against the Biden administration for Idaho and Texas.

It makes little sense to consider any of them WOTUS, since no American ship is traveling on them, nor could they. The White House is instead arguing because small streams can feed into larger rivers they all fall under the new definition. 

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The United Nations, which was basically last to acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic and even said allegations it originated in Wuhan were racist, has never stopped promoting every alternative to an accidental lab leak - and alleging any other discussion was racism.

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A recent study found that vaccination with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine resulted in immune cell response considerably lower in people with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection than those without.

The level of this key immune cell that targets the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, CD8+ T, was substantially lower in unvaccinated people with COVID-19 than in vaccinated people who had never been infected. People who recover from SARS-CoV-2 infection and then get vaccinated are more protected than people who are unvaccinated and the new paper suggests that the virus damages an important immune-cell response.

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After the East Palestine derailment, government officials in states have been worried that eco-terrorists will also ramp up their efforts to sabotage energy infrastructure while media attention is high.

Utah just became the 19th state to pass the infrastructure equivalent of a hate crimes law; HB 370 provides greater penalties for environmentalists who damage railroads, energy plants, pipelines, or infrastructure leading to those. Utah had already been concerned after attacks during the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 so a judge can now sentence those caught attempting to go beyond peaceful protests to five years in prison.

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In 2014, a new invasive species from Asia was detected in Pennsylvania, but by the time government knows about it, it is too late and spotted lanternflies have since spread to more than 100 counties across 14 states. 

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Fresh off his single "Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction", United Nations Secretary-General and proud socialist Antonio Guterres has debuted his follow-up “Humanity is on thin ice", backed up by his in-house group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - who had their own big hit when they told us the Himalayas would be melted by 2035 in its Fourth Assessment Report,

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Some companies profited during the government lockdowns and then lingering social stigma about being outside the home. Exercise bikes, office furniture, and coffee machines all did well.

It will be decades before we know how many have been impacted in ways that were unanticipated. Being at home, for example, should have given more time to exercise, yet it often did the opposite. Despair, prevalent media discussing disaster in real time, and social isolation don't lead to a desire to exercise in some.

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If you own an electric car in America, you paid a premium to do a good work; save the planet from CO2 emissions.

Except perhaps not. Unless you are a wealthy elite who can spend $60,000 on a car and $25,000 on solar panels (government subsidies funded by poor people aside) 80 percent of your electricity probably came from conventional energy, like natural gas, anyway.

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President Biden issued another slap to those oil-guzzling Republicans intent on ruining Gaia, or he enraged environmentalists by letting oil-guzzling Republicans ruin bucolic Alaska, all in one day.

Even in the same minute.

Which was it? Neither, and that is a problem with corporate media. To get you to see an ad and get them paid they have to write a headline that is most appealing to you - and if you are someone in the middle, you quickly receive both.

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These days I am spending a few months in northern Sweden, to start a collaboration with computer scientists and physicists from Lulea University of Technology on neuromorphic computing (I'll soon write about that, stay tuned). The rather cold weather of March (sub-zero temperatures throughout the day) is compensated by having access to the night show of northern lights, which are often visible from these latitudes (66 degrees north).

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Athletes use custom-​made insoles because they know a fraction of a second can make the difference between victory and defeat, but to do that specialists must first create a pressure profile of the feet. Athletes walk barefoot over pressure-​sensitive mats, where they leave their individual footprints and then orthopedists create customized insoles by hand.

The optimization and adjustment takes a lot of time and if you are a wealthy elite, the money is less of a worry but for people with musculoskeletal pain the cost may be out of reach.

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Once Big Tobacco wrote out tens of billions of dollars in checks in a settlement brought on by their efforts to suppress the risks of cigarettes and cancer, lawyers pivoted to a war on all nicotine.

There is no evidence nicotine is harmful compared to something like caffeine, it is certainly nowhere near as harmful as a legitimate carcinogen like alcohol, but we suddenly got claims about second-hand smoke - still unsubstantiated - being as risky as smoking and even third-hand smoke - PM2.5 left on objects after smoking - all thanks to the statistical miracle-maker known as agenda-driven epidemiology.

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Water is over 70 percent of the surface of the earth but how that came to be, through what mix of random chance and extraterrestrial involvement, has been a debate. Earth is a relatively small planet and relatively near its star so creating large surface oceans is difficult.

A new study analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system’s formation four and a half billion years ago and found they had extremely low water content, among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites. 

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