Just Stuff

The Scientist named the Wegman plagarism incident one of the top 5 scientific scandals in 2010:

A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.

(Via Deltoid)

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Federal spending last year (FY 2010) actually dropped by $62 B, compared to the year earlier. (That's 1.2% of GDP.) The deficit dropped too, from $1.41 T to $1.29 T. It's still much higher than previous years, however, but some people would call that a recovery if it occurred in, say, Arctic sea ice.

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Rick Santorum actually said this the other day:

"Let's look at colleges and universities," Santorum said in the ballroom of the restored Frank Lloyd Wright Park Inn Hotel on Mason City's town square. "They've become indoctrination centers for the left. Should we be subsidizing that?"

Santorum tossed out Harvard University's motto, "Veritas," Latin for truth. "They haven't seen truth at Harvard in 100 years."

Can you imagine a world where universities receive funding, or not, based on whether what they teach is the position of the Administration? Frightening -- at least as frightening as Gingrich's proposed Presidential Commission on Religious Freedom, which he says he would establish by Executive Order the first day he's in office.

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Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has some laughs at his own expense. All pundits should write such a column.

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Wait until Michelle Bachmann hears about this: the ban on incandescant light bulbs may kill the Easy-Bake Oven.