Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt: Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don’t totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and […]
Category: Politics
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Brain Drain
Another week, another “Ask a ScienceBlogger” question. This week, the topic is the putative “brain drain” caused by recent US policies: Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general […]
Why Does James Dobson Hate Marriage?
I’m sort of on a roll of unpleasantly political posts lately, which I try to avoid. I can’t really not link Scalzi on the framing of gay marriage, though: There’s a manifest difference in a debate which has as its founding proposition that same-sex marriage is a theoretical construct in the US — which is […]
Generation in Debt?
Via bookslut, an interview at AlterNet with Tamara Draut, author of Strapped, a book about how hard young people have it today. The basic thesis of the book and the interview is that twenty- and thirty-somethings these days are in a uniquely bad position, because of the rising cost of college and relatively stagnant wages. […]
Bottomless Stupidity
Scalzi has the proper response to the Bush Administration’s latest insult to the collective intelligence. New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 […]
Farewell to Warblogging
Matt Welch has a nice post-mortem for the 2001 blogging boom, in which he recalls the days when the whole post-September-11th-attacks thing seemed like it would really shake up American politics, and that weblogs were at the forefront of a grand realignment. That failed pretty spectacularly, didn’t it? It’s a good piece, both recalling what […]
A Hubris-Crazed Monster from the Bowels of the American Dream
Via sennoma (I’m not sure that link will work, as the server appeared to be down this morning), Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Nixon: If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of […]
Shameful History
We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of Peter Debye, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi collaborator, which touched off a major […]
Loose Lips Sink Research Grants
A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your […]
Physics Funding Fundamentalism
The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics: The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be […]