politics

I recently stumbled on a transcript of Bill “the science guy” Nye’s interview on CNN last week. In it, he said that climate skeptics (i.e., people like myself), are at least as bad as people who deny that smoking causes cancer. There are quite a few things he misses, in fact, he got things totally wrong, but I do like the his analogy to smoking and cancer as you’ll see.

After being busy with the submission of two research proposal and trying to stay afloat with the pretty heavy teaching load I have this semester, I decided I should take a short break and post something on my blog. I actually have quite a few things I have been wanting to write about, but it seems that the most relevant thing is the the mini-war which is raging not to far from here. So, I thought I'd stray from my usual and write about the middle east.

Dear Rep. Adam Schiff (representing California's 29th district).

Although I presently live outside the US, I am a registered voter in the 29th district which you represent. I kindly ask that you will drop your support of SOPA.

Out of curiosity, I opened a few weeks ago a poll asking the visitors of this site, what do they think is the primary cause of global warming. 429 people answered the poll (thanks to all of you!).

The results can be summarized as follows.

First, the visitors of this site have the following background:

Background	Fraction (Votes)
Layman	54.9% (232)
General Scientist	41.1% (174)
Climate Scientist	4.0% (17)

A few days ago I had a very pleasant meeting with Andrew Bolt. He was visiting Israel and we met for an hour in my office. During the discussion, I mentioned that the writers of the recent IPCC reports are not very scientific in their conduct and realized that I should write about it here.

A few weeks ago, the hacker/whistleblower has done it again. A new release of a large amount of e-mails from the same source (University of East Anglia) has surfaced in Russia. It is most likely from the same original batch because the last of the new e-mails is from 2009. Here is my perspective of things. Here are my thoughts about it.

I recently stumbled upon one of the most meaningless papers I have ever seen. The paper "proves" that the scientists advocating an anthropogenic greenhouse warming (AGW) are statistically more credible than the "unconvinced". Their main goal is to convince people that they should join the AGW bandwagon simply because it is allegedly more credible.

A week ago was Earth day, and just like the trend elsewhere, Israel joined with an hour long blackout. In principle, I am very much in favor of environmental awareness, and if it brings some, so be it. But if you ask me, overall, this event is a rather pointless gimmick. Why?

A few words about the longest strike ever in the Israeli Universities, a strike which ended last week. No science in this post. Sorry.

On my personal views of President Bush's visit to my humble town of Jerusalem. A few thoughts about quantum mechanics and the speed of sound.