Filter Pass!

The Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Accelerates.  "Denying research opportunities because they do not align with an agenda is inane and potentially destructive."  Not good. 

Real Clear Politics: CDC Funding Decisions Based Largely on Politics, Not Science.  This is why the government should not be charged with allocating funds to science. 

Behind the Black: Today’s blacklisted American: Black scientist blacklisted for doing good research.  His subject was discovering the truth behind the slurs insinuated against James Webb, after whom the space telescope was named.  He found the allegations to be baseless. 

Richard Feynman via Marc Andreessen: What is science?  A great read. 

This looks cool: the Black and Decker cocktail machine.  A sort of Keurig cartridge machine for mixed drinks.  You supply the alcohol, it supplies everything else.  What will they think of next? 

InsideHook asks: What's causing so many people to leave California?  How long do you have?  /) 

Their subhead is "it's not necessarily what you might expect", and they go on to suppose it's a housing issue.  Yeah okayyy.

This looks interesting: Universal control, from Apple.  "If you haven't been following the news, Universal Control is Apple’s feature that lets you control multiple iPads and Macs using a single mouse, keyboard, and trackpad. You can move the cursor and keyboard seamlessly between the devices, and iCloud infers the positioning based on your cursor activity."  Cool. 

Long read of the day: What can we learn from Barnes & Noble's surprising turnaround?  The TL;DR is: they focused on books, including rejecting publishers' paid promotions.  I'm happy for them.  But this seems more like an outlier than a harbinger. 

xkcd: Game night ordering.  Hehe... 

Yay: SpaceX aces 60th orbital launch of 2022.  Pretty amazing, up from 31 in 2021.  How many in 2023? 

New Yorker: An evocative year in illustrations.  Pretty great, as always. 

Paul Krugman explains why Tesla is like Bitcoin.  It's hard work to be this stupid, but somehow he manages to do it.  The only way in which they are alike is they're both things Paul Krugman does not  like. 

Since you asked, I am in favor of one, and not the other.  I liked Tesla from the first, and Bitcoin too, but now I have to admit that 10 years have passed and still nobody has found a compelling use case for blockchains.  And the "proof of work" thing which burns entropy just doesn't make sense.

The anthropic principle at work: We've Never Found Anything Like The Solar System. Is It a Freak in Space?  Well... it turns out, it's much easier to detect the kinds of planetary systems we've found than it would be to detect ones like ours.  This seems more like a selection artifact than a genuine data point.  There are so many galaxies each with so many stars that it's impossible to know whether we're an exception.