i think the letter is too optimistic, actually. whatever their own plight, they're being used as tools to rile up militaristic hate against russia. when they no longer serve that use, or start asking questions that challenge that narrative, the media will blacklist them as radicals.

i hope they at least got paid.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26067971

ok, but the solution is necessarily structural. there aren't any good pesticides, and we can't grow the amount of food we need without them.

i suppose stricter regulations might help act as an incentive to build more indoor growing sites. but, i'd rather be pro-active. and in fairness this government actually has been pro-active about encouraging indoor growing.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/02/05/ottawa_agrees_to_review_23_pesticides_after_pressure_from_environmental_group.html

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21593408-publishing-giant-goes-after-authors-its-journals-papers-no-peeking?fsrc=scn%2Ftw_ec%2Fno_peeking
http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2014/01/13/worst-sugar/
http://nyti.ms/1cfRYWi
http://plos.io/OAwin
http://plos.io/1hnvgQN
http://plos.io/1filk9U
http://plos.io/1eAqImU
http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/02/03/opening-up-data-access-not-just-articles/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/01/01/the-most-fascinating-human-evolution-discoveries-of-2013/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-new-method-to-measure-consciousness-discovered&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/01/earth-more-sensitive-increasing-greenhouse-gas-thought
http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/01/video-spiders-spin-electric-web

you can't run a case on a hypothetical, unless it's about a right. there's no legal action to prevent a hypothetical tort that's never been attempted (and probably never will be).

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=monsanto-critics-denied-us-supreme&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

i dunno about the gould idea, conceptually, but it's nice to see some research moving away from ideas of orthogenesis. rather than create a new abstraction and babble on about it, i'd rather interpret the results as evidence for the role of chance in the process.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/math/~3/tW6msj4GHQ0/

is this an onion article?

because an abstract idea cannot be quantified, it is therefore flawed? lol.

hey, more empiricism is always better than less empiricism. if you want to understand specific things, studying them through observation is always a better idea than applying abstract ideas. yet, then you want to argue that evolution should be described mathematically? ha! it seems to me that it's the dudes in the article that seem deductively challenged.

but studies are always better than no studies.

my guess is they'll find that the reality is too complicated to model using anything other than game theory.

http://phys.org/news308815368.html

this discourse means absolutely nothing to me.

how about this: it doesn't matter if it's genetic or not (it obviously isn't in most cases) because i ought to have the right to choose which gender i want to be, and people that don't like that can fuck off.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-trans/

i've always found it odd that skeptics cite this to discredit climate science, rather than cite it to discredit newsweek.

....because we should all believe everything we read in newsweek, right?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

i find this is a much trickier problem than it's usually presented as. i do agree with the need to do something to pressure israel to stop the genocide, but i'm not sure a boycott will work, and i'm not convinced the accusations of anti-semitism are without merit.

that's not to conflate criticism of israel with anti-semitism. they're clearly two different things. but there's also clearly a line where criticism is masking something deeper, and i think it's pretty widespread amongst those who argue otherwise.

i mean, there are certain things a bds campaign could do that would be blatantly racist. they could start putting yellow stars over the office of jewish academics, or force visiting israeli academics to wear yellow stars so everybody knows to boycott them. i'm not saying that anybody is suggesting this, but it would be pretty racist.

what i *am* saying is that it's not hard to hear those attitudes thinly veiled behind more politically correct positions and that it's hard not to conclude that it's a factor in many - not all - of the people calling for boycott. this is actually particularly vile, because it co-opts a legitimate human rights problem.

i'm not saying this because i've been brainwashed by zionism or because i hate bds activists or any other diabolical reason. i'm saying this because i can hear the racist contempt in the tone of voice, and i don't like it.

i don't know what the answer is, but i know the bds movement tends to pull out individuals that i could not consider to be allies.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11432