Public access to government funded research and information

A lot of the most useful information that is generated these days comes courtesy of the government and is funded by taxpayers. This is particularly true about basic research, which is mostly funded by government agencies like the NIH and NSF. But quite often, private sector interests lobby lawmakers to allow them to take that information out of the public domain and make it proprietary and charge people huge amounts of money to gain access to that information, even though we have already paid for that information through our taxes. That was one of the things that infuriated Aaron Swartz and for which the justice department hounded him until his death. [Read more…]

The 3D printing phenomenon

3D printing is the hot new thing. I have not used one myself but a colleague of mine says that the cost of such things is dropping rapidly (you can now get one for less than $1000) and he has several in his lab because the cost of repairing the older, more expensive ones is now often greater than the cost of buying a newer and better one. He says that they come in extremely useful for creating customized items for his research. [Read more…]

Michael Ratner on Bradley Manning

If you want a good source of news, check out The Real News Network, which, in order to maintain their independence, does not accept advertising, government, or corporate funding. They rely on donations. One of the people the network regularly features is Michael Ratner, the former head of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Julian Assange’s lawyer in America. He attended the Bradley Manning hearing at Fort Mead where the latter read his statement explaining what drove him to download the documents and give it over to WikiLeaks, and spoke about what he drew from it. [Read more…]

Film review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

While not deep or demanding, this comedy touches on some serious issues and makes for enjoyable watching. It tells the story of seven aging English people each of whom is in the twilight of their lives and trying to come to terms with that brute fact. One has unresolved issues from his boyhood in India that he wants to settle before he dies, two are lonely and seek companionship, another feels useless and discarded after a lifetime spent working hard, a couple in a long loveless marriage sense that tensions are reaching breaking point, and a recent widow whose husband had made all the decisions in their lives now suddenly finds herself left to fend for herself in a modern technological world for which she is totally unprepared. [Read more…]

Since we’re talking about popes …

… a letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer yesterday complained about the disrespect shown to Catholics by the Non Sequitur cartoon strip by Wiley that had appeared the previous Wednesday. The letter began:

I thought the mass media were in agreement that insults based on race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation or creed have no place in civil discourse. Apparently, the creator of the comic strip “Non Sequitur” believes the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics don’t deserve such consideration.

[Read more…]

The role of religion in modern political life

The role of religion in modern political life is a puzzle. God as an idea worth taking seriously is clearly on life support, at least as far as serious analysis goes. As Andrew Levine says, for a long time in the world of political analysts “the idea that the Creator of all there is would care about the political affairs of particular Homo sapiens, that He (always a He!) would favor some members of our paltry species over others, seemed too preposterous to take seriously” and that “it is hard to see how any part of the Sturm und Drang of modern politics could really be about God, no matter what some political actors do, say, or believe. If their self-representations belie what is plainly the case, they must be deceiving themselves.” [Read more…]