Billy Bob has watched a lot of rumbles on vaccines and is ready to step in to fix the NIH. A lot.

You check back in after election day and find you have tariffs on penguins, a war with Greenland, and Big Ballz has all your PII. Strike that, you wouldn't have sees all that mess coming even if staid on the socials (except maybe the poo account).

The burning keeps me alive.

Especially because he said 'the website'. Imagine counting every line of HTML in wikipedia as a 'line of code'.

Things get pretty big pretty fast when you do it that way.

Right, read your Constitution. Advise and consent is for Cabinet posts, not every freakin' job in the Govt.

It mostly replicates a system that is working well, with known failure points and workarounds.

In Mass. but the Netherlands uses a similar system also. They spend less, have lower mortality, and greater life expectancy than we do.

It's totally true that the ideas underlying the ACA have been hashed about since they were first proposed by the GOP in 1993's HEART act, tested in the real world, and proven.

The idea of making people register in order to view plans though, that was just bad web application design, no argument there. PHB wins that one.

Now thats a freaking good point. I've had UnitedHealthcare and BC/BS and their websites have always been horrible. Just suxors.

That pre 1963 Polio vaccine was contaminated with SV40 virus? CDC soon yanked the warning, and it only exists now on the Internet Archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20130522091608/http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/updates/archive/polio_and_cancer_factsheet.htm

Given that vaccines Drs want to give to kids have increased 3x since 1980, and many are for non-lethal diseases like rotavirus or for things like Hep B that a baby is highly unlikely to contract, and given that drug production is imperfect, I think many parents have legitimate concerns and being ordered to unquestionably follow their known-to-be-imperfect doctor's advice feed the backlash against vaccines.

Dr. Sears has good information for parents who want to take an informed, balanced approach:

http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/vaccines

Mod parent up please - that is a very good video:)

Lots of Scalzi's aliens eat humans. Some find us delicious.

Most of the 'sensible' interplanetary war stories start with cheap, easy FTL and fewish habitable planets. In which case conflict is likely for species that can use the same planets. Of course its a HUGE leap to cheap easy FTL.

One I remember that didn't have cheap/easy FTL had a species flee their dying home planet on a slower than light colony ship, and end up here. They wanted to come down and party with us, and we didn't want them to.

"I wish (ha, and a pony) that those with a political agenda would not misrepresent science as being in anyone's 'interest' or misquoting scientific papers to show one thing when the full results show something completely different."

Yeah. Where did you see that happening?

Your link says correctly that what heats glass greenhouses is not the greenhouse effect caused by carbon in the air.

The mythbusters demonstrated that containers with higher CO2/Methane levels grew warmer than a control. How exactly were they off-base?

"So hard that it has never been empirically tested,"

That is about as solid falsification as any lab experiment - if one had to put an entire system into a controlled experiment in order to test a hypothesis, most of what we call science would be impossible - we test hypotheses about gravity, gas pressure, genetics, etc. in controlled lab experiments, but for some reason we can't test the effect of carbon on infrared light??

If the lab experiments demonstrated that carbon had no effect on heat, we would need to re-examine the whole theory. But what is possible to reproduce in a lab does support the theory, as does historical data (insolation, global temperature, and atmospheric carbon levels from the Carboniferous period, etc) as does insolation vs. heat data from other planets (Mars, Venus, etc.).

If the Carboniferous was cold or Venus was cooler than it is, we'd have verifiable evidence that carbon and other greenhouse gasses do not have a the same effect on a planetary scale as they do in the lab, but all empirical evidence we can gather, both via observation and controlled experiment, supports the theory of the effect greenhouse gasses have of planetary temperature.

The PDF simply reports the results of a study - I don't see anything there that suggests that soil erosion is going to stop global warming in the short term, its just a cool study, IMO, that helps everyone learn more about the complexity of the total system.

Do you think science be put through a political lens before it's published or talked about?

Suspicions about CO2 as a warming agent are based on the effect carbon molecules have on infrared light.

Its not very hard to test the hypothesis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRd5GT0v0I

And when that happens in the dry upper atmosphere where the planet's heat is radiated outwards, less heat is radiated outwards.

I didn't know that erosion had an effect on carbon sequestration. Then I found this:

http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/nri/highlights/2007_no9.pdf

Cool.