The Definition of Insanity: Identified!

A year or so ago, I was involved in a conversation, and the subject came around to the classic definition of insanity: "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results."

I've seen it widely quoted, generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein. Back then I did a Google search, and found both those attributions, along with others that stated definitively that it was NOT either Franklin or Einstein. So where did it come from? I shrugged and moved on.

Until today. There was a post on Balloon Juice that once again quoted "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," attributing it to Franklin.

I guess Wikiquotes has gotten on the case in the time since I last explored this, because someone in the comments was able to direct us to the answer... In fact, the line comes from Rita Mae Brown, in her mystery novel Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68).

Franklin is one of those classic American "wise men" (ie: Jefferson, Lincoln, Twain) to whom many "pithy" statements often get attributed; attributions without a verifiable source should be treated with some skepticism (Wikiquotes)

So, now we know! Of course, I can't resist noting that once again, lazy intellectuals forget the name of a smart woman and transfer her wisdom to dead white males....

Un-intelligent design

Ben Stein has a new movie. It's a documentary, sort of, about intelligent design (ID) theory. Cleverly, they're calling it "Expelled" (see, it's a riff on the expulsion from paradise, while whining that the poor ID scientists are being unfairly expelled from intellectual circles - and jobs at academic journals - just because they're propounding "science" that violates every tenet of what science stands for.

Oh, wait. That's not quite the way they put it... according to a review in Scientific American, the main issue was how a pro-ID paper get published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington without peer review. According to Managing Editor Richard Sternberg, "it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors, I chose myself.")

According to Sternberg, "after the publication of the Meyer article the climate changed from being chilly to being outright hostile. Shunned, yes, and discredited." As a result, Sternberg filed a claim against the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for being "targeted for retaliation and harassment" for his religious beliefs. "I was viewed as an intellectual terrorist," he tells Stein. In August 2005 his claim was rejected. According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!

Oh.

And it gets worse from there. Read the whole thing....

Disastrous Farm Bill

One thing we can do right away about climate change: DO NOT adopt the current version of the farm bill.

How bad is it?

What can we citizens expect if the proposed $300-billion farm bill is signed into law? Federally subsidized feed -- corn, soybeans and cottonseed -- for animal factory farms that spread disease, greenhouse gases and dangerous working conditions wherever they set up shop... The continuation of America's obesity campaign, which ensures the cheapest and most widely available foods are made up of such high-calorie ingredients as high-fructose corn syrup, refined flours, saturated fats and unhealthy meat and dairy products. And more federally backed exports of California's water -- in the form of cotton and rice, mostly sold overseas.

Ironically, when Gingrich's radical free-market Republicans took office in 1994, the bloated farm bill of the day was one of their prime targets. They put together a package that was supposed to increase subsidies temporarily to wean farmers off Uncle Sam's bloated teat.

You can guess how well that worked. Once the subsidy increases were in place, no-one had the political courage to actually do the weaning. The next time the farm bill came up was right after 9/11, and agribusiness used National Security as a catch-all excuse for even BIGGER subsidies (we must secure our food supply!).

Now, with food prices soaring to the highest levels in decades, nobody really thinks farmers need subsidies. But that's not stopping agribusiness from demanding them. And unless we do something, it looks like once again, they're going to get them. It's a great deal. They spread $80 million around in campaign contributions and lobbying costs, and in exchange they get billions and billions of taxpayer dollars.

Al Gore on Climate Change at TED

Al Gore gives yet another great talk on climate change...

Disproving Climate Deniers: It's not the sun

One of the favorite arguments of the Climate Change Deniers is that we don't have any effect on Earth's climate - it's mostly the sun.

So it's big news when Lancaster University scientists report "there has been no significant link... in the last 20 years."
Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one.

According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple.

"We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right.