Day: July 15, 2002

Steven den Beste goes into some detail to make a point about the film Reign of Fire. If humanity is ever faced with a scourge of firebreathing dragons, those lizards don’t stand a chance. Such a war would last like a month and end up with a lot of barbecued dragons.

I’d heard of this film but didn’t realize that the movie simply skips the difficult part of explaining how a few dragons discovered in 2002 manage to wipe out most of humanity by 2020.

Here’s how I would get around that — since we’re already dealing with flying dragons, why not give them the side ability to generate electromagnetic pulses which have completel wrecked havoc with technological society.

Then again, why not do a movie that has a decent script instead of building a film around CGI special effects?

Back in 1999, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claimed to have created Element 118 in their laboratory. Then in 2001 after it became apparent that their research could not be replicated, Lawrence Berkeley withdrew the claim. An investigation into the event has revealed the problem — fraud committed by one of the 15 researchers assigned to the project.

The laboratory fired the researcher, but the whole affair has caused renewed interest in scientific fraud. Such fraud seems relatively common in biological sciences journals, but accounts of the Element 118 debacle seem shocked to see such fraud in the physical sciences.

Source:

Elementary mistake due to falsified data. Hazel Muir, NewScientist.Com, July 15, 2002.

What could be more important than protecting the United States from terrorism? Preserving the jobs of unionized federal government workers of course.

The bill that would establish a Department of Homeland Security also contains a sentence that would give the executive branch more authority to fire workers at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs Service and 20 other federal agencies currently planned to be part of that department.

Democrats are already bristling at such language. The Post quotes a spokesman for House Democratic Whip Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) saying,

It’s a huge issue for the Democrats because it’s a huge issue for working families. Public employees were the first responders on September 11th, and they deserve the security of keeping their civil service positions. This is 170,000 people who don’t know if their job is going to be protected.

Thank goodness House Democrats have their priorities straight. Fighting terrorism should never overshadow the important mission of protecting government employees.

Source:

Bush to Ask Workers for Flexibility on Homeland Security. Ellen Nakashma and Bill Miller, Washington Post, July, 10, 2002.