wetenschap Category

Hollywood star Will Smith's thirteen year old son Jaden has seen his dad's movie about aliens 'Men in Black' numerous times. When they were on a visit to President Obama in the White House dad explicitly forbade his son to ask any questions about aliens. But ofcourse the teen got a question in anywhay.

Jaden Smith: "Do aliens exist mister president?"

President Obama: "OK, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of extraterrestrials but I can tell you if there would have been a top secret meeting and a discussion about it, it would have taken place in this room."

This is what philosopher Noam Chomsky had to say about President Obama on American tv yesterday. Warning, it's not nice!

If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers.
If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them.

First, it's not true. The neocon Bush government has killed more people worldwide than President Obama and most presidents before him like the last presidents: Clinton, Bush sr, Reagan, Carter and Ford. Also more Americans - civilians and soldiers - were killed under the Bush administration than under most American administrations before him.

Still he has a point. Peace Nobelprize winning Obama is constantly killing people in numerous countries in the Middle East. In fact with his anonymous drones he's killing so many muslims that a CIA counter-terrorism boss recently warned that the strikes in Yemen have the risk of converting domestic militants into 'dedicated enemies of the west'.

Glenn Greenwald calls it 'these constant acts of lawless violence' and çan't understand why there's almost no discussion about it in...

Deze vraag werd gesteld door Twigg op GoeieVraag met deze toevoeging: "Genieten vogels bijvoorbeeld van de zonsondergang als ze mooi hoog in de boom zitten?"

a)  Jazeker, wel eens een vogel horen zingen?
b)  Nee, wel eens een muis horen piepen?
c)  We zullen het nooit weten.

There is a lot of planning involved in becoming a 'supreme bully'. Even Santino the chimpanzee knows that.
From his enclosure in Furuvik Zoo in Sweden the chimp plans his actions with care. He has always bullied visitors he doesn't like but with the years he has become more like an expert.

Researcher Mathias Osvath: "After a group had left the compound area, Santino went inside the enclosure and brought a good-sized heap of hay that he placed near the visitor's section, and put stones under it.
After this, Santino sat down beside the hay and waited. When the visitors came back, he waited until they were close by and, without any preceding display, he threw stones at the crowd." 

Taylor Jones, Hoover Digest

The Department of Motor Vehicles in Nevada has given Google a license to test autonomous vehicles. The first such license issued in the world. Google! 
An autonomous car is able to drive without the help of a human being.

Last year Nevada - one of the least populated states - passed a law that permits testing of driverless cars. Google has equipped eight vehicles to drive autonomous: six Toyota Priuses, an Audi TT and a Lexus RX450h.

Most scientists think that dinosaurs became extinct because of an asteroid striking the earth some 65 million years ago, while, in fact, dinosaurs have farted themselves out of existence, British scientists have found.
The Brits calculated that giant plant eating dinosaurs produced more than half a billion ton of methane each year. That must have warmed the planet enough to make living impossible for the prehistoric animals, they write in the scientific journal Current Biology.

Deze GoeieVraag wordt gesteld door Jan:
"Hallo allemaal: Is er een plaats in of in de buurt van Amsterdam waar de zonsondergang goed is te zien?"

a)  Ja, op een hoog gebouw.
  b)  Nee, er is teveel luchtvervuiling.
c)  Hoe ver is Zandvoort nu helemaal?

After being ridiculed in the American press and drasties yesterday, the conservative Heartland Institute, an anti-science thinktank financed by the oil, coal and tobacco industry, decided to take down their billboards on Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago.
On the billboards climate scientists are compared to serial killers, marxists and terrorists like Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Charles Manson, Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden.

Amazingly, apart from Big Oil and Coal, Heartland gets money from companies like Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Nucor, and Time Warner. So apparently supporting hateful morons is good for your image in the U.S.

This is what Heartland wrote on their website about the campaign:

Of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants. ... The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.

Foto: Ramirezi

This is a billboard you can see on the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago. This one is with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. There are more with Charles Manson, Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden.

The billboards are the product of the conservative Heartland Institute, an anti-science thinktank heavily sponsored by the oill and coal industry. This is what the Heartland thinks of 99 percent of the climate scientist and of journalist who report accurately on it.

The argument is probably that people who believe in global warming are more out of touch with reality than Charles Manson and the Unabomber.
Amazingly, ten years ago more than sixty percent of Americans believed that manmade global warming is real, now it's less than 50 percent. Thanks to well funded institutes like Heartland.

By the way, these are the same people who are gonna spent lots of money to stop the reelection of President Obama.

a)  Doordat de belletjes uit elkaar spatten.
b)  Door een chemische component in de belletjes.
c)  Door de prijs van de fles.

In America the word is spread that wind turbines kill millions of birds every year. It's based on research by thinktanks financed by Big Oil and Coal and other enemies of renewable energy sources. Bird experts and statisticians don't agree.
Now there's a report on the damage 84,000 communication towers in the U.S. does to birds. Tv and radio towers kill almost 7 million birds a year. Some of the towers are hundreds of meters high.

The taller the tower the greater the threat, the study found. The 1,000 or so towers above 900 feet accounted for only 1.6 percent of the total number of towers. Yet these skyscraper towers killed 70 percent of the birds, about 4.5 million a year.

"AI 3 maanden heb ik geen school meer gehad, heb zun reden. Mijn IQ is nu 103, ken het gezakt zijn."

Deze vraag werd gesteld op het forum GoeieVraag.

a)  Dat ken wel.
b)  Dat ken niet.
c)  Je zit boven het gemiddelde, wees blij.

New scientific research has proven that a few beers does make people better at creative tasks. Psychologist Jennifer Wiley of the University of Illinois in Chicago: "At 0.07 level of blood alcohol, people were worse at working memory tasks but better at creatively solving problems."

The scientist let half of the participants consume two pints of beer. After that they did a game of word association. People with the beer finished the task in 12 seconds, non-drinkers in 15.5 secs. Drinkers also solved the problems forty percent better then non-drinkers.

Vier klokken... Twee klokken staan vijftien minuten verkeerd en een andere klok gaat voor.
Welke klok staat goed?

Arend Van Dam, politicalcartoons.com

John Derbyshire is a rightwing writer for the neocon magazine National Review. And since he wrote this piece, he's not anymore... a writer for the Review that is. He's fired for writing a racist article. With information like this:

Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

He's probably referring to Desi Bouterse here. And this

The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

The wife of Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney said yesterday that she's still waiting for real Mitt Romney to come out.

Ann Romney: "I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out, because he is not!”

We would like that too Ann. Just one example. Which is the real Romney?

Romney on global warming in 2003:  "now is the time to take action toward climate protection... We are the first state to enact a cap on CO2.
Romney now: “We don’t know” whether humans are warming the planet, and that doing something about the problem “is not the right course for us.”

Dus waarom niet koekii in plaats van koekie?.Deze vraag werd gesteld op GoeieVraag.

a)  Dan vergis je je met de 'ij'.
b)  De letter 'e' wordt nu eenmaal gebruikt als verlengingsletter.
c)  Er zit geen logica in de taal.

Global warming is all just a hoax to put Big Oil and Big Coal out of business. That is the official point of view of Fox News. This is what Fox Business weather expert Tracy Byrnes had to say about climate change this week:

"The temperature basically hasn't changed much since the Ice Age."

ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is being overdiagnosed. Especially boys are regularly misdiagnosed with ADHD.
According to ScienceDaily, German scientists found that psychotherapists and psychiatrists often use unclear rules of their own.
WHAT???

While a small majority of progressive Americans still think that science is a better way to understand the world than through religious documents written thousands of years ago, a majority of conservative Americans have no trust in science.

Just 35 pct of self-identified conservatives now have a “great deal of trust in science.” That is revealed in a report published in American Sociological Review. There was a 28 pct decline in trust of science among conservatives since the first survey taken in 1974. 
A big part plays the constant stream of misinformation about the science of global warming, financed by oil and coal companies and the religious revival against scientific theories like evolution.