World's Greatest Beauty Product Revealed!

Love those closing lines!

(via kottke)

Experts Discuss Latest Sea Level Rise Data And Trends

These guys do this for a living and they also manage to do a good job of making it understandable at a less technical and nerdy level...



This is definitely not an issue that we should be ignoring.

(via CP)

Read This Now - New Year, Same Crappy Political Reporting

It's far from new news that political reporting in the US is far from anything that aspires to be truly newsworthy or truthful, or to actually inform the readers or viewers etc etc.  With the GOP primary heating up with the advent of the Iowa caucuses George Packer does one of the best jobs that I can recall in summing up the problems with the state of our political coverage...

But political journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers? On the other hand, there’s an endless appetite for stories about Santorum’s effort to reach out beyond his evangelical base, or Gingrich playing the expectations game in Iowa. This stuff is political candy.

Read the whole thing for more details on the current scene in Iowa as well.

See also Greg Sargent's wrap up of Mitt Romney's Big Lie Strategy.

Read This Now - The GOP War On Voters

Ezra Klein has a good quick rundown of the various attacks on voters that the GOP has come up with over the course of 2011 in the course of shining a bright light on the hypocrisy that the Republican presidential primary candidates are now displaying after many of them failed to register to be included on the Virginia primary ballot...

The open secret of these laws is that they hurt turnout among Democratic constituencies such as students, minorities and low-income voters, which helps Republican politicians get elected. Virginia is just an odd case where restrictive ballot-access laws are hurting Republican politicians.

Read the whole thing for the details and links to other articles.  You could also take a look at this recent post from Charlie Pierce about Mitch McConnell's belief that democracy does not work.

Another Post Power Point Proposal

Power Point presentations are pretty awful, most folks agree on this and see them as pretty much the only available option which is what keeps them in use for the most part.  John Bohannon has a fun and only slightly tongue in cheek proposal for moving beyond power points, dance...



You can check out some of the Dance Your PhD videos here.

If you haven't seen Prezi yet you should check it out, it can take a little longer to build out your presentation than power point but the results can be very compelling.

(via W-M, where John and I both spent part of our junior year, but not at the same time)

Good TV, Bad Exchange Of Ideas

I'm glad to see that Barney Frank still hasn't lost his spark since deciding to retire, and I'm not surprised to see that George Will is still unwilling to actually have a discussion or exchange of ideas; he just likes to throw bombs and darts from a comfortable remove not get up close and personal and engage with anyone.



Someone will step up and give Frank his own show once he's retired right?

(via The Politics Blog, which I'm very glad to have finally found)

Read This Now - Can I Get A Fact Check?

Actually, no.

Ezra Klein has a good rundown on the problem with fact checking organizations in today's political climate and partisan arena.  It boils down to the fact that they can't manage to stay out of the he said she said model of reporting that fact checking ostensibly should be immune to.

And that, ultimately, is the problem with the fact checker model. They have no actual power, so their only influence comes from the public’s sense of their legitimacy. And about half of the public leans towards one party and about half of the public leans toward the other. That means PolitiFact and these other outlets need to find some uneasy balance between the parties, too. But that just means the parties will have plenty of opportunities to decide that these are hackish, partisan operations. Conservatives got there a few weeks ago, and now liberals are following.

Take a look at the whole thing, it'll only take you a couple of minutes.

And remember everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.