The Doc Is In

   At Oregon State University, there were four sophomores taking chemistry and all of them had an “A” so far. These four friends were so confident that, the weekend before finals, they decided to visit some friends and have a big party over in Eugene.

They had a great time but, after all the hearty partying, they slept all day Sunday and didn’t make it back to Oregon State until early Monday morning.

Rather than taking the final then, they decided that after the final they would explain to their professor why they missed it.

They said that they visited friends but on the way back they had a flat tire. As a result, they missed the final.

The professor agreed they could make up the final the next day. The guys were excited and relieved. They studied that night for the exam.

The next day the professor placed them in separate rooms and gave them a test booklet.

They quickly answered the first problem worth 5 points. Cool, they thought! Each one in separate rooms, thinking this was going to be easy…. then they turned the page. On the second page was written….

For 95 points: Which tire?

Submitted by Andrea

  By Dr. Ben Zuckerman

Ever since my youth I’ve been a numbers type of guy. As a teenager in the 1950s I discovered that the typical American woman was having 3 or 4 children and I calculated that the USA was in for a big population explosion. At about the same time, Chinese women were having even more children than Americans. The fact that these two countries together are currently responsible for half of the entire anthropogenic contribution to increasing atmospheric carbon is partially a result of the large population increases engendered by these high fertilities.

Unfortunately, fertility is a forgotten player in today’s “environmental sustainability” agenda being advocated in so many countries, including our own. If your environmental guru is a global warming guide from Al Gore, Sierra Club, NRDC, Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense, Outside Magazine’s Green Issue, Time Magazine’s Global Warming Survival Guide, or indeed the entire mainstream U.S. environmental movement, then you will find that the number of children a couple has is not a component of anybody’s sustainability equations.

This omission introduces dramatic errors into a major new international poll, “Greendex 2008,” commissioned by the venerable scientific and educational organization, the National Geographic Society. A total of 14,000 people in 14 countries were queried on a wide range of topics to determine their environmental footprint and “to promote environmentally sustainable consumption”. The survey was constructed with the help of 27 experts based in many of the countries included in the study. This survey is especially significant because National Geographic intends to repeat it year after year to determine how the world and how each country are faring. Thus, it is important that the survey be as error-free as possible.

Should you be interested in quickly finding out how sustainable your personal behavior is according to National Geographic you can go to http://event.nationalgeographic.com/greendex/ and then click on “GO NOW” in the upper right corner of the webpage.

After I answered the 12 multipart questions, the website calculated my “Greendex” score. The higher the score, the smaller is one’s environmental impact. The last of the 12 questions asked about the number of people in my household who are adults (18 and older) and children (younger than 18). My wife and I have no children, so I put “two” for the number of adults and “zero” for the number of children.

Out of curiosity, I then increased the number of children first to “one”, then to “two” and so on all the way up to “six”, but leaving my answers to all other poll questions exactly the same. I fully expected my “Greendex” score to go down because, all other things being equal, surely a couple who has, say, 4 non-adopted children, has a much larger environmental impact than a couple who has none. If one makes the simple assumption that, on average, a child’s lifetime consumption and, thus, environmental impact are roughly the same as that of one of its parents, then a couple (initially two people) who gives birth to 4 children (resulting in six people) has 3 times greater lifetime environmental impact than a childless couple.

Thus, please imagine my surprise, when my Greendex score went up (i.e., improved) substantially as the number of children living with my wife and me increased. Remarkably, the National Geographic survey rewards people for having lots of children! When applied to the 14 countries surveyed, a country like India is rewarded for its high fertility of about 2.8 children per woman, while a country like Japan is penalized for its low fertility of about 1.2 children per woman. Taking this topsy-turvy survey formula to its logical (absurd) conclusion, the best environmentalist would be one who produced dozens of children over his/her lifetime.

How could such a carefully constructed survey get something so important, so wrong (so backwards)? Ultimately, the fault must be attributed to the mainstream U.S. environmental movement that, for decades, has abrogated its responsibility to address in a politically meaningful way the environmental harm caused by population growth both here and elsewhere. As mentioned in the second paragraph above, one could never tell from anyone’s list of “50 simple things you can do to save the Earth”, that arguably the environmentally most important life decision a couple can make is to limit their number of non-adopted children to two, at most.

Ben Zuckerman is a Professor in the Physics & Astronomy Department at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Institute of the Environment. He is a former member of the national Board of Directors of the Sierra Club and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and of Californians for Population Stabilization.

  A blonde, wanting to earn some extra money decided to hire herself out as a “Handywoman” and started canvassing the neighborhoods.

She went to the front door of the first house and asked the owner if he had any odd jobs for her to do. “Well, I guess I could use somebody to paint my porch,” he said. “How much will you charge me?”

The blonde quickly responded, “How about $50?”

The man agreed and told her that the paint and everything she would need was in t he garage.

The man’s wife, hearing the conversation, said to her husband, “Does she realize that our porch goes all the way around the house?”

He responded, “That’s a bit cynical, isn’t it?”

The wife replied, “You’re right. I guess I’m starting to believe all those dumb blonde jokes .”

A short time later, the blonde handywoman came to the door to collect her money.

“You finished already?” the husband asked.

“Yes,” the blonde replied, “and I had paint leftover, so I gave it two coats - no extra charge.”

Impressed, the man reached into his pocket for the $50 and handed it to her.

“And by the way,” the blonde added …. “it’s not a Porch — it’s a Lexus”

A New Zealand judge has made a 9-year-old girl a ward of the court so that her name can be changed from Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii, the country’s national news agency reported Thursday.

Family Court Judge Rob Murfitt listed a series of unusual names that New Zealand parents had given their children, and said he was concerned that such strange monikers would create hurdles for them as they grew up.

“It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted the judge as saying. …

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  Do you think that your up to speed on the news?  Take this short Pew Research test and find out how you compare to your fellow citizens (results below). Click HERE for the quiz. No cheating!

…. In the first quarter of the general election, he has simply gotten more and better coverage than McCain. For those who need more evidence than the enormous press entourage that is treating Obama’s current trip not like the campaign swing of a presidential candidate, but like the international debut of the New American President, there are several new studies which help quantify the disparity.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which evaluates more than 300 newspaper, magazine, and television stories each week, found that from June 9 (after Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination) until July 13, Obama was more prominently covered every single week. During one particular week, July 7–13, McCain was a significant presence in 48 percent of the stories—but Obama met that mark in 77 percent of the pieces. Similarly, the Tyndall Report, a media monitoring group, found that Obama received substantially more media attention.

I can only imagine what the gap must be like this week, as Obama continues to meet with world leaders and adoring crowds, while the mere presence of media’s biggest and brightest stars stamps each and every event as important!

Given all that, it’s not surprising that voters, particularly those of the Republican persuasion, think the media is more or less in Obama’s pocket. A recent survey by Rasmussen found that 49 percent of the likely voters they talked to believed that reporters would favor Obama in their coverage, while just 14 percent said the same about McCain. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans thought the press would try and help Obama win, while only 21 percent of Democrats thought journalists were in bed with McCain. Complaints about bias are only exacerbated when the New York Times (the bête noire of the right) rejects an opinion piece written by McCain comparing his position on Iraq to Obama’s—just days after the Times ran a similar piece by Obama.

Suspicions of pro-Obama bias began in the primaries. A Pew survey in late May and early June found that 37 percent of Americans believed that Obama received preferential coverage; only eight percent said the same about his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton….

So writes, in part, Dee Dee Myers in Vanity Fair.

  A disbarred Manhattan lawyer who pleaded guilty to statutory rape has sued the American Express Co. for giving police credit card information he says led to his capture. James Colliton was arrested in February 2006 near Toronto, where prosecutors say he fled after being indicted on charges of having sex with underage girls. The 44-year-old Colliton said Monday that American Express violated its agreement to withhold customer information from third parties. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified sum. …

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