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Robert Park | 13 Aug 2011 17:15
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What's New Robert L. Park 12 Aug 2011

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L Park   Friday, 12 Aug 11   Washington, DC

1. MENDING: SORRY TO HAVE MISSED A WEEK.  
August is usually a slow month in Washington, but much is happening – and 
it's not good news.  We’ll try to catch up. 

2. THE DEBT DEAL: STRONG MEDICINE, OR A DOOMSDAY MACHINE?  
"Take some more tea," the March Hare said.  "I’ve had nothing yet," Alice 
replied, "so I can't take more."  Last month a House panel voted to stop 
building NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, and to flat-fund the National 
Science Foundation.  I didn’t write about it at the time, because it seemed 
unthinkable.  The debt agreement, however, is about setting spending 
ceilings, not floors.  Floors are for taxes.  The Tea Party and the 
Republican freshman class favor regressive taxation, under which those who 
benefit most from our economic system contribute least to its support.  
This may be inevitable when the major determinant of success in election 
campaigns is fund-raising.

3. THE POPULATION: DEBT CEILINGS ARE SIMPLY A DISTRACTION.  
The real problem is that there are too many of us. The need to limit 
population on a finite planet was explained in 1798 by the Rev. Robert 
Thomas Malthus in "An Essay on the Principle of Population."  Paul 
Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, "the Population Bomb," helped motivate 
the "Green Revolution" and "the Pill."  With the famine in Somalia on front 
pages, the world population reached 7 billion, double that in 1968 when 
Ehrlich issued his warning.   Last week, Science magazine devoted a special 
section to population.  Unfortunately, it treated it as a problem of the 
developing world.  It's a mistake to think of overpopulation just in terms 
of starving masses.  It’s much more:  It’s the Hubbert peak, global 
warming, disappearance of the great ocean fisheries, floating garbage
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Robert Park | 22 Aug 2011 01:09
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What's New Robert L. Park 19 Feb 2011

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L Park   Friday, 19 Aug 11   Washington, DC

1. HOMEOPATHY: THE DILUTION LIMIT AND THE CULTURE OF CREDULITY.
Based in France, Boiron, a huge multinational maker of homeopathic-
remedies, is suing an Italian blogger, Samuele Riva, for saying 
oscillococcinum, the company’s featured flu medication, has no active 
ingredient.  Congratulations Sam, I gave up trying to get Boiron to sue me, 
years ago but the Center for Inquiry, of which I'm a member, is pleading 
with Boiron to sue us. "Anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum," is 
listed as the active ingredient by the company.  It’s prepared at a 
concentration of 200CK HPUS from the liver of the Barbary duck.  The 200CK 
means the solution has been diluted 1 part in 100, shaken, and repeated 
sequentially 200 times. HPUS means the medication is listed in the 
Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States, and prepared according to 
1938 federal guidelines.  It’s a national disgrace that the antiquated law 
sanctioning homeopathy, introduced by Sen. Royal Copeland, himself a 
homeopathist, is still be on the books.  The dilution claim is totally 
meaningless.  Somewhere around the 30th of the 200 sequential dilutions, 
the dilution limit of Earth would be reached, with the entire Earth 
becoming the solute.  That is, the possibility of even one molecule of the 
duck-liver extract remaining in the solution beyond that point would be 
negligible.  Long before the 200th dilution, the dilution limit of the 
entire visible universe would have been reached.  This is all quite 
meaningless.   Astronomers put the number of atoms in the visible universe 
at about 10 to the 80th power.  It would take many universes to get to a 
dilution of 200 C.  

2. DARPA:  THE SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENT LIFE COMES UP SHORT.
According to Dennis Overbye in Thursday's NY Times, the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency is planning to award $500,000 for a study of what
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