On the Republican candidates

The candidates for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination are abysmal... All 3 of the front runners are young-Earth creationists and anti-science. The worst two are Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, the former against vaccinations for cervical cancer, the latter publicly praying for rain to alleviate drought and both avid deniers of human caused climate change.

It's actually so bad that Nobel Prize winning Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, wrote an editorial on the issue in this week's New Scientist. This is why politics should have more room for scientific discourse, the public needs to be swayed by actual evidence on issues like climate policy and science education as opposed to rhetoric as is so often the case.

So true about funding

With all the cuts by the conservative government, I've had to defend science funding before. Phil Moriarty, from Sixty Symbols at Nottingham University, puts up a good case way more eloquently than I ever could.