Other people on … religion

A quick view to see what other intelligent people think of religion.

None of your business

The other day I went to the bank with the intention of depositing money into my account. The most common difficulty when it comes to depositing money at the bank used to be the lack of it. Now it is the mandated small-talk by the bank tellers.

Are we there yet?

A man recently died when he was walking. He hit a pole, fell and fatally injured his head. I am now waiting for the government to outlaw poles in streets. In the meantime there are plans to reduce speed limits to 30km/h because a bunch of pedestrians were run over in Victoria (Australia) in 2008. The government must look forward to handing out speeding fines to bike riders.

The frugal planet

All figures are in US dollars!

I recently discussed one of the two main objections to the LHC experiment at CERN in Switzerland, namely that of the usefulness of pure research. The objection that I did not talk about is one that money spent on the research should instead be spent on more useful things. Now that the world is in the midst of an economic crisis, scientific funding is bound to suffer. The claim is that money spent on LHC research ($9 billion over 15 years or $600 million/year) is a waste and should be spent on more important things (feeding the hungry in Africa is always the most popular one). However, with the global GDP at about $70 trillion ( 2008 ) there is a lot of money going around and it’s difficult to look at all of the spending in detail. I thought to look at some spending which apparently is more important than financing scientific research.