Uygur’s premise is that she knows that she has already lost the 2012 election, and knows that she will be effectively too old to run for office in 2016 . So her only option is to insure that Obama loses the election to McCain, so that she can run in 2012.

I am not, and never have been, a Hillary hater. However, I’ve been appalled by her behavior in this election after super Tuesday. Normally I would have dismissed such a theory as sensationalism. But how else are we to interpret Hillary’s comment that only she and McCain had the proper experience? How else are we to interpret Bill Clinton’s comment that only Hillary and McCain love their country. These are odious comments made by politicos desperate for attention. For all that the Clintons had done and been through, I always believed they had the best interests of the Democratic Party at heart. Until now.

Science and Beer (via Mr Verb).

In brief:

[T]he more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

As a scientist who no longer drinks any alcohol, I certainly welcome this. However,  what type of window are we averaging over here? Do I have to count the terrifying amounts I used to drink in my youth?

As a postscript to this, also see Marvin Minsky’s What Makes Mathematics Hard to Learn.

And, for that matter, it’s worth giving another plug to Project Euler, which I think comes very close to Lockhart’s ideal for mathematical education.