evolutionary psychologist stephen pinker on the decline of violence in the world

This may challenge a lot of people, but Pinker is a heavyweight of the Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynmann, Stephen Hawking breed in his own field.  It will be controversial (the link to the Scientific American review below is not positive), but it will not be ignored.

From a podcast promoting his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined:

“Believe it or not, violence has been in decline for long stretches of time. And today are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker at the ScienceWriters2011 conference in Flagstaff on October 17th. His new book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

“The decline of violence has not been steady. It has not brought violence down to zero. And it is not guaranteed to continue. But…it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.”

electric cars as the ultimate nimby refusal to deal with underlying issues

Coyote blog makes the best point about how people just don't get the issues involved with electric cars (I mean, aside from the fact that my commute and recharging would pretty much require me to stay overnight at my job every other day):

Press responses from Fisker Automotive highlight the problem here:  electric vehicle makers want to pretend that the electricity to charge the car comes from magic sparkle ponies sprinkling pixie dust rather than burning fossil fuels.  Take this quote, for example:

while this won't end the global warming debate, you could hold out a faint hope that it might change the nature of the argument

The Berkely Earth project, a collaboration of a whole passel of extremely reputable climatologists, has issued a new set of findings regarding global temperature change over land for the past 100 years.  They used a statistical model that incorporated virtually every known data set, and came up with the following:

Their conclusions include the following: