That's for sure. Of course, H.L. Mencken observed long ago that

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

But the link you gave implies that it's even impossible to underestimate such "intelligence"... What's even funnier (or more pathetic) is that the "Tea Party" is funded by corporate plutocrats and lobbyist lapdogs.

It looks like Alan Grayson is about to, so the saying may need modifying soon.

This one is big. This is REALLY big:

NASA: Usable Water Found in Moon Crater

Wow, what a find! Maybe when the developed world has its finances in some kind of order, another manned mission to the Moon will be put together.

That is pretty cool. Finances won't ever be in order though...if we wait for that, we'll never do anything or get anywhere. In the 60s finances weren't in order either, but they went anyway, and the money and benefits from spin-off technologies proved to be a boon for pocketbooks and everyday life (e.g. velcro, microwave ovens). There is lots of talk from private enterprises about taking over space and going to the moon if countries aren't going to do it.

Look - scientists at CERN have made atoms of antimatter (anti-hydrogen to be precise) and kept them for over a tenth of a second. Article in Independent newspaper This has got to be massively important, right?

And I've just seen an article about synaesthesia, the condition where senses get mixed up together. Apparently Richard Feynman, the artist Kandinsky and the author Nabokov all had synaesthesia in one form or other. A friend of mine says she has a very powerful association between the numbers 1 to 20 or so and a particular colour for each number. Here's the article, from the Guardian

My old music teacher told us that some people with perfect pitch associated colours with each note. So when they'd hear a note, they'd see a colour, and know which note it was. Others with perfect pitch though don't do that.

The colour-note relationship though is (was?) used to teach students who didn't have perfect pitch, perfect pitch. We were to learn each note and associate a specific colour with it, until with practice, you would imagine a colour right away when a note was played.

I started taking that course in university (part of my religious education degree), but the person teaching it was a voice training teacher and she expected all of us to sing (minor, major, pentatonic scales, various intervals etc). Far too much singing, and I found out the entire class was composed of her voice students with me being the only exception (couldn't sing, didn't want to sing, wasn't going to sing, don't need to sing) so I dropped out of that class, and just taught myself from the material available. Another failure of the classroom in that it doesn't take into account different learning styles of the students.

Re: CERN. More info here from Scientific American.

Here's a neat video of a solar furnace which is hot enough to melt rock. It collects light from just 2 square meters yet produces temps in excess of 3500 C.

For those who enjoy such things, NPR's Science Friday recent rebroadcast a 1993 show about a new think called "the internet."

NASA discovers a new form of life.