Researchers at Santa Clara University have replicated the findings of the famous Milgram experiment, where by using the trappings of authority they were able to get volunteers to administer torturing electrical shocks to innocent people. (The shocks were simulated, the victims actors.)

If you've never heard of the Milgram experiment, you should stop and read about it right now. Unless you're in a burning building, there is nothing more important you can do - without this understanding of authority, little in the world of human action makes sense.

Is this tendency to blindly follow authority just a laboratory artifact? Sure, there's Abu Ghraib, but maybe that was the result of military conditioning.

Sadly, the case of the fast-food joint strip searches demonstrates that very ordinary people will do horribile things on command of authority, in real life without any special training or conditioning. In over 70 cases spanning a decade, a caller was able to manipulate managers and employees of fast food restaurant into performing strip searches and other abusive acts merely by posing as a cop over the telephone.

And this, my friends, is why we must question authority. Make a habit of it.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry has left us.

Majel played the Enterprise's first officer in the original pilot "The Cage" (later recut with a frame story as the TOS two-parter "The Menagerie"), then Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series. Then in TNG she played Councilor Troi's mother, Lwaxana, as well as providing the ubiquitous computer voice in TNG and later series. In fact, she has recenntly finished voice work on the forthcoming Trek movie.

She and Gene Roddenberry married two months after the final episode of Star Trek was aired. (According to Memory Alpha, they were in Japan and has a "Shinto-Buddhist" wedding!)

After Gene's death she did a lot to preserve the Star Trek legacy, and also worked as executive producer on two shows based on ideas from his archives, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda.

Dear Mr. Obama and company:

You blew it.

You almost had me. I was on your side, all set to back you up. I was willing to overlook the backpedaling on telecomm immunity and on cannabis decriminalization. I gave money, did some canvassing for the Obama campaign on Election Day.

I wept when Barack Obama gave his Election Night speech. In that moment, hell, I would've taken a bullet for him.

I've stood up for him in the weeks since the election, defended some questionable Cabinet appointments with the idea that we should wait to see what policy decisions will be made, that some compromise would be necessary to get things done.

But for you to endorse a bigoted, anti-science, anti-choice, anti-religious liberty figure like Rick Warren by choosing him to give the invocation at the Inauguration...

Nope. I'm out.

With talk of federal spending to help the economic recovery, it's become a right-wing talking point that FDR's New Deal didn't work.

Like most talking points from right-wing pundits these days, it's a bunch of malarkey.

Employment began to recover in FDR's first term. By 1937, the labor force had reached just short of the boom's 1929 peak. In 1937, conservative opposition slowed New Deal projects - and employment fell again, though not as steeply. Opposition ebbed, the New Deal was strengthened, and employment recovered to higher than 1929 levels - and was trending still higher - by 1940, before the U.S. entry into WWII. (Note this chart shows non-farm, non-WPA employment.)

The Huffington Post takes the New York Times to task for claiming that Big Three auto workers are making $70 an hour:

As Media Matters and other critics reported last week, it's a conservative myth concocted by totaling all wages, plus health and benefit costs to current workers and 450,000 retirees and their families -- and then deceptively dividing that huge total payout by the number of current UAW workers, about 140,000 in Detroit.

Two science stories to tickle your big-thought imagination:

• Physicists have gathered substantial evidence that 99% of the mass of protons and neutrons - which make up almost all of the mass of ordinary matter - comes not from the quarks that make up the nucleons, but from the "virtual" gluon particles the carry the strong nuclear force. According to quantum theory, these virtual particles pop into existence and quickly disappear again, sort of borrowing against the the uncertainty principle.
• A theory called loop quantum cosmology (LQC) brings back an old idea of n "oscillating" universe, one that cycles through an endless series of expansions and contractions.

How much food can be grown sustainably using permaculture methods? In this article on permaculture.com, David Blume recounts his experience:

As far as I know I was one of the only farmers fully utilizing permaculture to produce surplus food for sale in the US as a full time occupation. On approximately two acres— half of which was on a terraced 35 degree slope—I produced enough food to feed more than 300 people (with a peak of 450 people at one point), 49 weeks a year in my fully organic CSA on the edge of Silicon Valley . If I could do it there you can do it anywhere.

I did this for almost nine years until I lost the lease to my rented land. My yields were often 8 times what the USDA claims are possible per square foot. My soil fertility increased dramatically each year so I was not achieving my yields by mining my soil. On the contrary I built my soil from cement-hard adobe clay to its impressive state from scratch....

At most times I had no more than half of my land under production with the rest in various stages of cover cropping. And I was only producing at a fraction of what would have been possible if I had owned the land and could have justified the investment into an overstory of integrated tree, berry, flower and nut crops along with the various vegetable and fruit crops. The farm produced so much income that I was routinely in the top 15% of organic farms in California (which has over 2000 organic farms) in most years on a fraction of the land that my colleagues were using.