Presidente del Gobierno José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain said the Spanish Republic has decided to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by revoking Mexican independence:

“It has always been a common misperception that the 5th of May is a celebration of Mexican independence from Spain. This is not correct, is is actually a celebration of victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, but we know that no one can really be proud of defeating the French so the mistake is understandable. In truth, we never agreed to Mexican independence anyway so we are simply revoking it.” (more…)

It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists - a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

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When President George Bush announced in 2004 that he wanted to reinvigorate space exploration, he presented a number of arguments for increasing funding but they were all rather tepid. Space exploration technology, for example, led to CAT scans and MRIs. Oh, and we got better weather forecasting.

Honestly, those are pretty weak arguments to justify an organization that gets almost $15 billion per year. Why not mention Tang and a pen that writes upside down? At least Tang is something most of us have had. I have never had an MRI.

Since then we have had some interesting projects take off; the Dawn misson to Ceres, for example, but nothing that really captured the attention of the common man. The space shuttle is, let’s face it, boring.

I remember one episode of Farscape where our lead character, who piloted a ship through a wormhole and discovered all kinds of interesting things, speaks with reverence about his astronaut father who was … a space shuttle pilot. I started laughing even though it wasn’t supposed to be funny. That’s how far the space program had fallen - the only recent thing that young people could idolize was the equivalent of a high-altitude delivery truck.

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Sometimes people think that, because I write this column for peanuts, I am somehow available for free science consulting services. Obviously this is not the case but I don’t mind the occasional question, especially if it concerns real puzzles like how a car in China doesn’t cause global warming but a car in America does.

Lately I have been pestered with questions about this whole Christmas thing. It’s a troublesome issue, I agree, but I am not in the free science business so most of the questions I just ignore - however, one of the many,many,many (not that many - Lady Scientist ) groupies that flitter about me on the internet caught my attention recently with their query about Yule physics because they had the creativity to put it in seasonal rhyming form;

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I’m usually a pretty patient guy about marketing. Unlike some, I am not educated by it and, unlike others, I don’t look down on it. I know why it it exists and I appreciate its value but at some point in advocacy issues ( in this case the environment ) it invariably crosses a line from being funny to offensive and then it goes completely over the line into being the kind of junk science that needs to be ridiculed.

My latest gripe is the claim that low energy bulbs are a magic panacea for the environment and that they are wonderful in all respects. I don’t use them and there are a few compelling reasons why you should focus on other ways to save the environment also.

The main reason I don’t use them is because I am not smug enough.

You know what I am talking about. Who actually laughed at those Apple television ads where the smug, hipster guy is the Apple user and the buffoon uses a PC? It takes some true marketing incompetence to make Microsoft seem lovable but they did it. The only people who liked those ads were Apple users, who are already smug.

Now we have commercials where a hip CFL bulb guilt trips a traditional light bulb in the same condescending manner - and without about the same level of actual data behind it. It will sell some lightbulbs - and maybe make your cat insane, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s discuss light.

The whole point of light bulbs was to give us daylight at night - at first, anything was better than dark but we later discovered that the closer you can get to natural light, the better off you will be. Here is a chart showing the light spectrum, including daylight, incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

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