Swans on Tea

The red flag proclaiming “I don’t understand science” goes up when the story sounds something like this:
The panel includes the word “evolution” in state science standards for the first time, but it is relegated to a place among a host of ideas, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Relegated? To the “lowly” place that includes [...]

I fucking opt out already.
I buy stuff for my lab. I get email. I don’t care if your widgets are on sale — if we don’t need one, I won’t be buying any. I don’t make any “OMG, those 100 microfarad capacitors are to die for” impulse purchases for the lab. [...]

Over at Uncertain principles, Chad talks about how Nobody Expects Bose-Einstein Condensation, i.e. while the phenomenon had been predicted, the enabling technology was serendipitous.
What really made [magneto-optic trapping] take off, though, was that people figured out you could get the laser cooling wavelength for rubidium from diode lasers. And diode lasers are manufactured in mass [...]