Free Republic

... I went to see Interstellar mainly because I was tickled by the fact that the bad guy is called "Dr Mann". But I took along my kids, and I'm glad I did because it's a good film to see with children or parents. Underneath all the saving-humanity space-travel stuff, the only relationship that matters in the movie is between dad Matthew McConaughey and his daughter. I'm tiptoeing around the startling evolution of that relationship, but let's just say that the, ahem, role reversal of their final scene together had my boys talking all the way home. Interstellar is directed...

The term "hockey stick" was coined by the head of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Jerry Mahlman, to describe the pattern of historical temperatures in the northern hemisphere (it kind of looks like a hockey stick on its side). The chart, created by Dr. Michael Mann (now at Penn State University) shows relatively stable temperatures until around 100 year ago when we see a spike up. It is one of the key pieces of information used to prove that global warming is about to destroy the world. To create most of the chart, climate change...