It makes me sad a guy who helped introduce me to the wonders of science is now saying things that get him described as “anti-science”.

On Dilbert — I like the strip a lot. It doesn’t bother me that Adams is an antiscience loon, any more than it bothers me that BA is an atheist/agnostic (at least I assume he is; if he isn’t he can correct me). I don’t just read things by people I agree with. Heck, I love Heinlein’s SF books; that doesn’t mean I buy into his crackpot right-wing ideology.

They are reasonably priced (~5 cents each), but it’s cheap enough that shopping centers would very much want to just freely distribute the bags, attract more customers, and cut the trouble of collecting 50 won (~ 5 cent) coins. Hence, enforcement by law.

It is actually much more effective than you might imagine. You know how many women would love to buy ~$100 shoes but fume if asked to pay $1/hour for parking…

Plastic being non-biodegradable is irrelevant if the bags wind up in a landfill. Paper doesn’t break down in landfills either. Paper bags take up a lot more space, weigh a lot more, and require cutting down trees to make them. Before you try to claim that it’s the leftover parts of trees cut for lumber, you should look at the forests cut down in the southeastern US and fed into giant pencil sharpeners to make paper.

A bundle of 400 1/6 barrel bags weighs about 60 pounds (I’ve lifted plenty in my 30 years in a grocery store. It is about 75 cm long, 50 cm wide and 30 cm high (guestimates, but that should be pretty close.

A box of 1000 plastic bags weighs about 14 pounds, and is about 30 cm cubed.

Furthermore, it is my understanding that ethylene was a waste product of the cracking process in producing gasoline before the invention of polyethylene. I think it was just burned off.

Of course littering is a problem, but that’s as true of paper bags as anything else. (I’d love to see a cop pull over someone who throws a lit cigarette on the highway and give him a ticket for littering. We saw many brush fires along the highway one very dry summer, most likely due to cigarettes.)

So in plastic bags we use less space in transport, storage and disposal. They are recyclable, weigh less, costing less in fuel to transport, and they amount to air pollution transformed to a harmless, even useful, substance.

Even if I’m wrong on the details, I hope I’ve made the point that the whole picture is much more complex than “Oooh look at that ugly plastic bag hanging in the pretty tree!”

I live in of the wine counties in CA; once in awhile a vineyard will rip out old vines and then fumigate the ground, insulating the chemicals with large lengths of Visqueen-like material. The last time this happened along the Russian River there was plastic along the entire length from where the stuff washed into the watershed (pushed by winter storms) near Hopland clear into the Santa Rosa drainage. It was an eyesore, festooning the trees and shrubs along the river for over a year.
I visited the Copper Canyon area in Mexico a few years ago. We flew into a small town mid-way down the Pacific Coast to start the rail and bus journey. There was plastic bag litter everywhere; no roadway, roadside, or field in any city or small town escaped the blight.

Plastic is recyclable; most supermarkets have places where bags can be returned. They get recycled/remade into more plastic stuff.
People are the problem, whether in Mexico or here in the U.S. It is so easy to toss an empty bag, and the comment above which noted that bags don’t biodegrade readily is on the mark.

When I was a kid my grandma used to walk to the neighborhood market with a wheeled basket. If she didn’t need a whole lot of stuff, she had her own shopping bag made of fabric. Everything changed when we began driving to the big supers and were provided with paper bags to hold the groceries.
Safeway (and probably other stores) are now selling fabric bags which can be used to haul your stuff home. They’ve tried this before, several years ago, but the idea never caught on. Perhaps it will this time, because we seem to be getting more conscious about the environment and what we’ve done to it.

The fundamentalists aren’t being dishonest and I’m sure they are just a willing as the rest of us to learn. A person shouldn’t be held accountable for simply having had a different upbringing. The only differences between most fundamentalists and some of the posters here are the source(s) of what they believe and whom they trust as an authority.

Don’t think so? If your opinions are really someone else’s; if you think the evidence for XXX exists simply because YYY (and ZZZ, etc.) said so; if because you are so certain, you never entertain the idea your beliefs may need updating; or if your idea of searching for the truth is to go to QQQ’s website for “the facts” and stop if told where evidence might be found — guess what!? — you and the fundamentalist are doing the same thing! Both you and the fundamentalist are certain you know the “Truth” because someone told you it was “Truth.” The fundamentalist doesn’t have much recourse but YOU are supposed to know (and act) differently.

If that’s not you, then fabulous! But if it does describe you (no need to confess — just be honest with yourself) then you’re treating science as a religion.

I recognize those here to whom what I’ve said is most applicable will be the first to hastily post, “NOT ME!” Stopping you is futile. Have at it.

Phil, if you’re complaining for the sake of complaining that’s OK but if your purpose is to inform, you’re not going to succeed if you insult your intended targets by calling them “twinkies” or worse.

The way to deal with it is to tell the store they need to train their cashiers not to waste bags or you’ll stop voting with your dollar. People take what the cashier gives them because THEY don’t want to look like an a@@. Shop at grocery stores that give a discount when you bag your own in canvass you brought. (Ignore those who think planetary housekeeping isn’t a group project when you call them out, even if they threaten violence). There are other problems with plastic bags besides biodegradability. Check out the annual landfill quantity, the number which have to be picked up by hand due to litter and what resources are drawn in oreder to manufacture bags each year. Is there a sound reason NOT to cut our bag usage in half (with next to no effort required)?
It IS a problem that needs a solution and what’s the solution if not dollar-voting and education? (People that are actually proud of their ability to waste are…a waste).

Just as in oil and global warming, you don’t need to believe in the ultimate disaster scenarios to believe that working to fix the problem is a good idea.

Pfft!

I had my tongue firmly planted in my cheek

Well, it was planted somewhere.

Pow! Zing! Tee hee!

and have no intention of giving up my consumption of either. I simply wanted to point out that I think PZ may have over reacted and let Phil know that audience overlap exists between Scott’s blog and his.

PZ overreacts to everything. He follows the Penn & Teller school of skepticism that goes as follows:

A PERSON: I dunno… I just wonder about the existence of the soul sometimes, you know. Is there any point to it all?
SKEPTIC: You’re a [bleeped] pile of [bleeping] [bleep] and you [bleep] your mother, your dog and many children on a regular basis.
A PERSON: OK, I’m going away now.
SKEPTIC: A little [bleep] like you can never hope to aspire to the grand magnificence of my perfect and unsullied mentality!
A PERSON: (no longer there)
SKEPTIC: Ah! Another win for skepticism!

Oh, sorry there, Mr Gandhi.

And, yes, I find applying a nice brine to marinate the targets of my righteous Whoop-assings Of Justice to be quite effective.

So you’re the guy putting that single can of soup in a plastic bag. Good to know. Oh, and brining physical violence into the mix is a nice touch.

My spine’s just fine thank you. I had my tongue firmly planted in my cheek and have no intention of giving up my consumption of either. I simply wanted to point out that I think PZ may have over reacted and let Phil know that audience overlap exists between Scott’s blog and his.

Not to mention if you “call me out” for it, you’ll wind up looking like an ass *ON* your ass. Mind your own business.

Then again, I don’t find Dilbert funny, so that’s probably why I don’t like to see it promoted.

Sheesh. Intolerant much? There’s lots of things in the media I don’t like, but I can’t begrudge the people who make them from promoting their product. Can’t imagine a rational reason for even worrying about. You sound like a bit of a busybody.

********* BA! I got the floating ad, too. It’s for Opinion-Central. Clicking the X and the No button produces no result. **********

Should I stop reading something I enjoy if something else I enjoy tells me I shouldn’t?

Good gravy, man, grow a spine. I will continue to read Dilbert *and* the BA, and anyone who tells me otherwise can get bent. Besides, I can’t get exciented over the science opinions of a cartoonist. Unless he runs for office.

Actually, I thought God’s Debris was a clever thought experiment even if it’s fantasy.

Also, I am always amazed by how little people put into plastic bags at the grocery store. I am getting very close to calling people out when they buy a single item and use a bag, but I have so far been able to contain myself, because I realize I’ll just end up looking like an ass.

Great site, by the way. I get a lot less work done when you have a lot to talk about.

I enjoy Scott’s humor. I also enjoy Dilbert but the fact that I work for a gigantic corporation and live a third of my life in a cubicle may have impaired my judgement. For the most part, I don’t take him seriously. Sometimes he writes on the fringes and sometimes he blasts right on past the fringes but my take is that he does that, not necessarily because he actually believes those things, but rather he’s encouraging explorative thought. He’s not a scientist and readily admits that but does that mean he’s not allowed to wonder “out loud” in his blog? Isn’t asking questions (even the stupid ones) the very foundation of understanding and progress? The idea that he’s an “anti-science twinkie” just feels wrong to me. I don’t think he is.

Should I stop reading something I enjoy if something else I enjoy tells me I shouldn’t?

Hey, so he doesn’t have a doctorate. Wit doesn’t evaporate for lack of a license. I don’t like the ways he yanks people’s chains on occasion, but a) there are plenty of BABlog fans who haven’t been to civics class, and b) I’ve seen very few people actually study what he says anyway. As Randi points out, experts are among the world’s easiest to fool; please entertain the notion that this means you all now and then. I know it applies to me.

The BABlog’s great strength – and it is great – is in the presentation of digestible information about astronomy. That’s a great service, and I am here merely suggesting that Mr. Adams’ work has not been studied as carefully as Eta Carinae by current company.

Hey – the linked comic mocks pareidolia. Whattaya know – we have something in common!

Think I like the porn ads better.