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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker John Boehner have often used the line "I'm not a scientist" when arguing against the administration's climate agenda. Now The Hill reports that President Obama has flipped the script on Republicans on the science behind climate change during his State of the Union address, admitting he's not a scientist either, but that he knows "a lot of really good" ones. "I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act," Obama said Tuesday night. "Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities." The president said he trusts "the best scientists in the world" that are saying "our activities are changing the climate." The Republican statement is not a particularly compelling line, as many analysts have pointed out. “It’s got to be the dumbest answer I’ve ever heard,” one Republican energy lobbyist told the New York Times. “Using that logic would disqualify politicians from voting on anything.”

To some extent, GOP leaders are banking on polls that show Americans don’t consider climate change a top national priority. But according to Will Oremus, they’re also banking on Democrats being too timid to push back very hard on environmental issues, for fear of being painted as liberal tree-huggers. By hammering on it during the State of the Union, Obama is signaling that he now views climate as a winning issue for Democrats on the national level.

Douglas Quenqua reports in the NYT that the days of the Baby Boomers are numbered as Millennials are set to overtake them as the United States’ largest living generation "Which is obviously terrifying! #Millennials, with their hippity-hop music and their "Snapchats" and their twerks, overtaking that most noble (and by "noble" we mean "populous") generation!" But there is power in numbers, and the size of the millennial generation will carry some benefits for its members. "They are tired of being stereotyped by boomers, whom they view as ruining the world for them,” says Jeffrey Arnett. “This could allow them to demand more respect than they’ve gotten so far.” Perhaps more important, it will give them “more power in the conversation about where American society should go in particular.”

Part of the probem is in determining demographically just what is a Millennial. While Boomers are traditionally deemed to include anyone born between 1946 and 1960, according to Pew Research "Millennials are defined as those ages 18 to 34 in 2015." In other words, those born between 1981 and 1997. “One of the defining events typically associated with millennials is that they grew up experiencing 9/11,” says Richard Fry. But those born in 1997 “would have been 5 years old when the attacks happened,” not usually an age when global events leave formative impressions. Then there's the Gen Xers, projected to remain the “middle child” of generations – caught between two larger generations of the Millennials and the Boomers. Gen Xers are smaller than Millennials because the generational span of Gen X (16 years) is shorter than the Millennials (17 years). Also, the Gen Xers were born during a period when Americans were having fewer children than later decades. "For Xers, there’s one silver lining in all this. From everything we know about them, they’re savvy, skeptical and self-reliant; they’re not into preening or pampering, and they just might not give much of a hoot what others think of them. Or whether others think of them at all."

The insurance industry is a fat target with $481 billion in premiums in 2013 and agents’ commissions of about $50 billion. Now Conor Dougherty writes in the NYT that the boring but lucrative trade has been attracting big names, among them Google which has formed a partnership with Comparenow, an American auto insurance comparison site that will give Google access to insurers in Comparenow’s network. “A lot of people are waking up to the fact that it’s a massive industry, it’s old-fashioned, they still use human agents and the commissions are pretty big,” says Jennifer Fitzgerald. “It’s ripe for — I hate to use the word — disruption.” It may seem like an odd match for Google, whose projects include driverless cars, delivery drones and a pill to detect cancer, but the key to insurance is having lots of data about people’s backgrounds and habits, which is perhaps the company’s greatest strength. “They have a ton of data on where people drive, how people drive,” says Jon McNeill. “It’s the holy grail of being able to price auto insurance correctly.”

Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, says rumors of the insurance agent’s death have been greatly exaggerated. “Even if they go through Google or another portal, they still end up at an insurance agency or company at some point,” says Hartwig. “I think the agency model has a lot more consistency than many people give it credit for.” But people in the industry and Silicon Valley say it is only a matter of time before online agencies attack the armies of intermediaries that are the backbone of the trade and Google could present formidable competition for other insurance sellers. As many as two-thirds of insurance customers say they would consider purchasing insurance products from organizations other than insurers, including 23 percent who would consider buying from online service providers such as Google and Amazon. Google Compare auto insurance site has already been operating in Britain for two years as a search engine for auto insurance prices. “There are 40,000 agencies in the US," says Ellen Carney, "and you could absolutely imagine them shrinking by a quarter."

Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”. "I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today," writes Marco Arment. "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." Many issues revolve around the general reliability of OS X. "With Yosemite, I typically have to reboot my laptop at least once a day, and my desktop every few days of use," writes Glenn Fleishman. "The point of owning a Mac is to not have to reboot it regularly. There have been times in the past between OS X updates where I've gone weeks to months without a restart." I know what I hope for concludes Gassée. "I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell. If Apple were to spend a year concentrating on solid fixes rather than releasing software that’s pushed out to fit a hardware schedule, that would show an ascent rather than a slide."

Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced the pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. Now the NYT reports on recent research on why some groups, like some people, are reliably smarter than others. In one study, researchers grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning. Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success. Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics (PDF). First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. It appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."

Astrophysicist Adam Frank has an interesting article in the NYT postulating one answer to the Fermi paradox - that human evolution into a globe-spanning industrial culture is forcing us through the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis and that climate change is fate and nothing we do today matters because civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary changes. According to Frank, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact. Some excerpts:

The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.

All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.

By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear.

As we describe in a recent paper, using what’s already known about planets and life, it is now possible to create a broad program for modeling co-evolving “trajectories” for technological species and their planets. Depending on initial conditions and choices made by the species (such as the mode of energy harvesting), some trajectories will lead to an unrecoverable sustainability crisis and eventual population collapse. Others, however, may lead to long-lived, sustainable civilizations.

Nicola Davis writes at The Guardian that a new exhibition at London’s Science Museum tiitled Churchill’s Scientists aims to explore how a climate that mingled necessity with ambition spurred British scientists to forge ahead in fields as diverse as drug-discovery and operational research, paving the way for a further flurry of postwar progress in disciplines from neurology to radio astronomy. Churchill "was very unusual in that he was a politician from a grand Victorian family who was also interested in new technology and science,” says Andrew Nahum. “That was quite remarkable at the time.” An avid reader of Charles Darwin and HG Wells, Churchill also wrote science-inspired articles himself and fostered an environment where the brightest scientists could build ground-breaking machines, such as the Bernard Lovell telescope, and make world-changing discoveries, in molecular genetics, radio astronomy, nuclear power, nerve and brain function and robotics. “During the war the question was never, 'How much will it cost?’ It was, 'Can we do it and how soon can we have it?’ This left a heritage of extreme ambition and a lot of talented people who were keen to see what it could provide."

According to Cambridge Historian Richard Toye, Churchill was a “closet science-fiction fan” who borrowed the lines for one of his most famous speeches from H. G. Wells - to depict the rise of Hitler's Germany. "It's a bit like Tony Blair borrowing phrases from Star Trek or Doctor Who," says Toye. A close friend of Wells, Churchill said that The Time Machine was “one of the books I would like to take with me to Purgatory”. Wells and Churchill met in 1902 and several times thereafter, and kept in touch in person and by letter until Wells' death in 1946. "We need to remember that there was a time when Churchill was a radical liberal who believed these things," Toye adds. "Wells is often seen as a socialist, but he also saw himself as a liberal, and he saw Churchill as someone whose views were moving in the right direction."

Cade Metz writes that last week Parisa Tabriz, head of Google’s Chrome security team, helped arrange an early screening of Michael Mann’s 'Blackhat' in San Francisco for 200-odd security specialists from Google, Facebook, Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Square, Cisco, and other parts of Silicon Valley’s close-knit security community, and their response to the film was shockingly positive. "Judging from the screening Q&A—and the pointed ways this audience reacted during the screening—you could certainly argue Blackhat is the best hacking movie ever made," writes Metz. "Many info-sec specialists will tell you how much they like Sneakers—the 1992 film with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, Ben Kingsley, and River Phoenix—but few films have so closely hewed to info-sec reality as Mann’s new movie, fashioned in his characteristic pseudo-documentary style." “Unlike others, this is a film about a real person, not a stereotype—a real guy with real problems thrust into a real situation,” says Mark Abene. "The technology—and the disasters—in the film were real, or at least plausible.

Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth’s character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable. “It’s the first crime-thriller to hinge so heavily on hacking without becoming silly.” says Poulson. "We put a lot of work into finding plausible ways that malware and hosting arrangements and all these other things could be used to advance the plot and all of that I think turned out pretty nice."

It’s common knowledge the NSA collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn’t need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails. Now Alice Truong reports that during operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, the US was able to analyze laptops formerly owned by Taliban members and according to NSA officer Michael Wertheimer discovered an email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: “CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT.” According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants. "It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed “spam” filters (PDF)." From a surveillance perspective, Wertheimer writes that this highlights the importance of filtering algorithms. Implementing them makes parsing huge amounts of data easier, but it also presents opportunities for someone with a secret to figure out what type of information is being tossed out and exploit the loophole.

The WaPo reports that Danielle and Alexander Meitiv in Montgomery County Maryland say they are being investigated for neglect after letting their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter make a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. “We wouldn’t have let them do it if we didn’t think they were ready for it,” says Danielle. The Meitivs say they believe in “free-range” parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of “helicopter” parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world. “The world is actually even safer than when I was a child, and I just want to give them the same freedom and independence that I had — basically an old-fashioned childhood,” says Danielle. “I think it’s absolutely critical for their development — to learn responsibility, to experience the world, to gain confidence and competency.”

On December. 20, Alexander agreed to let the children walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well. Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them. Alexander said he had a tense time with police when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services which showed up a couple of hours later. Although Child Protective Services could not address this specific case they did point to Maryland law, which defines child neglect as failure to provide proper care and supervision of a child. “I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” says Alexander. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with.”