<\/p>\nI made a chart! This is the kind of thing you do when you return from a long trip and are jet-lagged.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These are the 2008 research budgets for physical sciences<\/a>, in billions of dollars, for the main funding agencies in the U.S.: the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. For helpful comparison purposes, I’ve also plotted the $14.9 billion that has been misplaced<\/a> over the course of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Not the cost of the war itself, which has been over $500 billion<\/a> so far and will be well over a trillion<\/a> when all is said and done. Just the funds that were … lost. Embezzled<\/a>, whatever. Labels are so confining.<\/p>\n Readers with interests outside science funding are welcome to suggest their own comparisons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I made a chart! This is the kind of thing you do when you return from a long trip and are jet-lagged. These are the 2008 research budgets for physical sciences, in billions of dollars, for the main funding agencies in the U.S.: the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. For helpful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-science-and-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}