One of the favorite devices used by political scientists of the literal variety is the “doomsday” clock. According to ABC, they’ve reset the thing today, giving us another minute of breathing room. This morning, the world was five minutes away from finito. Now, thanks to what the scientists called “signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization” — and because Barack Obama was elected president — we get another sixty seconds.

Missing from that list of happy signs, of course, is Iran. But the whole business of scientific prediction is pretty shady, as both Anthony O’Hear (here) and I (here) write in today’s Fortnightly. Science that devotes billions to predicting weather badly, while not predicting massive earthquakes at all, seems to have something backward.