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The Obama Administration does not support blowing up planets. Nor did it expect federal employees to work the day before Christmas. It won’t impeach President Obama or reallocate defense funds to NASA.
But the White House will share its official home brew recipe – it’s not classified. They’ll share it. All you had to do was ask, and 12,240 people did, as part of the White House’s We the People petition initiative.
Launched in September 2011, the petition system lets users create petitions for just about anything they can dream up (though, of course, the petitions and site are tightly moderated). Then, after garnering an initial 150 electronic "signatures," the petitions are posted online. If, after 30 days, a petition has earned enough signatures, the White House promises to issue an official response.
But there’s a problem. The petition system has become too popular. The initial benchmark of 5,000 signatures was too easy to achieve, and was quintupled to 25,000 in October 2011. On Jan. 15, the White House again bumped up the threshold to 100,000, so only the most popular ideas would rise to the top. Now there’s a petition to repeal that decision (signatures: ~700), and one asking to the administration to abolish what has become an “irritating sideshow” (signatures: 700+), and another asking the White House to please take the petitions seriously (signatures: 37,000+. Response: We’re listening. Seriously.).
Since September 2011, nearly 10 million signatures have been entered on the more than 141,000 petitions created. In the last two months of 2012 alone, 73,000 new petitions were created and 2.4 million people joined the system.
As of Jan. 24, there are more than 285 petitions awaiting signatures. The most popular, by far, is the request to legally recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group (signatures: 325,000+). Many of the petitions are requesting some form of tax regulation or gun control, or a ban on gun control, or a pardon for a convicted criminal. But among the most recent petitions are some that relate to science and tech.
Like, for example, the petition asking the administration to consider building a Death Star; 34,435 signatures later, it received the now-famous, fantastically space-nerdy, official, “No.”
In this gallery, we’ve collected some of our other favorite science-related petitions. And of course, included the White House homebrew recipe.
Because if there’s one thing we at Wired Science love as much as science, it’s beer.