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Religious Right Loves Gambling Ban

Agape Press reports on the "ecstatic" reaction of religious right groups: .Concerned Women for America (CWA) is applauding the passage of the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, a bill sponsored by Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. The legislation prohibits the use of credit cards, checks, and wire and electronic fund transfers in online gambling, which is illegal. Kyl's bill is the Senate's version of H.R. 4411, the House bill sponsored by Republican Congressmen Jim Leach of Iowa and Bob Goodlatte of Virginia. These bills seeks to extend the nation's gambling regulations…

Me in the Media: Two New Interviews

I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people: -- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me: It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…

A Request for Physics Expertise

As I noted a while ago, I'm giving a talk at DAMOP a week from Tuesday with the title "What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?". This is intended as an introduction to the meeting as a whole, for new students or people coming in from other fields. The reason? I found a copy of the 2001 DAMOP program, which featured 270 talks and 293 posters. This year's meeting is almost twice as big: 477 talks and 548 posters. That's awfully daunting, so I'm going to try to provide an introduction/ guide to the meeting as a whole. This, of course, requires me to know a little bit about a wide range of…

Links for 2012-09-05

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Kermit How Kermit the Frog is the perfect model for an academic administrator. Chester A. Arthur: Sasquatch Trainer : Filmmaking Frenzy: Commander-in-Chief From the people who brought you "Rutherford B. Hayes, Urban Vigilante," a movie about the only Union alumnus (so far) to be US President. In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why? « Face in the Blue One of my most-visited sites on the web is Reddit.com, and one of my favourite subreddits is HistoricalWhatIf, an online community that debates…

There are no atheists on airplanes

I hate flying. I hate the wasted time. I hate the invasion of privacy. I hate being disconnected from the internet. I hate the food. I hate being around that many people. I hate being squished next to people on the actual plane. I hate the stress. EDIT: UGH AND THE BATHROOMS! I HATE THE BATHROOMS. How could I forget that??? I hate it. What does not add to the fun, is flying itself is extraordinarily painful for me. As far back as I can remember, flying, especially the descent, causes me *extreme* ear pain. Sharp shooting pain, as well as a dull, constant aching pain. Its all…

Atheists with vaginas.

I am so pissed off. I didnt get out of the lab until quarter till 6 tonight, so there was no friggen way I could get down to OU to see Barker (feed/potty Arnie, feed/potty me, 15 mph on I-35... I would have gotten there by the time his presentation was over. Why the hell is it that on Friday nights I have loose, whatever plans, I can sneak out early at 4, but the Friday I want to leave early, I end up being wrapped up in BL-3 till 5 fourty-fucking-five???? RAAAAAGE!!!) So I was all hyped up for some quality atheist entertainment, and Im at home instead. ... So Im going to bitch about…

Kinsley on Clinton's Victory

Now that Obama has scored a very convincing win in the big election, I am reminded of a column written by Michael Kinsley in 1992, celebrating the victory of Bill Clinton. It's eerie how much of it is still relevant today. Couldn't find it online, so here are a few excerpts. Alas, just as with Clinton, no doubt Kinsley's first sentence must give everyone pause. No doubt it will all end in tears. But for the moment, I FEEL GREAT! It's like the lifting of a terrible headache, or like coming up for air after swimming underwater. Yes, the euphoria is not entirely rational. I think I speak…

links for 2009-05-05

The 25 most important movies ever made about war and diplomacy. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine "Last week, in the online edition of Slate's sister publication Foreign Policy, two of its regular bloggers, Stephen M. Walt and Daniel W. Drezner, drew up lists of what they regard as the best movies ever made about international relations. Both are eminent international-relations professors, Walt at Harvard, Drezner at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. It's no surprise that neither of them gives our own film critic, Dana Stevensâor, for that matter, Gene Shalitâthe slightest cause…

The Pseudonymity Laboratory: Do you trust me?

At the upcoming ScienceOnline'09 conference (16-18 Jan 2009 in RTP, NC, USA), PalMD and I will be leading a discussion session on the needs and justification for anonymity or pseudonymity in blogging. Women bloggers have additional needs for blogging under a pseudonym and PalMD and I are currently enlisting such unadvertised participants so as not to, you know, compromise their identity (yes, those present will learn who he and I are but we can assure all that it will be anti-climactic). Even prior to developing discussion points for the session, I had been considering the possibility of…

Old Timey Chemistry Tables, Alchemical and All

I'd seen Janet's notice a few days or a week or whatever it was ago of The New York Times's notice of a book about the history and philosophy of chemistry. As Janet commented, it's just not every day you get studies about chemical history in the NYT. It's probably only maybe one or two days, ever. Oddly enough, they'd also had coverage last summer of a conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia on alchemy (yes, that CHF, whose motto remains, for reasons still unexplained: "we hate hipsters"). As it happens, I've written about chemistry tables as visual representations…

Can You Have Open Science in the Dark?

The arXiv is a game changer for how large portions of physics (and increasingly other fields) are done. Paul Ginsparg won a MacArthur award for his vision and stewardship of the arXiv (something other institutions might want to note when they decide that someone trying to change how science is done isn't really doing work that will impact them.) So...Given: The arXiv is great. But there is something that's always bothered me a bit about the arXiv: transparency. (Note: those of you who wish to complain about the fact that you can't get endorsed on the arXiv, this article is not for you.…

Emailing Those Responsible for Science Funding Cuts

Mad about the funding cuts in science? Why not send an letter to those responsible? Taken from an letter just sent out to members of the American Physical Society: From: Arthur Bienenstock, President, the American Physical Society To: Members of the American Physical Society Re: Federal Funding Alert: http://www.aps.org/policy/tools/alerts I am writing to request that you contact your elected representatives and let them know that the 2008 federal budget deals a devastating blow to basic research. You can make this contact quickly and easily at: http://www.aps.org/policy/tools/…

More questions than answers: the future of the scientific journal

On one side, there are some who say the future of scholarly communication in science is databases - or, rather, more or less shared and curated data sets. Some of the folks in this crowd go farther to say that science is a continuous stream and people should be able to comment on and point to this stream. There are those who see the disaggregation of the journal with the papers remaining more or less the same. So databases of discrete pieces that can then be re-aggregated (I've mentioned this before) And there are those who basically think we'll sort of go on as we have been, but perhaps with…

Metaphysics disclaimer

Ron Amundson is a philosopher and historian of biology at the University of Hawai'i - Hilo who has done some great work in my field. So I was greatly amused and more than a little sympathetic to see this disclaimer linked to from Leiter's blog: Metaphysics DISCLAIMER Phil 310, Metaphysics, is a course in some core topics in Western Philosophy, including the Free Will Problem, the Mind-Body Problem, related problems in Philosophy of Mind, and the Problem of Personal Identity. If you’re interested in what these involve, you can find long discussions online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of…

Fear and pain, the great educational motivators

I remember my physical education class in high school — the instructor (I will not dignify him with the title "teacher") was a psychopath, as far as I was concerned. He ran the class like a petty tyrant; members of the football team were treated royally and given exemptions and privileges, while the rest of us were subject to his whims and rather vicious rules. We had jock strap inspections every day, and if we were unequipped, we'd be punished; we had to, for instance, run a certain number of laps around the track, and the students who came in last would be punished. And punishment was…

What does the shadow know?

How do we tell where an object is in a three-dimensional world when our eye only gives us two dimensions worth of information? Today's reading ("Moving Cast Shadows Induce Apparent Motion in Depth" by Daniel Kersten, Pascal Mamassian, and David Knill of the University of Minnesota [Perception, 1997]) explores one aspect of that question: the role of an object's shadow. Video game designers faced this issue in the 1980s when they began attempting to make "3-D" arcade games. One classic example was the game Zaxxon, where you flew a spaceship diagonally across the screen. The trick was, you not…

Yet another example of credulity begetting credulity

Thanks to a commenter going by the 'nym of djm, I found in a comment yet another hilarious example of how credulity towards pseudoscience of one form often goes hand-in-hand with other forms of pseudoscience. It looks as though the "intelligent design" creationists are down with Steorn's claimed free energy machine as "evidence" against materialism: Steorn's findings totally undermine the basic premise of materialism, simply by demonstrating a confirmed physical effect that materialists predict cannot happen. These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated that the principles of…

The Listener against free speech, part 2

Lawyer Steven Price, who specialises in media law, comments on the Listener's use of legal threats to silence a blogger: In the comments section of the correction and apology, someone has helpfully posted a link to a copy of HotTopic's original post. Don't you just love the internet? On the off-chance that the link is removed in the near future, let me take the liberty of reproducing it here. By all means, pay a visit, and encourage others to do likewise. I hope that the post receives exponentially greater attention as a result of this legal threat. I don't say that because I'm a free speech…

Gene discovery may aid in development of drought-tolerant crops

Parts of the Southeastern U.S (where I live) have been experiencing severe drought conditions for months. Droughts can have significant environmental and economic impacts on a community. According to this press release, aridity is on the increase across the globe, as is the world population, and it is important that increasingly dry areas should be taken into cultivation to ensure food production. Researchers from the University of Helsinki and the University of California in San Diego have discovered a plant gene that could help in the development of drought-tolerant crops. Here's a…

Sometimes You Just Need To Be Angry

Here's the story: Samia was hacked off about something. I know I recommended white science bloggers link to other bloggers in a show of link-lovin, but some of the stuff I see just seems tokenizing/LOOK AT ME I'M OPENMINDED! Ew. Fuck a bunch of wannabes. This kinda got Isis hacked off. What the fuck??? No, I mean seriously. What the fuck?... ...So what has you upset Samia? Is it a particular incident or the blogosphere in general. Either way, you've got to offer more guidance than today's brief blog-lashing. You've established yourself as an advocate for diversity and as someone who is…

Greg Beck, R.I.P

I apologize for not noting this earlier, but the one and only Greg Beck died last week. I knew Greg through his astonishing blog, and had the pleasure of meeting him in person a few times as well. Like the rest of the KC blogging world, I'm stunned and shocked. There's very little to be said about Greg that he didn't say already. His blogging represented the peak of the form; it was personal, raunchy, opinionated and, without fail, interesting. His years as a bouncer in the nightclubs of Kansas City gave him a wealth of material to work with, and he retold those stories in a voice that…

Nabokov Was Right

Nabokov always said that the only thing he enjoyed more than writing novels and solving chess puzzles was studying butterflies. As he notes in Strong Opinions: Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime -- but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum. Even after Lolita made Nabokov (in)famous and rich, he continued to put his scientific knowledge to work, and layered…

Significant figures what are they for and what do they have to do with uncertainty?

Suppose I am working on a problem and I wish to calculate the density of something. I measure the mass to be *m* = 24.5 grams and the volume is *V* = 10 cm3. In this case the density would be:  ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! This is not a test!!!! Something is drastically wrong! Clearly I messed up. How can I have the mass measured to **3** significant figures, the volume measured to **1** significant figure, but the density calculated to **3** significant figures? Isn't this a violation of some fundamental…

Expensive Wine

The latest Men's Vogue has a rather interesting article (not online) by Jay McInerney on a small group of real estate moguls who like to drink very, very expensive wine. For these oenophiles, a 1982 Romanee-Conti is a young wine - even their champagne is typically several decades old - and a $500 bottle is borderline plonk. It's not uncommon for these winos to consumer $30,000 worth of rotten grape juice at a single dinner. Not surprisingly, these expensive wines are often highly praised, with descriptions that feature some very purple prose. And while I would certainly love to drink a 1945…

Music and Math

The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers: The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to…

First Impressions, In Person and Online

There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress: Let's start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university's endowment sends the message that you might not be a…

The ultimate homeopathic remedy

It's one of those things that can't be repeated too many times, but homeopathy is ridiculous. In fact, so ridiculous is homeopathy that I don't usually write about it all that often. The reason is that, like homeopathic dilutions, a bit of skeptical blogging about homeopathy goes a long, long way (although I'm not sure whether diluting the blogging makes it stronger). True, anti-vaccine ideas are often just as ridiculous, but they're also dangerous to children, which is why I'll sometimes write about nothing but anti-vaccine nonsense for several days in a row. Homeopathy, on the other hand,…

Rosie O'Donnell vs. David Kirby on the "causation" issue of autism: Guess who loses?

Pity poor David Kirby. After all, he made his name by hitching his star to a losing hypothesis, namely that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. He wrote a book about it, Evidence of Harm, back in 2005 and has milked that sucker dry ever since. Most recently, his appearances culminated in a "debate" last month with Arthur Allen, whose book Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver just garnered a very favorable review in the New York Times, during which he did a most amusing dance around the issue by pointing to "other sources" of environmental mercury…

After SB 277, online medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates are now for sale

After writing about the failure of state medical boards to discipline physicians who practice quackery and an apparent notable exception in Tennessee just yesterday, my attention was brought back to California and the topic of SB 277, the law enacted last year that, as of July 1 this year, eliminated non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. As anyone who’s read this blog for more than a year knows (or anyone who’s just paid attention to the political battle to pass SB 277 lsat year in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak), once the battle was over and antivaccine activists…

Vicarious Travelers and the Poison in the Gift

A trip overseas, especially with today's fuel prices and other changes in the airline industry, is different now than it was even a few years ago. This is especially true in regards to the topic of this post: How to deal with the problem of vicarious travelers and their need for trinkets, as well as your desire to bring trinkets to everyone you know when you go on a trip. At the very outset I want to tell you this: There is precious little in the way of legal trinkets that a traveler can find anywhere in the world they may go that can not be obtained at the local trinket shop in your own…

I Actually Agree with...Huckabee?!?

In an interview (in which I think Huckabee was trying to ensure he wouldn't be chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee), Mike Huckabee critiques conservative economic thought (italics mine): The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it's a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don't get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go…

Note to Krugman: This Is Not a Centrist Healthcare Bill

In the battle of ideas, what things are called matters (e.g., the 'death tax' instead of the estate tax). So I'm utterly puzzled as to why Paul Krugman is calling the current state of play in healthcare centrist: The fact is that the Senate bill is a centrist document, which moderate Republicans should find entirely acceptable. In fact, it's very similar to the plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts just a few years ago. This is not a centrist bill. After one considers everything that those left-of-center bargained away, it's hard to see how this bill could be any farther to the right…

Dogs killed in Korean bird flu cull

There's been a lot of notice that the South Koreans are responding to two outbreaks of bird flu (H5N1) not only with the culling of poultry by the hundreds of thousands, something that has become quite routine, now, but also the slaughter of neighboring dogs and pigs. Pigs are a well known host for influenza and dogs are susceptible to several subtypes, although there have been only a few reports of infection with H5N1. The South Koreans insist that dogs have also been killed elsewhere but the fact not publicized. I don't know if it is true or not. The big news in the West is killing the dogs…

Don't Delay Rule on Lead in Children's Toys

By Jerome Paulson Starting on February 10th, companies won't be able to sell children's products that contain more than 600 parts per million total lead. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recently clarified the requirements under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and put to rest the fear that thrift stores and consignment stores would have to go through lead certification processes for all of the many products they sell. But some consumers and businesses are still concerned that the costs of third-party lead testing will be too high for small toymakers, and have started a…

Open letter to Douglas M. Steenland, president and CEO, Northwest Airlines

Dear Mr. Steenland, I would contact you using more conventional means, but getting through to even a minor lackey at your company is next to impossible. Thank you in advance for reading this. I hate your company. They are perhaps the most difficult company I have ever dealt with as a consumer, and I won't be sorry to see them go, although I doubt it will change anything. Let me give you a little background. In December, my in-laws planned a family trip for their 50th anniversary. I'll spare you some of the details, but let me give you the basics---an elderly couple, and two young couples…

Russ Douthat on the War on Christmas

Russ Douthat of The Atlantic is guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan's place and has an interesting post about the "War on Christmas". He writes: the only thing more annoying than the killjoys who want to keep creches off town greens is listening to Bill O'Reilly or John Gibson rant about how it's all part of an insidious plot, cooked up in some secret lair where Barry Lynn, John Shelby Spong and the editorial board of the New York Times gather to guzzle eggnog and plan the destruction of all that is good and holy. To the extent that the real meaning (or the "original intent," if you will) of…

Moon Coronation Story Goes Mainstream

The Moon Coronation story, which I covered here previously, has finally been picked up by the mainstream media in the last couple weeks. The New York Times, Washington Post, ABCNews, BET, the Pittsburg Post Gazette and the Boston Globe have all picked up the story. The articles range in their accuracy and perspective. The BET article is excellent, while the Boston Globe article is little more than a fawning piece about how everyone likes the Moonies now. True to form, of course, the Moonies are spinning the coronation as proof that America is now bowing before Moon: The "outside" view of…

Links for 2010-01-19

Cocktail Party Physics: a bevy of bloggers (#scio10) "I especially liked Carl's (I think it was Carl) description of this emergent media enterprise as a delicately balanced ecosystem, each segment interdependent on the others for survival. Several weeks ago, Bora! posted one of his occasional rants relishing the collapse of traditional media, in which he baldly stated that he really didn't care if the cost of the revolution was journalists losing their jobs. (I can't find the link, sorry. He's just so damned prolific.) I adore Bora!, but he's wrong about this. He should care that…

Stargate: Universe and the Myth of the Lone Genius

As you may or may not have heard, there's a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much... Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it was fine. I'm not a huge fan of the other series in the Stargate family, but they're reliably entertaining when nothing else is on, and this will probably fall into that category. I doubt I'll be re-arranging my social calendar for this, but it was pretty good. The show did do one thing that really…

PROOF GOD EXISTS! Details at 11

Actually, the report in question came on just shy of 11 p.m. Although my local Fox television network affiliate had been promoting its 10 o'clock news report, in which a scientist uses physics to prove the Christian god exists, for several days, the editors didn't think it newsworthy enough to slot it ahead of half a dozen car wrecks and other assorted crimes and offenses to decency. Which shouldn't come as a surprise, because news that someone had actually proved a god's existence would surely lead off any newscast I was directing. Also unsurprising was the discovery of the identity of the…

The Assault on Reason, Open Thread

UPDATE JUNE 30: So. I've finished reading The Assault on Reason. I must say, it's not what I expected. My ultimate takeaway feeling is that this is a very powerful book, whatever flaws it may have. But that's getting close to giving away my review, which I'm still in the process of writing....so in the meantime, let's carry on the great dialogue we have going in the comments. I'll do so by making the following additional points: * In response to Mark Powell: I know you think Gore is making too much of the concept of "reason"--but it's clear that in using this term, Gore doesn't simply mean a…

Ecological tragedy in Vietnam: not a children's story

Wildlife of Vietnam, by Brendan Wenzel This bundle of exotic animals by Brendan Wenzel is whimsical, yet unsettling. On the one hand, it would be perfect for a children's book; I imagine a tale in which the animals overcome their natural animosities, cooperate to free themselves, dump a hapless and ineptly nonthreatening poacher in the river, and return safely to their various homes, in the happiest of ecological endings. But we all know that's not how the story really goes. Wenzel, a New York illustrator who until recently lived in Vietnam, says his work was inspired by the worsening…

Why I'm raising the sprogs vegetarian.

In a comment on the last post, zwa asks: I'm curious about your vegetarianism (as one myself) and whether your kids are. If yes, did they choose it, if no did you try to convince them? My kids are vegetarians, and have been since birth -- so they didn't choose it. I have imposed it on them in a stunning act of maternalism. OK, it's actually not that stunning. Anyway, for the curious, here are my reasons for this particular parenting choice: The family dinner table isn't a restaurant. The choices are to eat what I'm serving or not eat it. This was the deal (at least when I was growing up)…

Wii to be replaced in 2012; Preview expected in early June 2010

I've hardly ever played video games, and Julia, growing up, never did either. Then a couple of years ago we got a Wii and now we play it regularly but responsibly. Amanda joins us now and then. After the filing of our 1040s, we realized we could afford to buy a new TV to replace our old energy-hogging tube model, so we did. Now we will be able to see what we are doing when using the Wii. As an indicator of how much we are NOT addicted to game play, I'll note that other than testing that the connection works, We've not used it since installing the TV on Friday. The Wii is great, but it…

Next time you go fishing, be sure to bring a video camera

Newsweek has a story about the capture of the colossal squid, and it sounds like a) there will be video footage released next month, and b) the boat captain made a good bit of money off of it. Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. "It really didn't put up much of a fight," he says. "Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that's about it. It certainly wasn't grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea." As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about…

Cloud Computing

In general, I try to keep the content of this blog away from my work. I don't do that because it would get me in trouble, but rather because I spend enough time on work, and blogging is my hobby. But sometimes there's an overlap. One thing that's come up in a lot of conversations and a lot of emails it the idea of cloud computing. A lot of people are interested in it, but they're not really sure of what it is, or what it means. So what do we mean when we talk about "cloud computing"? What's the cloud? How's it different from good old-fashioned client/server computing? The idea of cloud…

How the Tea Party Monster Was Created

One of the things to remember about the Tea Party Uruk-hai who run the Republican Party make up the shock troops of the GOP is that they were manufactured--just like the orcs in the Lord of the Rings. Comrade Driftglass explains: Conservatives built this monster. It didn't just wander out of the woods one day, or land here from another planet. The Wingnut Base -- whatever teabagger, Colonial Williamsburg camouflage they're sporting this week, and however hard the media tries to pretend they aren't who we know they are -- was manufactured by the Conservative Movement to win elections. Made…

OSHA standards are game-changers, David Michaels tells American Industrial Hygiene Association members

by Elizabeth Grossman "With what's on the table in Washington now, you may think the technical phrase is 'job-killing OSHA standards' but standards save lives," said David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor of Occupational Safety and Health, in his address to the American Industrial Hygiene Association meeting in Portland, Oregon on May 18th. "OSHA doesn't kill jobs. OSHA stops jobs from killing workers." To occupational health and safety professionals, this is not news - and it's a message that Michaels has taken on the road over the past year - but in the current anti-regulatory…

Popularization Is Its Own Reward?

One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don't align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded-- with tenure, promotion, and salary increases-- for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little institutionalized reward within academia for science popularization. An extreme example of this is the failure of Carl Sagan's nomination to the National Academy of Sciences: According to sources within the academy, Sagan was…

Iain Murray, in favour of payola

Iain Murray, comes out with an article in the American Spectator in favour of pundit payola: An opinion piece -- whether an individual op-ed or a column -- exists to promote a point of view by argument. It does not seek to establish a fact, but to win people over to a particular viewpoint or opinion. Therefore, the strength of the argument is the key factor in determining the effectiveness of the piece. A sloppily constructed, poorly thought-out argument will convince no one -- while a tightly constructed, coherent, and well-written argument can sway minds. That is why opinion pieces are…