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Online Reading Less Rewarding?

In an increasingly digital age, one researcher looked at the differential effect of reading print versus online, which seems like a logical choice. However, she found that online reading is less rewarding - and perhaps effective - than reading printed material. The reasons for this include less physical manipulation of the computer and the flashy multimedia on the pages. There needs to be more consideration, she thus argues, as we integrate more and more technology into the classrooms and our daily life. So it might be better for you to go read the newspaper than to scan the internet and read…

This Guy Wrote a Book???

Via Jason Kuznicki, via Alas, A Blog, and via Teresa Nielsen Hayden, comes this story of an aspiring writer who is attempting to sell a book manuscript on E-bay, but only to famous authors. He believes that it's good enough that if it just had a famous author's name on it, it would be a bestseller. One hopes that his manuscript is written more competently than his horrible sales pitch: I am a first time writer and have two more chapters to go, to complete my story. It's fiction, a coming of age story that would be most enjoyed by adults. It's a fascinating read that I had a couple of english…

Blogger Challenge 2008: funds from Seed and a chance to vote on which propsal should get the money.

By now you've probably seen the news that Seed has kicked in $15,000 to fund projects in our Blogger Challenge slates. We are, as always, thrilled at our Overlords' generosity. This year, though, rather than applying the money at the end of the drive, we have a situation where each blog with an active challenge has been given control of a $715 giving credit at DonorsChoose. In other words, we get to decide how to use this windfall to help fund classroom projects ... and to get more readers involved in funding them. So I'm going to see if I can get some audience participation from you on…

The Buzz: Blogospherics -- Micro-blogging Mania

While the rumor that Google is in "late stage negotiations" to acquire Twitter, the social networking website based on text message-style entries of 140 characters, hasn't been confirmed, the feasibility of such a notion says volumes about Twitter's massive rise in popularity over the past years. Now the third-largest social networking website (behind facebook and myspace), Twitter has revolutionized the way information is generated and communicated. Naturally, ScienceBloggers are no stranger to this micro-blogging phenomenon. Bora from A Blog Around the Clock reflects on how social…

Unintended consequences

I rather like the growing bans on smoking in bars and restaurants — it makes them much more pleasant places for those of us who'd rather not inhale poisons from acrid, burning weeds involuntarily. But maybe an exception should be made from places where the burning and inhaling of plant matter is the whole intent of visiting, as is being discovered in the Netherlands. Millions of people flock to Amsterdam's "coffee shops" every year to legally buy cannabis and hashish over the counter and to smoke it without fear of arrest, as long as they are on the premises. But the new law bans tobacco…

Mortgage Backed Quantum Computers

From the annals of strangely mixed news stories. Canada: $25 billion government bailout and....$50 million for the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing: BRANTFORD, Ont. -- The $25-billion government deal to buy mortgages from Canada's banks isn't a lifeline for lenders stuck with bum loans, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday... He said the government will likely make money on the deal, because its borrowing costs are lower than those available to banks. Harper also produced an election goodie, promising a $50-million grant to a high-tech research lab at the…

Reminder: Seattle Millionth Comment Party Today

TODAY! TODAY TODAY! Come party with me, Sandra, Dave, and GrrlScientist in the upper mezzanine at Ozzie's, 105 W. Mercer St. just behind the Space Needle*. Some of the Seattle Skeptics are showing up, and later on, a few folks from the Pacific Science Center. Meet lots of people who care about science and science education, and drink beer (or orange juice, you know, if you're into that sort of thing) on Seed's dime! We'll buy the first couple of rounds, at least, and keep going until we run out of budget. We'll start at 4 and carry on until... um, I'm not sure how long we'll carry on, but I…

How Many Books Is That?: Modeling Amazon Sales Rank

A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them. So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: This…

The Buzz: Feynman Lectures Online

In 1964, Richard Feynman delivered a series of seven lectures to students at Cornell University on "The Character of Physical Law." Decades later, the video footage of the lectures was purchased by Bill Gates—who has said that Feynman could have inspired him to go into physics rather than software—and on Wednesday, Microsoft Research announced that the lectures will be made available on a specially-created website, along with commentary from other physicists, full transcripts of the lectures, and additional related content. The project, called Tuva after an area in Russia where Feynman hoped…

Millenium

I already told you that my daughter is crazy about cats as well as getting really good at photography. Occasionaly I break down and post pictures of cats (but never on Friday!) just because she took them. So, you have had the opportunity to meet Marbles and also Biscuit and even both of them together. And she managed to catch me on camera as well. Nobody else wants their pictures online, but we forgot the dog! So, here is the first ever online picture of Millie, our toy poodle. Her real name - Millennium - comes from the date of her birth: just a couple of weeks before Y2K when the…

Geeks for Government!

Jessica reminds us that several scientists and geeks (i.e., Web designers and programmers) are running for various political offices this year. Some of them even got together on an ActBlue Geek Page. Of them all, I particularly like the savvy campaign ways of Sean Tavis who is running for Kansas State House, trying to displace a Creationist, anti-woman Neanderthal from that seat. Both Kevin Z and Ed Cone noted his online savvy and ability to raise funds online by using the Web well. Listen to this NPR story about this and read his XKCD-style stick-figure cartoons. And if you want to donate…

Newsletter 8 from CenSeam

The Census of Marine Life on Seamounts (CenSeam) project released Newsletter No 8 earlier this month. Visit their website to download this and other editions. This particular issue is one of their most extensive newsletters ever, featuring interesting stories and articles about: -A photographic image collection and analysis workshop in Great Britain -MBARI's open-source Video and Annotation Reference System (VARS) -The deepwater "fish spas" of the Kermadec-Tonga Arc -Longline sampling for deep-sea fishes on seamounts near the Azores -A new online data portal from Global Biodiversity…

A scientist talks about requirements for social software for scientists

I've weighed in a few times on how to build online communities or support scientists online, but it's really worth paying attention to when you get an actual scientist who is also very involved in and interested in social software tell you what he thinks. Cameron Neylon did just that in a recent blog post (comments on ff). I'll quote liberally from his blog and feedback some ideas. (he uses SS4S to stand for social software for science) All of the numbered paragraphs are direct quotes from his post. 1.  SS4S will promote engagement with online scientific objects and through this encourage and…

Government Nanny Alert

Via Radley Balko comes these two reports. The first is from Arkansas, where a bill has just passed both houses of the legislature that would ban smoking in any car if there's a child in the car. And the Arkansas governor loves the idea: Huckabee said Friday afternoon that the bill sounded like a great idea. "It's obviously protecting the child against secondhand smoke," the governor said at a news conference Friday. "I think it's a great bill. I'm glad that's cleared both houses. Delighted." Anyone wanna start a pool on how long before it becomes a crime to take a child to McDonald's? Isn't…

Markus Jokela speaks; women getting more beautiful

The author of the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States, speaks: Having your study publicized by the media is nice. Having your study misrepresented and misinterpreted in the process is not. The media coverage of my paper on physical attractiveness and having children had a bad start and even worse follow-up. The origin of the problem: Times Online news article sexing up the finding a bit too much (I wasn't interviewed for this article at all and heard about it only after it had been published). Then things got…

How to Read a Blog post (and books and stuff....)

Interesting post (based on one of my favourite books which may warrant a re-reading after many years - Adler's "How to Read a Book" but adapted to online reading) How to Read by Brian Clark: We know that people don't read well online. They ruthlessly scan for interesting chunks of information rather than digesting the whole, and they want to be entertained in the process. This is the reality that online publishers deal with, so we disguise our nuggets of wisdom with friendly formatting and clever analogies. But that doesn't mean you should read that way. If you've been publishing online for…

ScienceOnline2010: Be there or be rhomboidal

A couple of four years ago, a few dudes I just met around town had this idea to bring together a few bloggers who write about science. One was Anton Zuiker and the other was Bora Zivkovic, also known as Coturnix or He-Whose-Mind-Teh-Intertubes-Pass-Before-Going-Out-To-The-World. Anton also has a title, bestowed upon him by News & Observer columnist Dan Barkin back in 2007: He's a quiet visionary. He's a low-key doer. He's a let's-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It's the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a significant role in determining how far Web 2.0 goes…

Korean scientists clone cats that glow in the dark!

This is a-mewsing. (Photo Credit: Gyeongsang National University) When Genetic Savings and Clone shut their doors it looked like wishful cat owners were going to be out of luck and short of kittens. Never fear, the South Korean scientists at Gyeongsang National University have come to the rescue. I couldn't find all the details in the news articles but it appears that they inserted a gene for red fluorescent protein into a somatic cell from a cat, transplanted the cell into an egg cell, put the egg into a female cat's womb and a few weeks later, voila!, lovely white Angora cats that…

Darwin Quotes

I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind ... The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. -- I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold. - Charles R. Darwin, Support The Beagle…

Tough Love for Fat Hamsters

With water on tap and plentiful food pellets, hamsters live seemingly carefree lives... But there is a darker side to the hamster experience: hamster obesity. The first step is admitting to yourself that your hamster is a fat-ass and should be ashamed of her appearance. The second step is purchasing this awesome Japanese hamster-wheel pedometer. Now when you get home from work and little ScrapScrap claims to have gone to the gym, you can check the pedometer and make sure she's telling the truth. If you read Japanese, maybe you can figure out how to buy one here... If she's lying, a good…

Creepy Crawly Brain Banners

We got an exciting new banner today from Len the creator of Monster-by-Mail! Head over to his website for some absolutely phenomenal pieces of monster art! (Ohh... and make sure you buy stuff or order your own monster. Len's banner is now going to randomly rotate with our wonderful old banner done by my cousin Erin (click refresh a couple time to see them both up top). Here they are :) The Marauding Omni Brain was created by Erin Higgins who can be reached @ higgsmax2000 -at- hotmail -dot- com And this wonderful banner (as well as the image above) was created by Len over at Monster by Mail…

Another children's science book

We need more of these, and here's another: Great Adaptations: A Fantastical Collection of Science Poems. It contains short rhyming summaries of scientists' work on adaptations, all nicely illustrated. Here's one from Sarah Hrdy's work on empathy and cooperation. Doesn't that make you want to run out and buy it right now? How much would you pay? $5? $10? $25? Well, you can't. Instead, you have to go to this website and download it for free. Writing the book was a labor of love, so I hope you love it too! Lastly, because our objective is to get as many people reading and learning about…

What are we *really* like? (Thoughts on meeting people you know from online in real life.)

In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers' assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers' real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae. Maybe philosophy's to blame, but I think there's a deep and interesting question here. Mark writes: It's quite an odd experience in its way; between our blogs, and our back-channel forums, we've become a tight-knit community, and the people there were my friends, even though I'd never seen them before. And yet, as is clear from Mark's blogger-specific observations, there are ways in which a…

In memoriam: lilady

As I write this, I am sadder than I have been for a long time. I recently learned that a frequent commenter here, a woman whose efforts on behalf of children's health I admired greatly, has passed away. I'm referring to the commenter who went by the 'nym lilady and sometimes signed her comments with her first name, Connie. Although I knew her real name and approximately where she lived, I don't want to risk having antivaccine trolls try to contact her family in their time of sadness; so this tribute will refer to her by the online pseudonym by which she became known, lilady. The first…

De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

I've always read cookbooks the way one reads novels, not only for recipes but for plots, stories and bits of detail, and one of the details I always look for are acknowledgements of particular tastes in my cookbook authors. The reason I look for this is that cookbooks are usually a uniquely authoritative genre - one that purports to tell you THIS IS GOOD. And yet, of course, one's tastes are particular - most cookbooks that don't originate in restaurants are fundamentally about a particular person's sense of what tastes good and is appealing. Some acknowledge this, most don't, but it is…

Can Social Security Numbers Be Hacked?

Apparently so. And that should give everyone pause, since SSN has become the de facto national identification system. From PNAS: We demonstrate that it is possible to predict, entirely from public data, narrow ranges of values wherein individual SSNs are likely to fall. Unless mitigating strategies are implemented, the predictability of SSNs exposes them to risks of identify theft on mass scales. Any third party with internet access and some statistical knowledge can exploit such predictability in 2 steps: first, by analyzing publicly available records in the SSA Death Master File (DMF) to…

Swapping bird flu war stories. Time to share.

In the old days doctors traded clinical pearls and experience face to face at medical meetings. With the internet and online publication we sometimes forget how important those personal information exchanges can be and often still are. Canadian Press's Helen Branswell (still the world's best flu reporter) now tells us that about 100 doctors with the most experience actually treating H5N1 infections will be meeting this week in southern Turkey to swap experiences: Doctors who have treated H5N1 avian flu patients are meeting in a Turkish seaside town to try to find answers to the myriad…

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order. If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it. And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to…

Upgrading Ubuntu Linux is Risky

Hear me, Ubuntu-using brothers and sisters! Never use the on-line upgrade option to switch to a newer version of the operating system! In little more than two years, it has trashed my setup twice, once killing the machine outright, and the last time (yesterday) making it impossible to boot from the linux partition. When the time comes to upgrade, copy all your files to somewhere else, re-format the linux partition and install the new Ubuntu version from scratch. Then copy all your stuff back onto the partition. There is no safe way to upgrade an existing installation. A corollary of this is…

Google Definitions

I was musing about how haphazardly I learned about certain indispensable software and information sources. Then it struck me -- maybe there are people who don't know about Google Definitions? OMG! I've got to tell them! I use Google Definitions daily. It's an on-line meta-dictionary, collecting definitions from all over the web. To use it, just type "DEFINE:" into Google's search box and then whatever it is you need defined. And it knows everything, not just the sort of straight-laced stuff you find in printed dictionaries. define: myrmecology Myrmecology is the branch of entomology dealing…

No More Pocket Calendar

Two weeks ago I left my pocket calendar on my desk at the Academy of Letters where I only work one day a week. This was inconvenient as I rely entirely on the calendar to remember what I'm supposed to do apart from my weekly routine. When I finally got my hands on it again last Thursday, it calmly informed me that I was due to give a talk that same evening. The mishap made me decide to switch to an on-line calendar instead. I spend hours every day using on-line computers, and my smartphone allows me to call the site up when I'm moving about. So, though the new year is approaching, I'm…

Jonathan Drori: Why we're storing billions of seeds

Drori encourages us to save biodiversity -- one seed at a time. Reminding us that plants support human life, he shares the vision of the Millennium Seed Bank, which has stored over 3 billion seeds to date from dwindling yet essential plant species. Jonathan Drori has dedicated his career to media and learning. As the Head of Commissioning for BBC Online, he led the effort to create bbc.co.uk, the online face of the BBC (an effort he recalls fondly). He came to the web from the TV side of the BBC, where as an editor and producer he headed up dozens of television series on science, education…

Literature request fulfilled

Thanks to those who sent me a copy of the article I requested. Sadly, the library at my university has some rather large holes in its online collection. Even some fairly common journals are not represented. I'll have to read it this weekend. You'll all get personal e-mails from me later today, after I finish rounding on our service. As for finding the paper online at the author's website, personally, I find that to be a very uncommon situation, although I have had some luck in the past e-mailing corresponding authors. This is much the same as in the old days, when we old geezers would…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Extra Gene Copies Were Enough To Make Early Humans' Mouths Water: To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks. That's one interpretation of a discovery, published online September 9 in Nature Genetics, which indicates that humans carry extra copies of the salivary amylase gene. Humans have many more copies of this gene than any of their ape relatives, the study found, and they use the copies to flood their mouths with amylase, an enzyme that digests starch. The finding bolsters the idea that starch was a crucial addition to the diet of early humans, and that natural…

From the Archives: Getting a job 2.0

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from October 10, 2008. It provoked a bit of angst out in the library student blogosphere, which is kinda what I was hoping. ===== It's interesting times in the world out there. And not surprisingly, the world of the internet is thinking about the implications. One of the big implications is that it's going to be harder to get a job, and that's going to be true librarians as much as anyone else. As it happens, I've been collecting some…

Nobody Resembles Their Internet Caricature

I've seen a bunch of re-shares of this Vox profile of a "Men's Rights Activist" on various social media channels, with reactions varying from "This is fascinating" to "Boooo-ring." I thought it was sort of interesting, but not really in the way it was intended to be. The thing I found most striking the way the author, Emmett Rensin, introduces "Max": In the popular imagination, Men's Rights Activists are "neckbeards": morbidly obese basement-dwellers with a suspect affection for My Little Pony. But Max is remarkably unassuming in appearance, handsome enough and normally tall; equally…

Mortgage Basics (part 1)

One thing that I've been getting a lot of requests about is the ongoing mortgage mess in the US. I wrote a bit about it a while ago, explaining what was going on. But since then, I've gotten a lot of people asking me to explain various things about how mortgages work, and what kinds of trouble people have gotten into. Mortgage Basics The basic idea of a mortgage is very simple. You want to buy a house, but you don't have enough money to buy it up front. So you borrow money to pay for it. A mortgage is a loan that provides you with money to purchase a house, using the house itself as the…

Commenting on scientific papers

There have been quite a few posts over the last few days about commenting, in particular about posting comments, notes and ratings on scientific papers. But this also related to commenting on blogs and social networks, commenting on newspaper online articles, the question of moderation vs. non-moderation, and the question of anonymity vs. pseudonymity vs. RL identity. You may want to re-visit this old thread first, for introduction on commenting on blogs. How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online by Robert Niles goes back into history to explain why the comments…

Plain-language research for patients: patientinform.org

While I was guest-posting over at Collective Imagination last month, I suggested that while better public access to peer reviewed research articles is a priority for the scientific community, knocking down firewalls may not be sufficient to help many patients, who lack the scientific background to plow through a Nature article. To get there, we may need efforts to provide plain language, accessible, searchable summaries of the research that clearly signpost the articles' relevance to patient needs. In addition to many interesting comments on the post, I got an email from the people behind…

Farhad Manjoo defends Gmail

So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It: So if Gmail is as good as the power grid, the phone network, and home broadband, why does its failure spark such surprise and outrage--and always make national headlines...An online service's outage, though, is sudden, inexplicable, and communal. Gmail goes down for everyone at the same time, none of us knows why, and because we're all online and gabbing, the news spreads fast. Many people also spend a lot more time on Gmail and other Web services than we do on the phone or watching TV; even if you don't really have any pressing reason to be on e-mail or IM,…

Students Debate "Internet & Community," Part A

This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on "Communication and Society," we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter the nature of community, civic engagement, and social relationships. (Go here for reading list.) For many college students, having grown up "online," it's easy to take for granted the "virtual" society we live in, seldom pausing to consider how it might be different from more traditional forms of community life. Therefore, one of the goals of the course was to encourage students to think systematically…

Never Say Goodbye: Ocelot

tags: Ocelot, Leopardus pardalis, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day Ocelot, Leopardus pardalis. 195 animals remaining (Estimated U.S. population is fewer than 100 wild, 95 captive). Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. The photographer writes; Wild ocelots are gone from all U.S. states except Texas, driven out by human development. The elusive cats still roam the wilds of Central and South America, but there's little reliable data on their true numbers. Joel Sartore has shared some of his work on this blog before, so I am thrilled to tell you that…

Physics Drawing Games

I have two physics-based games to plug: Crayon Physics and Fantastic Contraption. Crayon Physics is, well, just watch the demo: Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo. Cool, huh? The promo trailer reminds me of Line Rider (an online/iPhone doodling game) crossed with Fantastic Contraption (an online physics puzzle game, soon to be on the iPhone as well). I once spent an afternoon trying to figure out Fantastic Contraption, but it confused the heck out of me. Still, it's free, addictive, and makes people stop and say "what are you doing?" Line Rider is more my speed, and since I can…

Online Visual Cognition Experiments

The Visual Cognition laboratory at Harvard is looking for your help! These aren't the usual ho-hum surveys - these are some pretty cool visual cognition experiments (I'm biased of course since that's what I study). Head on over and participate in a short study! From Josh: Web-based experiments are becoming very common. Putting surveys online is not that new and is already reasonably common, but it was generally thought that you couldn't put cognitive psychology and perception experiments online because they require careful controls in timing, display, etc. Well, increased bandwidth has helped…

There's organic, and then there's....organic

Organic foods from your supermarket may comply with the requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Organic Program, but are you really buying what you think you're buying? Many people "go organic" because they want to buy family-farmed, locally-operated produce. But as Steven Shapin points out in the New Yorker, most organic food sold in grocery stores is anything but. Earthbound Farm, a major organic produce supplier for Whole Foods, has projected revenues for 2006 of more than $450 million, and farms more than 26,000 acres. Doesn't sound so quaint anymore, does it. What'…

It's because we can't tax it, stupid

Remember the good old days when being a conservative meant arguing that government should stay out of peoples lives? Those days are long gone. On Tuesday, the House plans to vote on a bill that would ban credit cards for paying online bets and could padlock gambling Web sites. The legislation would clarify existing law to spell out that it is illegal to gamble online. To enforce that ban, the bill would prohibit credit cards and other payment forms, such as electronic transfers, from being used to settle online wagers. It also would give law enforcement officials the authority to work with…

The Worst Thing About Privatization Is...

...that it kills a great punchline. You see, companies are actually trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. That's what <Business Week says, anyway. Ian Welsh, at the Agonist, comments: I don't understand why this is even considered. You don't put basic infrastructure like this in private hands, because it allows monopoly pricing. They will squeeze the most money out of it they can, and that will be the majority of the surplus value produced by the roads. Since they will set the cost to maximize profits, it will be above what a proportion of the population and a proportion of businesses can…

Sunday Sermon: Your Moment of Duh! (Of Course, Government Is the Spender of Last Resort)

It is still astonishing the extent to which radical deficit reductionism still rules our political discourse, even as there are six people looking for work for every job opening. Robert Reich describes how you fix this: So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don't have customers aren't going do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations…

Ridiculous School Funding Drives

A perennial annoyance for me as a parent is the many odd ways in which schools force parents to organise the funding for trips and stays at camp collectively. The general idea is sound: it would not be fair to make the parents pay up front, because then the poorer families might not be able to send their kids. But our specific cases are ridiculous, because my kids' schools cater to some of the most affluent communities in the history of the world. I'm by far the poorest of the parents involved, and I can easily afford to pay for my kids' trips and camp stays. What's particularly silly is that…

Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science

Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004. (Full comments below the fold.) I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…