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What was, is, and will most likely be

I'll admit, I've never been a big fan of New Year's resolutions. It isn't that I don't like setting goals... but vowing to make a major lifestyle change with a time limit does seem to be asking for trouble. After all, there will always be a touch of chaos. With that in mind, I actually made a resolution last year, and more astonishingly, kept it. In fact, you're looking at it... this blog. Chaotic Utopia was around before 2006, but rarely seen. I had a collection of essays, stories, poems, doodles, and ideas that (to me) seemed rather important (though I wasn't completely sure why) stored on…

Taking Art Seriously

Earlier this week, the National Endowment for the Arts came out with a disturbing report: Americans -- particularly young Americans -- appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills. This report builds upon a 2004 NEA analysis that offered up a bleak assessment of the American reader. It turns out that reading, especially the reading of…

On My Fossil Wish List: Homo sulawesiensis

Could 2007 see some new hobbits? I certainly hope so. In October 2004, a team of scientists announced they had found bones of a hominid from the Indonesian island of Flores. They came to the astonishing conclusion that the bones belonged to a new species, which they called Homo floresiensis, which stood only three feet tall, lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, had a chimp-sized brain, and could use stone tools to hunt. That announcement launched an extraordinary debate, with scientists arguing in favor of tiny hominids (nicknamed Hobbits), or a dwarf with a birth defect, or an unusually…

Speed of sound in football stadium

Ok - I like Alabama football (sorry, but it's true). There is a clip on youtube of the end of the Alabama-Auburn game where the fans sing the traditional "Rammer Jammer". If you don't know what that is, don't worry. I am not sure I completely approve of the cheer, but it is a tradition. If you are curious, here it is: So, what is cool about this? Notice that the entire crowd is yelling the same thing, but they are out of sync. Can this be used to estimate the size of the stadium? I made an audio file from that youtube clip and looked at it with Audacity. Although I am completely…

Environmental Puzzle Solving: Doing the Math on the Commute

Pursuant to my previous post, today's project in the decision making process for Eric and I (we'll finally see the inside of the house tomorrow) is to find how long the commute to Eric's job and our synagogue is. These two things make up about half of our total driving - only half simply because we are very fortunate, and Eric has managed to work his academic schedule so he's only on campus three days per week. We realized last night that the house is further from SUNY Albany and our synagogue in Niskayuna than we'd realized - we'd figured it would be about the same since the house is only…

Washington Post on the Global Food Crisis

The Washington Post is running a series on the global food crisis, and if you haven't read it yet, it's worth a look.  In The New Economics of Hunger, Anthony Faiola explains how what started as an apparent blip in wheat prices has mushroomed into widespread hunger and unrest: The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Ãdouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence.…

The Catholic League downplays the evils of child abuse

Bill Donohue must be greatly distressed right now, since a commission has blown open the doors on a long history of child abuse by the Irish Catholic Church. He's scrambling to do damage control and making a pathetic spectacle of himself. He basically belittles the trauma that those kids experienced to salvage the reputation of his beloved Catholicism…it doesn't work. Reuters is reporting that "Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children," yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. Physical abuse includes "…

Study: U.S. still lags behind on health care affordability and access

The percentage of Americans who reported cost-related barriers to health care dropped from 37 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2016 — a change that directly corresponds to insurance expansions under the Affordable Care Act, a new study reports. On the flip side, Americans are still more likely than peers in other high-income nations to face financial obstacles to health care. The study is based on findings from a survey of patients and providers in 11 countries and one that the Commonwealth Fund has been conducting annually since 1998. Those 11 countries are: Australia, Canada, France,…

On tribalism

Some time ago I promised KK a post on tribalism, and he has never forgiven me for not writing it. I think the reason I never wrote it was because the word, or the charge, turns out to be so vague as to be meaningless. Tribalism is a charge you fling at people when you have no real arguments left and nothing of substance to say: "you're being tribal"; "no I'm not!"; "aha! see, you deny it, you must be tribal". And so on. What is it, anyway? I'd say it is when you defend views and ideas and data from "your" group even when you know it to be wrong, because you don't want your group to lose face…

Why Does Excel Suck So Much?

Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports). This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen…

What to Do About Science and the Public

In comments to last week's rant about the low esteem in which science is held, taffe writes: Ok then, what should scientists be doing, individually or as a community? Maybe the masses just plain find political info more interesting. I mean hell, you had to use dog fans as a hook for your popular book, right? One of the maddening things about blogging as a medium is the way its ephemerality leads to repetition. I feel like I've written this before, but it's unreasonable for me to be peeved about it, because there's no reason why anybody commenting last week would've seen the earlier post. So…

To predict what will make you happy, ask a stranger rather than guessing yourself

Want to know how much you'd enjoy an experience? You're better off asking someone who has been through it, even if they're a complete stranger, than to find out information for yourself. This advice comes from Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University, who espoused it in his superb book Stumbling on Happiness. Now, he has found new support for the idea by studying speed-daters and people receiving feedback from their peers. In the first study, he found that female students were better able to predict how much they would enjoy a speed-date if they listened to the experiences of strangers than if…

HIV, AIDS, MMR, NPR and WTF?

Thirty years ago yesterday, "the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMR) published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California." (see This Blog Post for details). Morbidity and Mortality Weekly is a really fun journal to read. It contains the latest reports of, well, death and serious illness as a means of disseminating information in a way that will allow quick response. So, if there are suddenly a bunch of cases of some disease scattered across the country, this kind of reporting may…

Crusaders against GMOs

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on Vandana Shiva, a crusader against GMO crops. I'd never heard of her before, but apparently she has charisma and cult-like followers who hang on her every word, and her word is a rather religious opposition to scientific agriculture. Weirdly, I can agree with some of it. At each stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the…

Creationists are history denialists

My upcoming visit to Houston to join Aron and others in protesting Texas creationism is smoking all kinds of interesting characters out of the woodwork. Meet Dr. David Shormann (the "Dr." must be his first name, he sure flings the title about), who has apparently been a person of some influence in shaping the Texas Board of Education policy. He's also a flaming young earth creationist who has drunk deeply of the Answers in Genesis kool-aid, and is very, very angry at the vicious, intolerant atheists who are coming to his city to argue against his nonsense. The freethoughts activists are…

"The Myth of Black Disingenuity": Exploring the Intersection of African American History and the History of Technology

I failed to produce this post in time for DNLee's Diversity in Science carnival - Black History Month: Broadening STEM Participation at Every Level. That's mostly because I had a bunch of personal stuff going on in the past couple weeks that just wouldn't leave me alone. I think I'll be back to more regular blogging now. You might have already read my brief post on Hercules, the chef enslaved by George Washington who eventually escaped to freedom. In it I noted "It was no small thing to be a chef under such circumstances, and the degree of technical skill required was surely astonishing…

Kathleen Seidel and her opponents

Over the weekend there was a very good article in the Concord Monitor about Kathleen Seidel and her legal battle with Clifford Shoemaker, whose intrusive "fishing expedition" subpoena recently drew condemnation even from prominent antivaccination activists such as David Kirby and Dan Olmsted and was ultimately quashed with the possibility of sanctions. What this article does a good job for those new to the debate is to put things in some perspective in a relatively brief treatment; I encourage you to read the whole thing, and I will focus mostly on a couple of interesting tidbits in the…

Using Light to Put a Mirror in the Dark: "Optomechanical Dark Mode"

In which I unpack a cryptic paper title and explain how quantum superposition lets you use light to keep things from interacting with light. ------------- I joined AAAS a couple of years ago to get a break on the registration fee for their meeting, and I've kept up the membership mostly because I like having individual access to Science articles, so I can read them in the coffee shops where I get actual work done. This also gives me access to articles in the "advance online publication" stage, which is hilarious because Union's institutional subscription doesn't include those articles-- if I'…

Universal remotes, evolution, sex, and sight

So Amanda had this TV. It had a remote. The remote sucked. It was broken. Then I moved in and with me came a universal remote. Lucky Amanda. I programmed the universal remote (a Radioshack 5 in 1) to handle the TV as well as a DVD player and a stereo. The remote handled everything. The old remotes hung around for a while occasionally being used, but then disappeared. Then we got a different DVD player and I had forgotten that the remote was a universal jobbie, so we just started using the remote for the DVD player Then we got an iPod cradle with speakers and a Roku. I purchased a…

Hallelujah! The mainstream press finally notices quackademic medicine!

I've been writing about a phenomenon that I like to refer to as "quackademic medicine," defined as the infiltration into academic medical centers and medical school of unscientific and pseudoscientific treatment modalities that are unproven or disproven. I didn't coin the term. To the best of my knowledge, Dr. Robert W. Donnell did nine years ago. However, I adopted it with a vengeance, so much so that a lot of people think I coined the term. In any case, I first began sounding the alarm about the infiltration of quackery like acupuncture, "energy medicine," naturopathy, homeopathy,…

No good deed goes unpunished in the Twitterverse

I've long been ambivalent about the merits of Twitter. Some may recall my "Why Twitter is Evil" post of a while back. That was written with one cheek mostly occupied by my tongue. It now seems clear that, whatever the original designs, the 140-character telegraph has become an invaluable network-building and maintenance tool, particularly for authors, activists trying to organize constituencies. This is all well and good. But the medium's dark side recently became all too clear following this past weekend's wonderful Science Online 2011 conference. The story begins Saturday afternoon at an…

Astrology Academy in Serbia

It's been a year since this first appeared (September 21, 2005). I wonder if the "academy" is still open or what are they studying there.... This I learned from Eric: How to become an astrologer For those few remaining stubborn hold-outs who still cannot read Serbo-Croatian, here's a quick translation: Institute for Astrological Research and Education "Johannes Kepler" recently opened in Belgrade. The goals of the Institute are to support the research in astrology, academic approach to astrology, and to aid astrologers and astrology in gaining social status. The Institute is not a part of…

Viruses and sandcastles at the beach

It's Saturday and it's summertime and Mrs. R. and I are still in the city. OK with me. I'm a city boy and find it easiest to maintain upright posture on asphalt, but my bride of 37 years likes the beach, so most summers we go off for a few weeks to the seashore (speaking littorally). It's down south where the water is warm but I still spend a lot of time inside in air conditioned splendor, listening to music and reading. Mrs. R. props herself up at the earth - water interface with her own pile of books, far from other people and the hazards of pathogenic viruses. It turns out, not really.…

Pandemic flu vaccine capacity: enough? too much? just right?

The "experts" have spoken to WHO and WHO has spoken to us: because of the march of science, there's been a large upswing in the estimates of how much vaccine the world could produce in a pandemic -- if such a vaccine existed and there was a way to deliver it. But if there was one and it could be delivered, then WHO thinks we could produce up to a 4.5 billion doses by 2010 as a result of new manufacturing technologies and techniques to make the produced antigen go farther. A lot of "ifs," to be sure, but without the ability to make the stuff the rest doesn't matter. At the moment we make a…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Just yesterday, the Obama administration announced it would take executive action to protect certain workers against discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Associated Press reports that the president plans to sign an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against workers based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The order is estimated to protect about 14 million workers who are not currently protected against such discrimination. The administration did not say exactly when the president would sign the executive order. The Associated Press article…

Adapting-In-Place Class Starting in July!

Well, since the Rio Summit failed to save the world (again), and we're slipping back into economic crisis, and _Making Home_ my book on Adapting-in-Place comes out in August, it seems like the right time to teach my AIP class again.  It helps to renew my sense of purpose as well - there's nothing like sitting down and sorting out all the work we're doing to get ready for the world we actually are emerging into again to feel a sense of excitement and purpose about it. The class will start on American Independence Day, July 4, and we'll declare our independence from corporations and the fear…

Adapting In Place Class Coming Up

I still have space in the Adapting in Place Class that starts next week - the last one for some time, I suspect, given other projects (I have to write the book about Adapting in Place, for example ;-)). aron and I will be running our Adapting in Place Class online for six weeks beginning April 5. The class covers every element of adapting your life both for things to come and things that are now, from going inside the walls of your home or apartment to community, family and security issues, from the ordinary (laundry) to the extraordinary (handling life transitions). This is our most…

The Right to Know Nothing

By Les Leopold  If you need a quick snooze, read a US Government Accountability Office report with its carefully parsed prose. But lost in the holiday rush was a December GAO report that could keep you awake as it bashes the Bush administrationâs effort to water down the community Right to Know regulations that provide us with potentially life-saving information about the use, storage and release of toxic substances.  These regulations require that companies make detailed reports which form the Toxics Release Inventory â an accessible public database on the quantity of toxic chemicals on…

Eastern Equine Encephalitis: The Mosquito that bit the Snake

Guest post by Hillary Craddock Last week a new study regarding Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) was published online (Bingham et.al.). EEE is a mosquito-borne virus that can cause serious, and sometimes deadly, disease in humans and equines. In warmer parts of North America, the virus is spread year-round, but in areas where mosquitoes get killed off in the winter it has been something of a mystery as to how the virus makes it from year to year. Humans and equines are both dead-end hosts, which means that a mosquito can not be infected from biting an infected person or horse. Researchers in…

Can we please just establish this one principle?

Prayer doesn't work. Enshrine it in the law — prayer is not a helpful action, but rather a neglectful one. Teach it in the schools — when the health class instructs students in how to make a tourniquet or do CPR, also explain that prayer is not an option. Faith in prayer kills people. The Wisconsin parents who allowed their daughter to die in a diabetic coma because they believed prayer was sufficient aid have been charged with second degree reckless manslaughter. That seems about right to me. Read this account of the progression of their daughter's disease, and ask yourself at what point you…

Now THIS is Open Science!!!

Dinosaur fossils have been dug out for a couple of centuries now. They have been cleaned up and mounted in museums and described in papers and monographs. The way this is all done has evolved over time - the early techniques were pretty crude compared to what palaeontologists do today. One of the important techniques is actually quite simple: making measurements of bones. And yes, many such bones have been measured and the measurements reported in the literature. And that literature is scattered all over the place in many different formats in many different journals. Nobody has put all the…

Expelled gets more bad press

The New York Times has taken notice of the promotional tactics being used for the creationist propaganda flick, Expelled. As you all know, they are trying to filter screenings, allowing only ideologically friendly people to see it, and keeping out the serious critics who might actually evaluate it on its merits, rather than as a media echo of what the viewers want to hear. There were nondisclosure agreements to sign that day, but Mr. Moore did not, and proceeded to write perhaps the harshest review "Expelled" has received thus far. The film will open April 18, but has been screened several…

Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial

As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett at Dot Physics. We've been trying to do this literally for months, but the weather wouldn't cooperate. Until this past weekend, when we finally managed to make measurements that allow us to do some cutting-edge science. For 200 BC, anyway... So, what…

Hanging up my blogging shoes

You might have guessed this was coming. My blogging frequency has dropped off dramatically this year, particularly this semester. I keep writing "yep, I haven't died yet - I'll tell you all about what I'm doing sometime, really" posts, and not ever following up. Other signs have included.... I hardly participated in Donors' Choose even though it is a really worthwhile organization. (By the way, today I donated $377 as a 10% contribution of our final donation number. Thanks so much to everyone who donated anything at all!!) I hardly even read blogs anymore, let alone write. And this wasn'…

Perhaps if more of us were "that guy"

DrDrA at BlueLabCoats has returned with an outstanding post, entitled, "I want you to hear me, I don't care what you see...," that she wrote out longhand during her recent travels: In my absence I picked up a whiff of a lot of chatter about what women scientists wear to work... or talk/write about wearing .... going on in the blogosphere. . . You see- the struggle I'm in daily in my own life and career is not about appearances, and it is not about symbolism or femininity- and it is not about who I am as a person, my likes and dislikes etc. It is a struggle to be heard and taken seriously…

Salmonella in Alamosa water supply - "I still love 'Salamosa'"

Alamosa is a town of 8,500 residents on the west side of the Rockies in southern Colorado, equidistant to Denver and Albuquerque. You may sometimes hear of Alamosa described by Al Roker or other morning weather reporters as the "nation's icebox" in setting the low temperature of the lower 48 US states, a title for which it fights with Fraser, Colorado (home of Winter Park ski resort). Alamosa is also a strikingly beautiful place in the middle of some unique geological features, including the nearby Great Sand Dunes National Monument, a massive group of dunes several hundred feet high…

The Friday Fermentable: Samichlaus, Liquid Love

Yesterday, 6 December was the feast day of Saint Nicholas and that can only mean one thing: the newest batch was Samichlaus bier was brewed in Austria. Samichlaus - Swiss-German for 'Santa Claus' - is recognized widely as one of the world's rarest, finest, and strongest bottom-fermented, or lager, beers. Indeed, it weighs in at a heroic 14% alcohol by volume (ABV). But the special attributes of the beer come from how it is brewed. The selection you are viewing here was brewed on 6 December 2006 and bottled in October (that's tea in my mug, not Sami, as this picture was taken this morning…

Climate Scientists as Pastors and Skeptics as Peer-Reviewers?

Last week I called attention to the emerging "science audit" movement, a network of engaged citizens who combine their own professional expertise with online communication strategies to demand a greater level of transparency in scientific research and data. Most prominent on climate change, this movement is likely to grow to include any issue where scientific evidence is claimed as the central criteria driving policy decision-making. Demands for a second-level of inclusive and participatory review of research in areas ranging from nanotechnology to biomedical research to vaccine safety…

THE DISCOVERY: What It Means for Framing & News Coverage

Conservatives are promoting Bush as the biomedical Atticus Finch. Shown here posing with a "snowflake" baby, adopted and born from left over in vitro clinic embryos. Some collected thoughts on what the stem cell discovery means for the framing of the debate, trends in news coverage and public opinion: ---->As I wrote yesterday, perhaps the biggest impact on the framing of the stem cell debate is to inject a booster shot of resonance to conservative claims that pursuing embryonic stem cell research is not necessary and that we can gain everything we need from morally unproblematic adult…

PSP Pre-Conference: The Culture of Free: Publishing in an Era of Changing Expectations (part 2)

These are a continuation of my notes. This portion has been transcribed from my scribble - I was sitting on stage for the second half of the day so live blogging didn't really seem appropriate :( If there is something wrong, not malicious, just bad handwriting.   Diane Harley, Senior Researcher and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project She's an anthropologist who has long studied the issues around new technology for scholarship and teaching. She's not an advocate for any particular type of approach for integrating new technology. She looks at value systems and faculty…

LY2140023: Progress in Schizophrenia Treatment?

In the 1950's, a new class of antipsychotic drugs was discovered: the antipsychotics.   href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpromazine" rel="tag">Chlorpromazine (Thorazine®) was the first. By the 1970's, several related compounds had been discovered.  In 1976, it was learned that there is a direct linear relationship between the strength with with the compounds bind at the dopamine D2 receptor, and the clinical potency of the drug. face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">[Figure from Seeman, Molecular Psychiatry (1998)3, 123-124] The discovery of this direct relationship was…

Gender Differences In Planning?

We all know that there are gender differences in neuroanatomy, as well as in some cognitive tasks (females tend to do better on memory and verbal tasks, men on spatial tasks) and both cognitive and emotional development, though it's not clear how the cognitive/behavioral/developmental differences relate to the differences in neuroanatomy. Research on gender differences is often plagued by confounding variables such as sociological factors that are damn near impossible to control for. Jumping into the gender-differences game takes a lot of guts, or extreme naivete, then, because not only is…

Goodbye ScienceBlogs

Craig is away at a workshop but emailed me this message to relay. Remember to visit and bookmark our new site! ------------------------------------------------------- When I was much, much younger, I joined Jacques Cousteau's Calypso Club (named affectionately after his beloved ship). Was anyone else club members? Is there still a Calypso Club? The rights and privileges of this elite club were endless. Entry was limited to any child with a few bucks to their name and a few cereal box tops. My membership packet came in with all kinds of information, patches, stickers, and certificates.…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging".

Session description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content,…

Friday Sprog Blogging: biodiversity, I choose you!

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that the elder Free-Ride offspring has a fondness (occasionally verging on obsession) for Pokemon cards. This means I had no choice but to involve my offspring in Dave Ng's Phylomon project: [W]hat can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same with the very wildlife around them. As a bonus, if they do…

Useless on-line survey of climate scientists

In a report on a climate change seminar, Bernd Ströher and Benny Peiser write: Particularly revealing were the almost sensational results of a survey conducted by Prof. Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers. The results show impressively that the much-repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human…

Slender yield from fat gene studies

Willer et al. (2008). Six new loci associated with body mass index highlight a neuronal influence on body weight regulation Nature Genetics DOI: 10.1038/ng.287 Thorleifsson et al. (2008). Genome-wide association yields new sequence variants at seven loci that associate with measures of obesity Nature Genetics DOI: 10.1038/ng.274 There are two massive studies now online in Nature Genetics looking at the genetic architecture of body mass index (BMI). Body mass index is a widely-used measure of body fat levels, calculated by dividing a subject's weight (in kg) by the sqare of their height (in…

A good protest should draw a crowd

Some of you may recall that I got rather cranky with some sensitive Catholics who wanted to cancel a play — "The Pope and the Witch", currently playing on the Twin Cities campus. Unfortunately, although we'd hope to go, we had this succession of snowstorms that made traveling impractical this past week (I may still go at the end of this coming week, since the last day of the play coincides with the last day of classes before spring break and my birthday). Anyway, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press picked up on it. I put the article below the fold to preserve the fact that they quoted me, and to…

Dancing with the snake

The Evil One recently talked to Paul Bloom, one of my favorite cognitive psychologists. Here is something I found of interest: ...and I brought up the issue that many researchers -- David Sloan Wilson being one that springs to mind -- have argued that religion is evolutionary but that it is also evolutionarily beneficial. David Sloan Wilson has proposed the idea that religion arose from group selection because religion promotes in-group cohesiveness. This would differ from Dr. Bloom's ideas because Bloom is essentially arguing that religion is neutral to selection and secondary to larger…

Journalism Needs a Reformation, Not a Revolution

Part of me sympathizes with ScienceBlogling Bora when he writes about the publishing bidness: I am excited about the way the Web is transforming society and all they care is how to save their jobs! I get it - they should care. The new media ecosystem can support a much smaller number of professional journalists than the old one. So many (though not all) will lose their jobs. I don't have an interest in that aspect of the media business at all. If they have any other expertise besides scribbling, they will find other jobs once their media houses lock the doors. If not, tough. But I am really…