It's about time

I think about 8 years of an administration that lets the science go wherever it leads, be that in agreement with the politics or not, would be amazing. Maybe after that, subsequent administrations may find it more difficult to play fast and loose with the data. Pie in the sky? Maybe, but anything is better than the current situation.

The past eight years has just highlighted the fact that scientific freedom and objectivity is something that we scientists have taken or granted - something that I don't think we apppreciated nearly as much as we should have, until it was taken away.

If I can say one thing for the Bush administration, it's that they often did not even pretend to be evenhanded - and when things would blow up in their face, there was no way to deny what had been done. (Not that it stopped them.)

Protecting Science from the Government - NYTimes

Path not taken

Had I been born 20 years later, this is what I would have majored in:

Digital Forensics - NYTimes

New Highway typeface

Clearview Slideshow

A different view

Maybe this is how we should think about Iraq:

How a Revolution Saved an Empire

Damned mosquitos.

Another case of our not being able to accurately judge risk?

"To Spray or Not to Spray"
John Tierney's Blog - NYTimes

I'm going out to fog the backyard now, thank you...

What if we had a party, and no one came?

Large numbers of scientists (a small fraction of the world's population) will be waiting impatiently for the results when the new collider at Cern starts up. What they will see will be guaranteed to be incredible. Whatever comes out is going to set the direction for basic atomic research for the foreseeable future. I am not one who is confident of finding answers to 'life, the universe and everything,' though. My best guess is that the answers they find will spawn more questions at an even more fundamental level.

But what happens if there turns out to be nothing?

That would be, to me, by far the most interesting outcome. That would mean we've been thinking about these things in a completely wrong way for a very long time.

Of course, try and explain the excitement of a null result to a politician who has sunk millions into this....

New York Times:
A Giant Takes on Physics’ Biggest Questions

Well, of course...

If you don't have a good plan for how to use them, they won't work!

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
New York Times

"A handful of schools are abandoning one-to-one computing programs as educationally empty — and worse."

Technology is not a panacea. It is a tool. If you don't know how to use it well, it's pretty damned expensive and useless...