Friday, June 01, 2007

The assault on science

Yesterday NPR carried a report, followed up by this today, and then there was this in the NYT this morning, about the head of NASA and his curious views about climate change. This isn't about the press getting science wrong, but the head of a massive and important scientific agency getting stuff wrong.

A friend just passed on a link to a brilliant blog called Denialism. A current thread there gives advice for how to become a crank. Looks like an excellent blueprint. But one problem: Cranks are by definition at the margins. Today, we have cranks running major institutions, instead of being committed to them, and creating legit-looking institutions with amounts of money that would help us advance science a bunch.

What do we call cranks when we can't keep them down on the farm any more?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Personally I think Nasa is a huge waste of money. The soviet and european agencys seem ta get a lot more accomplished with a lot less. Be interesting to see if those agencys are tackling the problem. Bugs me though because theres so much talent at NASA..sabotaged.*sigh* yes I'm bitter, can ya guess what I wanted to be when I grew up? hehehe