If Despina really _is_ Rimmer, he must be awfully uncomfotable, working as he does in an industry he's pretty sure is effectively doomed.

Posted October 9, 2007 11:18 AM by Jules

Note also that this is not the only blog where "Amanda" has supported "Chris". (Per Madeline Kelly in the previous discussion.)

I wonder if it's true that he's now working for The Australian, and if so, if his "popular support" contributed to his getting that position.

Posted October 9, 2007 11:19 AM by Joel Polowin

Every time you bring up Rimmer, I find myself thinking of Red Dwarf's holographic creep. I need a brain scrub.

Posted October 9, 2007 11:30 AM by Serge

Not to be a correcting-face, but it's mcz, not mcw.

Otherwise brilliant.

Posted October 9, 2007 11:35 AM by ethan

I wish the best of luck to those employees and coworkers of Rimmer who now have to deal with having their own work devalued by this idiot. I also hope people in the bookselling and publishing industries will look kindly upon them when they are looking for other jobs.

Posted October 9, 2007 11:53 AM by Jon Meltzer

#3 Serge: Yes, everybody does that when they hear the last name "Rimmer." It fits beautifully, doesn't it?

Posted October 9, 2007 11:53 AM by mjfgates

#It's Arnold Arnold Arnold Rimmer

I now have that tune stuck in my head. I blame Serge.

Posted October 9, 2007 11:56 AM by Jakob

I thought it was Arnold Judas Rimmer.

Posted October 9, 2007 12:06 PM by linnen

Oh, so I'm not the only one with that association.

Posted October 9, 2007 12:20 PM by Clifton Royston

So we have this weasely business type who wants protection money from is suppliers and employs sock puppets in an internet debate. Rather than read what he has to say, I'm pretty much going to spend my day pretending to be an actor trying to come up for motivations for peering inside his mind.

Now after Adam Smith's invisible hand gets through spanking him, I know what my motivation is going to be. Good old-fashioned schadenfreude.

Posted October 9, 2007 12:41 PM by Avery

The way he's completely unfazed by having his sockpuppetry exposed is quite amusing. It also makes me wonder what on earth he thinks he's accomplishing with this less-than-stealth-mode approach. He certainly can't believe that we're likely to be convinced by anything said by an obvious puppet, even ignoring the fact that his arguments are far from convincing.

Posted October 9, 2007 12:47 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#11 Bruce Cohen
"The way he's completely unfazed by having his sockpuppetry exposed is quite amusing."
Yes. This is what makes the entire thing strangely compelling to watch, in a 'please don't stop now' sort of way. It turns us lurkers into lurker-voyeurs.

Posted October 9, 2007 1:05 PM by Chris J.

Chris J. #12: How delightfully smutty!

Posted October 9, 2007 1:06 PM by ethan

Seeing as how the other thread has turned into a roaring cloaca of technical posturing, I would merely like to say the following:

I was an early adopter of electronic text processing (DPS on the 1100/42 in 1977 or so) because my handwriting is write-only and my typing has a high standard deviation. And as a result I have (or had) a stack of unreadable media in the basement with entries for every generation of computers I've owned. And let's not even start with video media-- at least I "bought not betamacks."

The obvious driving force behind book sales is that people want to own books. Yes, "duh", but all the Pop-Sci talk of new technologies is more about the pleasuring of techno-dreamers (or lower forms) than it is about giving people what they want.

(Parenthetical remark: Am I the only one who is depressed by Sci. Am.'s slide into being the ivy-league-liberal, direly humorless version of Pop Sci.? As far as I am concerned, it was better when it came in black & white & pink. At least PS has a sense of humor about itself.)

One of the things I've come to despise about the internet is its impermanence. If I had the time, I think I would create "FireMagpie", a browser that would just routinely copy the websites I visited just so I wouldn't have to worry about whether the material would still be there the next time I wanted it. Sure it would be "stealing", but then all active media produce the urge to suck more money for pay-per-view.

People want to own books because they want to have them, and because they don't want to have something standing between them and reading their books. Tom Swift and His Electric Library sounds cool, until it breaks, or until the next series comes out on an incompatible medium, or the books can only be gotten throught the ether for a fee for each reading. You have to be a total nincompoop not to understand why people doggedly resist this.

And besides, electronic books sound cool, until you're reading on the toilet and you accidentally drop the thing in the tub, thus destroying your entire library. Of course, you have backups, except that the last one is three months old and turns out to be unreadable anyway, and the one before that only works on the old model of the reader, which your eldest kid stepped on and snapped in half.

Posted October 9, 2007 1:25 PM by C. Wingate

"a roaring cloaca"

There's an ointment for that.

Posted October 9, 2007 1:27 PM by Stefan Jones

Bruce: It also makes me wonder what on earth he thinks he's accomplishing with this less-than-stealth-mode approach. He certainly can't believe that we're likely to be convinced by anything said by an obvious puppet . . . .

This is why I think the Internet needs its own brand-new rhetorical theory. I'm not sure Aristotle and Kenneth Burke are sufficient to explain the model of persuasion that lies behind some of this behavior. Why spawn sockpuppets? Does he think the site owner won't find out? (I don't know how it's done, exactly, but I know it's easy to find out). I think he is trying to emulate, all on his own, the industrialized deception that goes on when paid trolls all go at a forum from different IP addresses. Or he's just not bright. I dunno.

Posted October 9, 2007 1:30 PM by rm

Where do we mail the socks to?

(There’s nothing like receiving packets of socks from around the world to emphasize to an employer what a reputation they’re gaining.)

Posted October 9, 2007 1:42 PM by Michael

C. Wingate: I subscribed to Sci. Am. for about 20 years, and gave up on it a few years ago. The incidence of really stupid mistakes was too high — "energy" instead of "power" in describing the output of a dam on a per-unit-time basis, for example — and the "noise" on the pages was making them look like the text equivalent of a music video. They'd changed from having a moderate number of highly-informative articles to having a larger number of very shallow articles. They'd started having a lot of gosh-wow speculation that didn't stand up to scrutiny: "This is what a wormhole would look like if it appeared on a street in downtown Manhattan! (Artist's interpretation)"

Posted October 9, 2007 1:43 PM by Joel Polowin

I've been watching the whole thing unfold with the kind of horrified fascination I usually experience only at family gatherings where a prospective in-law makes a pro-eugenics statement without realizing that sixty percent of the assembled elders have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

But, damn, that hole he/she/it/they is/are digging is going to take care of the question of Australia's solid waste disposal needs for generations.

Posted October 9, 2007 1:43 PM by JESR

Stefan, JESR, et al: Look, I'm awake here in the wee smalls partly 'cos of the lingering uncomfortable after-effects of a nasty bout of gastro. I do not need youse lot making with the belly-laugh inducers. It hurts!
*makes note to wait & read thread again in 48 hours*

Posted October 9, 2007 1:58 PM by Epacris

#15:

Le Petomaine, eat your heart out.

(Of course, he bragged of being unafraid of copyright infringements.)

Posted October 9, 2007 1:59 PM by C. Wingate

#7 Jakob: He's also a fantastic swimmer.

And I blame Charlie Rimmer.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:07 PM by TChem

You're going to scare him off and that would be a shame since he's such a beautiful specimen of sockpuppetus internettus. Rarely do you get such a clear view of the species in it's natural habitat–the ever deepening hole.

It's actually been a bit like some sort of Animal Planet for the internet age till now. I've been watching from the laundry hamper blind with the camera crew as the whole thing unfolded, waiting breathlessly for Teresa in her lioness-of-the-internet-veldt moderator role to come in for the kill.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:09 PM by Kelly McCullough

I stopped subscribing to SciAm a year or so after they changed owners and began being noticeably dumbed down.
I dropped Smithsonian when the Bushies got control and dumbed it down to just another travel magazine.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:14 PM by P J Evans

Joel: I subscribed in dribs and drabs starting in the mid '70s-- what with interruptions from going to school where I didn't need to subscribe I'm not exactly sure when I started and stopped. It was in the last years of the glorious Morison/Gardner/Stong period. Dewdney was an acceptable stand-in for Gardner; Jearl Walker less so for Stong. But when they went to color, the magazine became noticeably thinner and the content increasingly less solid. These days, it seems to be written to a level not much above World Book. I'm not so sure the speculation thing was really their fault, though. Every time I've looked at what the cosmologists have said of late, it's been bloody obvious that they've been talking through their hats for years. (Apparently I'm not the only one; I'm hearing rumblings of discontent against string theory by critics who complain that it seems to be able to predict whatever you want it to.)

Until a few months back, Pop Sci had a inside-back-cover feature with some of the more off-the-wall "we'll be driving sky cars in the 21st century!" stuff they'ld put on the cover over the years.

BTW, all mad engineer boys (and girls) should know that a few years a go you could get the complete "Amateur Scientist" on a CD. (I've always wanted to make the particle accelerator, or the Maxwell's Demon device.)

Posted October 9, 2007 2:20 PM by C. Wingate

Kelly McCullough #23: Don't worry, it'll be a month or so before he notices this post.

Those talking about popular science magazines: Is Science News good? I haven't looked at it since I was a wee one, but have been thinking of subscribing to it. If not that one, are there any good ones?

Posted October 9, 2007 2:24 PM by ethan

ethan @ 26

Science News is good. They have some stuff that's web-only, too: the current MathTrek is on that lost mathematical paper by Archimedes, of which they've found one copy as a palimpsest and have been doing recovery one. Archimedes was that >< close to inventing the calculus.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:28 PM by P J Evans

Smithsonian the magazine doesn't strike me as so bad. Their gift catalog, though, is one of the most egregious of the species. It's all the "our museum has things like this" noodges, when as an area native and therefore an inhabitant of the Smithsonian ever since I could walk on my own, I know perfectly well that what they mean is, "we can't be bothered to sell you a reproduction of our actual holding, so we'll find some vaguely similar std. item and pretend that you're getting something special." Perhaps they need to be clued in that, on the internet, I can search the whole world for "things like what they have at the Smithsonian" and find much better goods at less pretentious prices.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:29 PM by C. Wingate

I like Discover for what it is, which is admittedly not on the same level that Sci Am once was. It has a nice math puzzles section. But it's not a way to keep up with what's current.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:34 PM by C. Wingate

The 19th century Scientific American (and its companion serial, Scientific American Supplement) is rather interesting too-- and different again from either the modern SciAm or the SciAm of a generation ago.

Only some of it's been digitized so far, but I've collected links to the issues I know of that are freely available online at

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=sciam

Anyone remember Science 8x? (where x matched the year of publication). I remember enjoying that a lot, though I was still in middle and high school when it was coming out, and I don't know how well it would have stood up from a professional scientists' perspective.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:37 PM by John Mark Ockerbloom

And here I was hoping for knitting patterns... though I suppose that instead of a single knitting pattern to be replicated as two socks, this context really calls for three or four socks which may look different at first glance, but on closer inspection turn out to be conceptually identical, perhaps using the same underlying stitches but with several different colors.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:41 PM by Julie L.

You have to love this renewal notice, from the Dec. 18, 1880 edition:

The next issue will close another volume of this paper, and with it several thousand subscriptions will expire.

It being an inflexible rule of the publishers to stop sending the paper when the time is up for which subscriptions are prepaid, present subscribers will oblige us by remitting for a renewal without delay, and if they can induce one or more persons to join them in subscribing for the paper, they will largely increase our obligation.

By heeding the above request to renew immediately, it will save the removal of thousands of names from our subscription books, and insure a continuance of the paper without interruption.

The publishers beg to suggest to manufacturers and employers in other branches of industry that in renewing their own subscriptions they add the names of their foremen and other faithful employes. The cost is small, and they are not the only ones that will derive benefit. The benefit to the employe will surely reflect back to the advantage of the employer. The hints, receipts, and advice imparted through our correspondence column will be found of especial value to every artisan and mechanic, as well as to students and scientists.

For terms, see prospectus.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:43 PM by C. Wingate

Re: C. Wingate and "FireMagpie"

What you want is the Scrapbook add-on for Firefox. Its interface leaves a little to be desired (in re subfolders, navigation, intefering with existing Firefox menus, and not having a "see source URL" in the right-click menu that I want it in), but it does exactly what you're looking for (if not as automatically as you might wish). It copies the web page to hard disk for offline viewing. You can also specify a link depth to capture to.

It also comes with a bunch of mark-up tools that I've never used.

Mainly what I use it for are A) saving research to disk so I can write the paper from wi-fi-poor regions, and B) downloading all the blogs I want to read just before a long bus or train trip.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:47 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Julie L.: If, some three months from now, someone uploads links to pictures of hounds-tooth stockings in different colors with "mouths" worked into the toes and name tags reading "Amanda," "Despina," and "Charlie," you will be held responsible.

Just saying.

No, I am not on my way to the yarn store this minute. Those are not two #2 circulars you see on my grocery list. I am making a perfectly innocent visit to the video rental place that just happens to be next door to the yarn store and does not could not possibly have a secret adjoining hall via the restrooms in the back.

Posted October 9, 2007 2:52 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Nicole @34:
And I thought the inner itch* to write a sonnet was bad!

Much coolness that The Secret Yarn Headquarters in your area has a hidden passageway from a seemingly innocuous location.

-----
* Which I am determined to resist for the mental image of a fire magpie, which picks up and collects different types of fire. You know, an octave describing two, or maybe four, different types of fire and light (say, lightning, campfires, candles at dinner, and starlight), followed by a "turn" to a quatrain with some best kind of light of all - maybe sunlight, maybe the light of intellect - and a nice couplet tying it all together.

I'll go bind a book instead. Really need to do that. And I've done to many light/flaming flying thing poems lately, from angels to dragons.

Posted October 9, 2007 3:01 PM by abi

I'll have to look into that scrapbook add-on. It sounds like something I could really use, with a bit of calculation.

Posted October 9, 2007 3:02 PM by C. Wingate

#35: What I am thinking of is some misbegotten cross between Rossini and Stavinsky. (Choreography by Charles Jones, of course.)

Posted October 9, 2007 3:05 PM by C. Wingate

"Be vewwy kwiyet, I'm hunting websites!"

Posted October 9, 2007 3:06 PM by C. Wingate

C.Wingate #28:

It's worse than that. The goods are gaudy and kitschy, compared to Real Museum Catalogs such as the Met, Boston and Chicago.

Posted October 9, 2007 3:10 PM by joann

Bruce Cohen (STM): The funny thing (for certain values of funny) is that a person of average intelligence can make it much harder to figure out the definite nature of the sock-puppet.

There are (as Teresa points out) some trivial ways (ISP) and some, slightly less trivial.

So, if someone realises that tones of typer are idiosyncratic, and ISPs are traceable (this is something which isn't as obviuos to lots of people, because they don't think about it from their end. The internet is a numinous thing which exists in no-place, ergo it has no-trace), they can mask both.

Use a library. Type the message in a wp-application. Edit said message to reduce parallel structures/quirks. Put the file onto some portable media, and swing by a coffee shop, library, wait until one is home, etc. (and make certain to never post the other persona from the wrong location) and one can maintain a reasonable level of plausible deniability.

If you do a little more work, you can make it more opaque (I know a computer lab at a local college which is 1: wide open, and 2: uses Macs. When I needed to do some things which wouldn't point back to me (don't ask; it wasn't nefarious; just a small bit of paranoia) I ducked in there, did the research, and was away.

But no, the internet is all wiggly electrons, and no one will be able to trace anything.

Posted October 9, 2007 3:18 PM by Terry Karney

joann: which is a shame, because the shops themselves have some very nice wares. I like the jewelry more than that of the Met.

Posted October 9, 2007 3:20 PM by Terry Karney

That is true, though slightly in the Smithsonian's defense their art holdings are comparatively shallow. OTOH, when they come out with a Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly paperweight set, I'm getting one. (I remember distinctly the first time I saw this THING. It was back in the mid '70s when the NCFA/NPG was the best kept museum secret in DC. We were walking down the hall when this brilliant gleam from a side room attracted our attention. Back in those days, there was none of this "we have to keep it in the dark to conserve it" display such as it suffers under now; it was floodlit like the sun in a white-walled otehrwise empty room, and it was literally dazzling. It is without question the most jaw-dropping museum experience I've ever had. The fellows who first found this thing must have felt like Howard Carter.)

Posted October 9, 2007 3:23 PM by C. Wingate

Why are there more sockpuppets than there are socks?

Posted October 9, 2007 3:28 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

C. Wingate @ 25

I always wanted to build the ion rocket. How cool, to be able to generate a plasma stream at 30,000K.

Even today there are sometimes good articles, usually not written by their staff, though. Lee Smolin wrote a pretty good one summarizing the position in his book that String Theory is basically unfalsifiable, and not terribly useful besides.

Posted October 9, 2007 3:42 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Terry Karney @40:

Maybe, in addition to using different sites to post for each puppet, one could use different stylistic constraints for each puppet. One never uses the letter 'e'. One writes in blank verse (but doesn't put in line breaks). One never uses words of latinate origin. One posts slightly cleaned up versions of posts that have been fed through an automatic translator to some other language and back again, to simulate being a non-native speaker of English...

Posted October 9, 2007 3:56 PM by Jim Henry

Like many children of the info age, I keep a significant portion of my music library on computers. I almost never play original CDs any more; as far as I'm concerned, they're archive copies, and if I want some music to take with me while travelling, I burn myself a disc. Actually, when I can, I burn myself discs of MP3s, which I can play in my car or on my portable disc player.

I also have an eMusic subscription. I usually download on my laptop, because it's got a good amount of space on it and it's what I've usually got up in the living room when I feel like doing my monthly browse. The trouble is, the laptop's burning software isn't great, and won't make me a disc of MP3s I can play on any of the devices I normally use. If I want to make discs of any of my eMusic downloads, I need to download them to my desktop and use its reliable burner. Which is fine as far as it goes, except that the files from eMusic are generally about 50% larger than the files I rip from originals using CDex - the upshot of which is that if I want to keep them with the rest of my music library and take up an optimal amount of space, I need to burn audio discs and re-rip them to the hard drive. It's an awful lot of trouble to go though just so I can get Cocteau Twins and Joanna Newsom on the same compilation disc, and the only reason I bother is because I'm enough of a geek that it's important to me.

Note that this is all with compatible file formats, without DRM, for use with readily-available generic devices (that still crap out on me from time to time, as my Walkman occasionally has days where it just doesn't feel like playing anything). I could solve some of this by sinking a not-inconsiderable expense into an iPod - which would give me a whole new set of headaches as I port everything over to the proper format, with related issues of disc space and whatnot, not to mention getting another device so it can hook up reliably to my car stereo, if that's even possible with the hardware I have.

And that, kids, is what Charlie and his socks utterly fail to understand about why paper books aren't going anywhere any time soon.

Posted October 9, 2007 4:15 PM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds has a whole 'sneak's charter' section for game designers who like to walk incognito in their worlds, focusing on creating believable MUD/MMO characters and the players thereof. He does go into the ethics of it*, but the idea is that it's important sometimes to see what it's like for players when the gods aren't watching.

He does suggest quite a few things like Jim Henry's list at #45, but also explains that the rationale behind that is as much to make sure that everything you say/write gets post-edited before you press <return>.

Changing IPs can help, but some people get a false sense of security from knowing they have a dynamic IP - or don't realise how much it helps the filter set to narrow it down to a country of origin or a particular ISP.

There are a whole load of other techniques involved, but I don't want to witter on about them because a lot of it's not all that relevant in this context.

* You wouldn't think that 'don't do this to your friends without a very good reason indeed' is all that hard, but some people don't see this.

Posted October 9, 2007 4:21 PM by Sam Kelly

My father built a Wimshurst machine and a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube (yes, that that's Am. Sci. article) when I was a kid; he never got the latter to work though. A few years back he made a Van de Graaf generator. He's appallingly competent about that kind of thing; he also has a Queen Anne ottoman (made out of an old cedar 6x6 that started out life as a basketball post) and a guitar. I keep thinking about making a radial Dirod generator but I should get off my batoosh and make a Kelvin generator first to amaze the kids. I also always wanted to make the nitrogen laser.

The ruling engine, was completely over the top. Even my father isn't that mad.

Posted October 9, 2007 4:26 PM by C. Wingate

The quality of twenty-first century sock puppetry is very disappointing to me, and doesn't hold a candle to the byzantine efforts of the BBS flame warriors of the pre-internet mythic era.

Posted October 9, 2007 4:39 PM by Earl Cooley III

#46: If everything you have is in MP3 format, then they already are in the proper format for an iPod.
(Also, I suspect that there is software that will transcode between the 192kbps VBR MP3 eMusic uses to whatever you use to reduce space. You'd probably lose audio quality in the process, but that's happening now.)

Hearing the output of your iPod on your car stereo is more of a bother. When I had a car with a tape player, I used a tape adapter. I'm currently using an FM transmitter. I'm considering an aftermarket kit to give my car stereo an audio in. (Some car stereos come with an audio in.)

As for ebooks, John Scalzi makes an interesting argument. In the case of portable music, we have always relied on some external mechanism (e.g., walkman, discman, your own band of wandering musicians) to get the music into a form we can hear. There has always been something between the medium and the ear. In the case of portable text, though, there hasn't been anything between the medium and the eye. We can read the book directly. Having a mechanism in the way is a paradigm shift.

This doesn't mean that the ebook is doomed, doomed, doomed. But I think it does mean that what follows for one does not necessarily follow for another.

The opportunities to use these devices aren't always the same. I listen to music in the background some times. I don't know what it means to read in the background. OTOH, I almost never listen to music on the T. (The subway is way too loud.) However, I almost always have an issue of Analog, F&SF or Asimov's with me when I take the T. (I'm catching up on my short fiction backlog.) If I had a convenient pocketable container for ebooks, an electronic subscription to above mentioned magazines, along with actual ebooks, I'd take the ebook reader onto the T instead.

(No, ebook readers don't need to be pocketable. After all, most books aren't. But the more convenient an ebook reader is, the more likely I'd use it.)

Posted October 9, 2007 4:41 PM by John Chu

My internet access being somewhat sporadic at present, I missed the original hilarity, so thank you, Teresa, for the heads-up -- I just spent [more time than I should admit during working hours] absolutely transfixed by the absurdity of it all, reading through the saga from the beginning.

Michael, #17: Where do we mail the socks to?
(There’s nothing like receiving packets of socks from around the world to emphasize to an employer what a reputation they’re gaining.)

We need a "spit-take warning" tag: there is now soda all over my keyboard...

Posted October 9, 2007 4:43 PM by Katrina Boyajian

I'm greedy. I love having books in paper format (and scientific papers ditto.) However, I also like having papers as .pdf files on my laptop - 'cos I can't carry all those filing cabinets of reprints/photocopies around with me - although I can't easily scribble on the .pdf files.

And I like having several dozen ebooks on my Psion - which I carry with me everywhere anyway as my appointments diary/addressbook/jotter notebook etc. etc.. That way, when I get delayed and have read the paper-format book(s) I've carried with me, I still have something to read.

I see the two formats as overlapping in use, but not mutually exclusive - and without either making the other irrelevant/redundant.

Jim's note in the original thread - that once the book has been produced, no more power is required - is perfectly valid. People like me, of course, who want to have their cake and eat it, will buy BOTH paper and e-book format. I can't see how that damages the bookstores, publisher or authors.

Posted October 9, 2007 5:03 PM by dcb

Every time I see "Charlie Rimmer's Socks" it makes me think of Paddy Doyle's Boots.

Posted October 9, 2007 5:05 PM by James D. Macdonald

P. J. Evans

Archimedes was that >< close to inventing the calculus

Yep, just within an ε

Posted October 9, 2007 5:19 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#30: Anyone remember Science 8x?

I remember it; I believe it folded into Discover, which was eventually bought by Disney.

Recent issues of Discover have been very thin.

Science News is for current stuff, SciAm for longer, less newsy articles, and Technology Review (affiliated with MIT) for more business-oriented science articles.

Posted October 9, 2007 5:31 PM by DaveL

No thread affection for _American Scientist_? I've been subscribing to
that on and off for several years. (Currently off, due to a recent
move and laziness.) When _Scientific American_ lost its science-nerd
luster, _A.S._ held firm. The articles are not for people who hated
science class, but you don't have to be a specialist in whatever-field
either.

Posted October 9, 2007 5:46 PM by Andrew Plotkin

Never read Amer. Sci., but it's obvious we're going to have to reevaluate our general science mag subscriptions.

Posted October 9, 2007 6:28 PM by C. Wingate

re myself (42): There are apparently a number of serious efforts about trying to decode the inscriptions on The Throne and Hampton's papers.

Posted October 9, 2007 6:31 PM by C. Wingate

terry #41:

Where we differ--I prefer the Met; I happen to like their styles. They're the kind of thing I'd design myself if I had the talent. They occasionally have something Venetian, such as the earrings I'm wearing right now. The Met also have a great selection of William Morris-patterned shawls, and I've been trying to collect the whole set as Christmas gifts for ages now.

The Smithsonian had a Gothic-trimmed bookcase/table thing that was about twice the price I found it for in another catalog; the latter now adorns the front hall--great for stashing briefcases, purses and umbrellas.

Posted October 9, 2007 6:31 PM by joann

re myself again (48) (some time I'm going to have to get in the habit of actually reading the preview (word processors have made me sloppy)): What I meant to say was that my father made that ottoman and guitar.

Posted October 9, 2007 6:39 PM by C. Wingate

I liked the part where Despina said that Rimmer's attempt at corporate extortion by menaces is the same treatment he, Rimmer, has been getting from This Blog.

How much interest are you charging him, exactly?

Posted October 9, 2007 6:41 PM by julia

John Chu at 50: Thanks - obviously I was misinterpreting the offer that iTunes made after I downloaded it to copy over all my sound files. The message the software gave me made it sound like there was some form of conversion about to happen.

Obviously, as has been stated elsewhere, the music/ebook parallel is not a perfect one. And I don't think ebooks are doomed by any stretch; it's a terribly neat idea, and I look forward to seeing where that technology goes in years to come. I just don't think they herald the death of print any more than downloadable music was the death-knell of the recording industry. But I think ebooks are going to have to be a lot more intuitive and user-friendly than music players before they become anything like ubiqitous, and the fact that an interface between text and reader is a new paradigm has a lot to do with that.

Posted October 9, 2007 6:42 PM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

Bruce @11, I suspect Rimmer's lack of shame when he's caught lying is a sign of sociopathy. (It's really quite common among higher managers. Apparently being a shameless swine who doesn't think of others as really human is helpful in the business world... not that I know this of Charlie, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.)

Posted October 9, 2007 6:48 PM by Nix

I read American Scientist, though somewhat erratically since I don't subscribe. I also still read Scientific American, and even New Scientist, though I gather that last admission makes me infra-dig these days, if not nekulturny.

By the way, Joel @18, what was up with that artist's impression of a street-level wormhole in SciAm? A useful illustration of what a wormhole does to light paths, I thought, and a good deal more realistic than the depictions on shows such as DS9 or Farscape, with their peculiarly tunnel-like 3D-projections-onto-3D-space.

Posted October 9, 2007 6:53 PM by NelC

I really miss the Sci American of a generation ago.

You could really learn things about a particular field of science, especially if you could pick up consecutive issues -- there was often a progression from "general survey" to "more detailed stuff" to "here is where we start to specialize." And it was readable for those who were not well versed in that particular field.

As for the sock-puppet, if it weren't so transparently a sock-puppet I would wonder at the audacity of someone who proclaims their expertise in book selling yet is so clueless that they both disparage the field itself, and claim to have owned 3 bookstores. Forgive my snarkiness, but I'm afraid that my thought when seeing la marioneta proclaim that credential was "you would think he would have wised up he couldn't run a business the first two times."

Posted October 9, 2007 7:35 PM by Craig R.

That supposed "wormhole" was just a photoshop/equivalent distortion of a normal street scene. If light was getting bent that much, what about everything else -- atmospheric effects, etc.? No light generated? Not to mention that in reality, you'd have a crowd of onlookers, police trying to keep people away, some idiot trying to jump into the wormhole because he wanted to see what was on the other side, etc.; the image failed to suspend my disbelief.

Posted October 9, 2007 7:38 PM by Joel Polowin

In the original thread, bringing up other discussions of this topic seemed like putting a stick through a fence next to a sign reading "Do Not Poke The Animals", so I didn't. However, a lot of the ground we've gone over in the last few days as regards ebooks was covered in a discussion on Charlie Stross' blog a few months ago.

Posted October 9, 2007 7:54 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Craig R. #65: I really miss the Sci American of a generation ago.

One Scientific American article I remember from about that time was "The Bride Price of the Maasai", which demonstrated that even relatively remote nomadic tribal societies were notably affected by the Great Depression.

Posted October 9, 2007 8:37 PM by Earl Cooley III

Bruce Cohen @43
Why are there more sockpuppets than there are socks?

Socks that go missing in dryers end up on the internet as puppets.

Posted October 9, 2007 9:27 PM by Kip W

SciAm was where I first read about seafloor spreading. The bacteriologist across the street had a subscription (his kids were the same ages as us) so I could sort of browse a bit. (I didn't know the physicist who moved in there afterward as well, though his wife was an artist and I spent one day in their garage helping her paint a backdrop for a theater production.)

Posted October 9, 2007 9:37 PM by P J Evans

Joel Polowin @ 66... you'd have a crowd of onlookers, police trying to keep people away, some idiot trying to jump into the wormhole because he wanted to see what was on the other side

Well what if Claudia Black is on the other side?

Posted October 9, 2007 9:46 PM by Serge

43 There are more sock puppets than socks due to the ungodliness of the liberals who are ruining this country for fine, upstanding citizens like Richard Roberts, Larry Craig, and I.L. Libby. That ungodliness causes dryers to destroy socks, leaving behind only sock puppets. And global warming, since the socks are no longer available to warm the feet of the faithful and He won't let the faithful's feet get cold.

I feel like I'm channeling Sam the Eagle.

Posted October 9, 2007 9:53 PM by C.E. Petit

How much interest are you charging him, exactly?

In Everquest circles, there was an infamous post by someone (and himself as sockpuppet) that ended up making "page 8" a verb. So, to put it in EverCrack jargon, Rimmer page eighted himself.

Posted October 9, 2007 10:06 PM by Peter

Glad I printed the blog before Teresa wisely took out its defamatory content. My cadding days with you are over but I shall possibly keep looking for chinks in some other mean-spirited site and post as TN-H to my heart's content.

Posted October 9, 2007 10:06 PM by Chris Oliver

Serge @ 71 - Reminds me of a D&D campaign or two.

Dungeon Master: "Okay, in the first room beside the evil wizard's research lab, you find what looks like a shimmering curtain of energy."

Player #1: "Cool, a teleportation field! I step into it."

DM: "Um. You do?"

P1: "Of course! Where do I end up?"

P2: "I follow him."

P3: "Me too. Where are we?"

DM: "... Okay. It's a year later. Each of you is now your identical twin, come to the castle looking for your brother, who disappeared mysteriously a year ago and you think might have done something dangerously stupidly rash and come to a horrible end..."

Posted October 9, 2007 10:08 PM by Joel Polowin

"Chris," you're still a liar. Teresa hasn't removed any content, defamatory or otherwise. Not that there was anything defamatory, mind. I expect you're making that ludicrous claim to cover yourself when folks notice that her remarks are the plain, reasonable truth.

But tell me, big guy, what's your real name? Come on, spit it out. What's your full, legal name, Charlie?

Oh, and you still owe me three essays. Get to work, champ.

Posted October 9, 2007 10:49 PM by James D. Macdonald

Chris Oliver #74: I shall possibly keep looking for chinks in some other mean-spirited site

Here you go! Have a nice day!

Posted October 9, 2007 11:45 PM by Earl Cooley III

All the same, it's interesting that "Chris" doesn't consider anything that's currently posted to be defamatory.

Posted October 10, 2007 12:17 AM by julia

Speaking of socks, the director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Edmund Capon, was (is?) well known for wearing odd socks: the gallery shop used to (and still might, but I couldn't see them in the online shop) sell pairs of odd socks, called Director's Socks, in lovely colour combinations. What would Charlie Rimmer's socks look like?

(What would yours look like? Mine are thick cabled socks, in a Kureyon colourway with a lot of pink.)

Posted October 10, 2007 12:44 AM by ema nymtonsti

C. Wingate at #48 wrote:

> My father built a Wimshurst machine and a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube (yes, that that's Am. Sci. article) when I was a kid; he never got the latter to work though.

A friend built a vortex tube for his high school science project, and his didn't work either. Maybe they're just a rumour :)

Posted October 10, 2007 12:53 AM by Steve Taylor

I thought I saw something just recently disemvowelled, but scanning quickly here can't spot it. Maybe that's what he means by "removing defamatory material".
§ <whisper> Don't mention the hyphen. It might show up usefully later.</whisper>

[DON'T get me started on the high-handed behaviour of iTunes! Grrr …]

Posted October 10, 2007 12:58 AM by Mez

I think the disemvowellee was Despina's repost of the Rimmer letter in the original thread.

Posted October 10, 2007 1:38 AM by mcz

C. Wingate, #14, "my handwriting is write-only" Ha! May I use that, crediting you?

Posted October 10, 2007 1:45 AM by Marilee

WHEEEE! Apparently I *don't* miss all the fun threads.

"My cadding days with you are over"
(shakes head in delighted disbelief)
Except that you're back, "Chris." You're *back.* You said you were going away forever but now you're *back!* Jesus, Chris, why did you come back? It's starting to look like…well, like
this
to be honest.

"but I shall possibly keep looking for chinks in some other mean-spirited site and post as TN-H to my heart's content."

Identity theft is a crime, but I expect that the only sites which would know who Teresa is would easily recognize you as a fraud, if by nothing than your Australian ISP. Well, that and the fact that Teresa's neither mean nor an idiot.

Oh, and before I forget, here's my favorite Red Dwarf moment, posted because I'm directing a play partially inspired by the episode this comes from ("Thanks for the Memory," season 2.)

Posted October 10, 2007 2:22 AM by Greg Machlin

Just like him to leave in a dugeon, threatening to commit identity theft on the way out. Well, of course, how else will he get an identity?

Which does beg the question, do sockpuppets have an identity crisis when they hit middle age?

Posted October 10, 2007 2:29 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

joann: I prefer the Smithsonian, when it comes to quality. I have some splendid looking things from the Met, which have worn the gilding off, or become dented.

The Smithsonian collection is harder base metals, and more sterling than plate.

Posted October 10, 2007 3:17 AM by Terry Karney

On a slight tangent...from Susanna Clarke's interview with Alan Moore at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/07/sv_alanmoore.xml&page=1 :

"He worships Glycon, a Roman snake god, not because he believes in Glycon (who was exposed as a glove puppet in the second century, a source of great delight to Moore) but because what he represents to Moore is real and important."

The earliest example of sock puppetry I've seen referenced :D

Posted October 10, 2007 6:36 AM by Russ

#34: Absolutely-- be my guest!

#80: from the Wikipedia article you can get to a couple of commercial manufacturers of the things. They seem to fit neatly into that subspecies of "mother of invention", the "I have X and need Y, so I'll use Z to get it even though something that used some other source would be more efficient" paradigm, where

X=compressed air
Y=cold
Z=vortex tube
something else=the Rankine cycle

Looking at the commercial versions, I think the flaw in the Stong version is the spiral chamber. All the apparently working varieties use a strictly cylindrical main chamber, sometimes rather larger than the hot and cold tubes.

In the exact opposite direction, one satellite project my father worked on involved this Stirling engine refrigerator, which they apparently had a great deal of trouble with. I'd come home, and there it would sit in the kitchen, a wooden case about two feet high and eight inches on a side. Lift the lid and there was this completely unidentifiable '70s-Analog-cover-spaceship ending in a small squat cylinder that should have been labelled "warp output", covered with a plastic cap that should have had a "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" streamer tied to it. I don't think they ever got this thing working or put it into orbit.

Posted October 10, 2007 6:40 AM by C. Wingate

I'm thinking of going to Home Depot today for some parts...

Posted October 10, 2007 6:57 AM by C. Wingate

Oh, and here's the rule:

Threats by lawyers are real; threats of lawyers aren't.

Posted October 10, 2007 6:59 AM by C. Wingate

#27 P J Evans Archimedes was that >< close to inventing the calculus.

Ooh - Alternate History story idea!

(Note to self - find some way to add gratuitous airships to the story).

Posted October 10, 2007 7:24 AM by Neil Willcox

I've just been reading the earlier thread.

Oh, wow.

I get to dust off a Twain quite I never thought I'd get to use. When it comes to the sock puppet postings:

To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

The whole thread deserves a bronze tablet and a clock that chimes the hours...

Posted October 10, 2007 7:41 AM by Bruce E. Durocher II

Michael@17:

Would that count as a Distributed Provision of Service attack?

Posted October 10, 2007 8:04 AM by Russ

Bruce@85:
...do sockpuppets have an identity crisis when they hit middle age?

I think they just unravel.

Posted October 10, 2007 8:30 AM by Gesso

Bruce @ 85, Gesso @ 94: The sockpuppets who are having a midlife crisis are easy to spot, as they run around in Berluti shoes with the laces down, the threads around their worn spots flapping in the breeze.

Posted October 10, 2007 8:42 AM by Stephen Granade

When "Amanda Blair" showed up in the other thread, it was correctly identified as a sock puppet in under an hour (three posts down the thread, one of those posts being from "Chris Oliver").

When "Chris Oliver" flounced the first time he was back in twenty-two minutes. When "Chris Oliver" flounced the second time it took him an hour and seventeen minutes to return as yet another sock puppet, which was correctly identified as a sock in the very next post.

I note with great amusement that when "Chris Oliver" wants to get a worthwhile copy of something he prints it out. What's the matter, chum? Why not just take an electronic copy? Or return here whenever you need to refer to the information here?

Maybe if you asked your Mr. Young (the e-book enthusiast you're so impressed by) he'll tell you why the "paperless office" still hasn't arrived a quarter of a century after the announcement of its arrival.

Posted October 10, 2007 9:07 AM by James D. Macdonald

"Maybe if you asked your Mr. Young (the e-book enthusiast you're so impressed by) he'll tell you why the "paperless office" still hasn't arrived a quarter of a century after the announcement of its arrival."

Indeed. My office couldn't function without email or Internet access, but that form of communication has increased, not decreased, the amount of paper in the workspace.

Now everyone prints out the emails they get related to a project, they print out preliminary calculations and quantities and plans, they print out drafts of letters that are to be sent out (and then print out another draft after revisions are made to the first one), they print out EVERYTHING in fact.

Why? Because everyone does not carry an internet-linked computer with them everywhere they go, and having that piece of paper (which can easily be copied and handed out to anyone wanting it) is much more convenient.

Posted October 10, 2007 9:31 AM by John L

Maybe if you asked your Mr. Young (the e-book enthusiast you're so impressed by) he'll tell you why the "paperless office" still hasn't arrived a quarter of a century after the announcement of its arrival.

It's hard to write notes on a screen. They don't stay with the text; neither do the yellow stickies.

Posted October 10, 2007 9:37 AM by P J Evans

I'm curious about that oliverandmaxwell@yahoo.com.au address. What's the connection (if any) with Oliver & Maxwell Books & Music (on Ormond Rd, Elwood, VIC, about a 20-minute drive away from the A&R offices per Google maps)?

Posted October 10, 2007 9:38 AM by Joel Polowin

I produce PDF proofs for clients. It generally takes routing three or four complete printouts to get approval to do it.

Posted October 10, 2007 9:59 AM by julia

And you also have people who are printing out a CYA copy of something like an email. The paranoid (I am one of them) don't trust the corporate computer system to not conveniently lose something which would have proved you were doing what you were told, not what the boss thought he told you to do.

Posted October 10, 2007 10:05 AM by Nancy C. Mittens

Gesso@94: Perhaps when the sockpuppets unravel, they lose the thread of their arugments and cannot do more than shout, "Darn!"

Maybe?

Posted October 10, 2007 10:35 AM by Fiendish Writer

At which point they're knot quite as amusing, I'm afrayed.

Posted October 10, 2007 10:50 AM by Gesso

On the discussion of scientific magazines upthread: does anyone have a recommendation of one or two magazines that could give a nice overview of science issues? I like Discover because it seems to be "for the rest of us". But something a bit more technical but still readable would be nice. Would the concerns expressed about Scientific American still apply if we stipulate that it would be a complete mathematical moron reading it?

Posted October 10, 2007 11:59 AM by Emma

One gent with a long track record in the networking biz, sighted with stacks of paper: "More bandwidth".

Posted October 10, 2007 12:18 PM by joann

in #62, Dan Layman-Kennedy wrote:

John Chu at 50: Thanks - obviously I was misinterpreting the offer that iTunes made after I downloaded it to copy over all my sound files. The message the software gave me made it sound like there was some form of conversion about to happen.

Actually, Itunes does something worse (or better): it volunteers to organize your music for you. This means copying all your music (probably nondestructively) into tidy hierarchical folders, and creating a database for where all of it is. Recent versions of itunes can download album artwork, which would be a great plus, except I believe it embeds the artwork in the mp3 file, making it larger. That could be forgiven, were the copies of the artwork better quality.

I use itunes, and I like it well enough*, but I understand the open source program Amarok is much better at dealing with certain things. (For instance, I believe that it's music identification algorithm is more accurate than the GracenoteCDDB that itunes uses, and it can be asked to download lyrics that can be embedded in the mp3s also. Naturally this is a civil wrong of copyright violation.)

So ends the helpiness. Amen.

*I prefer to not manually sort my music collection, and the folder structure makes manual backups reasonably easy. Note that the itunes database file is (or was) mergeable into an existing itunes installation making the inevitable windows reinstallation less painful.

Posted October 10, 2007 12:46 PM by midori

John Chu wrote "Hearing the output of your iPod on your car stereo is more of a bother. When I had a car with a tape player, I used a tape adapter"

I find these work better than FM adapters. The catch is that if they're cheaply made the mechanism can be noisy, which is annoying.

The one I have now is the best I've used. It's from Griffin, and it's the cassette adapter which lets you use the cassette controls to control the iPod. Sadly, that stopped working after about six months so I have to use the iPod itself to change songs, but the sound is still good and the mechanism is quiet.

Posted October 10, 2007 12:48 PM by Jon H

" except I believe it embeds the artwork in the mp3 file, making it larger"

I don't think it does. It keeps an 'Album Artwork' folder separate from the music.

Putting them in the files wouldn't make much sense, since there'd be much duplication - one copy of the art for each song on the album.

Posted October 10, 2007 1:10 PM by Jon H

For science news online, I go to Science Daily. Though it's basically light revisions of news releases from all over the place (mainly academia), it can be up-to-the-minute and nicely eclectic. As for the mags, I still subscribe to Discover but lament the way it's gone downhill in the last year or so. I also get Smithsonian (handy birthday present from Mom) and think it's holding up a bit better. The old version of Scientific American was too technical for me; the new one *can* be too dumbed down, but now and then I'll get it for some article that's of interest.

Alas, I've never found a really attractive general-interest magazine with an emphasis on archaeology and/or paleontology (sciences I might have gone into if I had the brain for it).

Posted October 10, 2007 1:29 PM by Faren Miller

During study breaks in college, I could be found between the magazine shelves, reading on the floor. Got some weird looks that way, but it made me feel like I was just there temporarily, just this one article, rather than halfway into an hour-long magazine blitz. Archaeology, Scientific American, Skeptical Inquirer, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and random ones with 'Trends' in the name were the usual ones.

On a recent lab trip to Denver, my group rented a university vehicle. I brought my usual car-trip pack-- my CDs, my Discman, a cigarette-lighter power thing, and a tape adapter (they make them in white now, to match the iPod). Everyone else had mp3 players.
The Suburban didn't have a tape deck, but it did have a CD player. I was the only one who could play music. Made me glad of five hours of 'going to Denver' random-random mix.

Posted October 10, 2007 1:37 PM by Diatryma

I would definitely dis-recco Sci. Am. if only because someone who wasn't scientifically astute might not catch on that they are not properly dispassionate. It was something I noticed way back in the days when they first started publishing articles about creationism. Those articles inevitably had an editorial tinge to them, which made me uneasy. But in those days it was an occaisional aberration; these days it's omnipresent. It always feels like they're trying to sell me something; or worse, that they're preaching to the converted.

Posted October 10, 2007 1:46 PM by C. Wingate

re #109: If you have an interest in middle eastern archaeology, then Biblical Archaeology Review is the magazine for you.

Posted October 10, 2007 2:02 PM by C. Wingate

Re Science News: I have to echo C. Wingate's comments on SciAm.

It's a digest, and I've seen, more than a few, places where the digester has picked some odd pieces of the reports to highlight. On the one hand, a small amount of work will get one to the original paper (though often that takes access to a university library).

On the other, if you don't follow up, there can be some serious misunderstandings about what the paper really said.

Posted October 10, 2007 2:14 PM by Terry Karney

A subtext of all the discussion of science magazines is that you really have to have a certain grounding to be able read any of them safely-- even the good ones. You don't necessarily have to understand much of the detail, but you have to know enough to keep your BS detectors in working order, especially in anything that has the slightest political implications. For instance, whenever you read something about global warming, you need to remember that the carbon content of the atmosphere is the residual product of a bunch of huge forces, manmade and natural, many of which we don't understand well at all; and that the greenhouse effect is only one of a bunch of big forces governing climate, many of which we again don't understand well. It's obvious that reducing atmospheric carbon is a good thing, if only because there's only so much of it on the planet. Reducing per capita energy consumption is likewise a good end in itself. But the mass media version of the thing-- which unfortunately has leached back into the pop. sci. press-- is phrased in tones of hysteria/ridicule which mask the scientific reality that we don't know what's coming, and that even if it's catastrophic, we may not be able to stop it with anything less drastic than switching off the power grid and abolishing mechanized transport-- and even that might not be enough. I've noticed at least that more responsible elements have for instance (there was a nice article about this in Discover) 'fessed up that the "hydrogen economy" isn't going to do a thing about global warming, but if you're a really raw layman you're now in the position of hoping that the science press is policing itself well enough.

Which brings me to my High School Science pitch: the one thing people need to take away from their high school science classes is enough sophistication to detect when they are being snowed. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to be able to do science, or maybe even to understand much science. But they need to be able to tell when science isn't science.

(Here endeth the sermon.)

Posted October 10, 2007 3:46 PM by C. Wingate

C. Wingate, I'd be happy, also, if people took these things away from science classes:

- Why not to mix Clorox and ammonia

- Bimetallic contact: why it should be avoided, and how

- How wet air makes low pressure systems

- Radiant heat uptake/loss, or why everyone needs curtains

- Elements combining at random: why not?

But you're right, a well-honed BS detector is the highest goal of basic science education.

Posted October 10, 2007 5:12 PM by JESR

C. Wingate, #14: my handwriting is write-only and my typing has a high standard deviation

SPLORT!!! The handwriting bit is about to turn into a button, I think.

Jon H, #107: The other major advantage to tape adaptors is that you don't have to keep fiddling with them as you drive from one state to the next and the next and...

The FM adaptors are fine if most of your listening is done within a limited geographical area, but for far-travelers they're a pain in the patoot. Of course, a direct input is even better, but they're of more recent vintage than any car we own.

Posted October 10, 2007 5:53 PM by Lee

C. Wingate 111

>I would definitely dis-recco Sci. Am. if only because someone who wasn't scientifically astute might not catch on that they are not properly dispassionate. It was something I noticed way back in the days when they first started publishing articles about creationism. Those articles inevitably had an editorial tinge to them, which made me uneasy.

C. Wingate

>ou have to know enough to keep your BS detectors in working order, especially in anything that has the slightest political implications. For instance, whenever you read something about global warming, you need to remember that the carbon content of the atmosphere is the residual product of a bunch of huge forces, manmade and natural, many of which we don't understand well at all; and that the greenhouse effect is only one of a bunch of big forces governing climate

So it sounds like the objection is that Sci. Am. does not take creationism and global warming denial with sufficient respect. I'm sorry but that is not something you can expect from any scientific magazine. Creationism may be perfectly respectable theology (or not depending on which theologicians you talk to). it is not taken seriously as a scientific hypothesis let alone theory. That is why even most creationist try disguise themselves by calling them selves students of "intelligent design". Similarly, global warming denial is generally recognized as a political tactic, not actual science. So of course science magazines won't deal with these "evenhandedly" any more they will deal evenhandedly with the hypothesis that "its turtles all the way down".

Posted October 10, 2007 6:31 PM by Gar Lipow

re #116: If anyone sees Nancy Liebowitz anytime soon, by all means tell her she can start cranking out "My handwriting..." buttons out any time.

Posted October 10, 2007 6:33 PM by C. Wingate

Real portable music enthusiasts drag around a PDP-8 minicomputer and portable power generator on a pallet truck and convert their music libraries into assembly language code so that when they hold their portable radios near the gear, it will play due to radio-frequency emissions leakage.

Posted October 10, 2007 6:36 PM by Earl Cooley III

re 117: No, Gar, you're missing the point. As a science journal, even on a popular level, their job is not to enter into a debate with creationists, global warming skeptics, or for that matter pseudoscience advocates. Once you enter into such a debate, you've done the exact scientific equivalent of biting into the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; you are no longer innocent of polemic taint.

The article about creationism years ago that first set off my alarms was ostensibly a sociological study. The problem was that the question that was being studied appeared to be "how can these people be so stupid?" The whiff of condescension was subtle but (to me) unmistakable. And its detection set off mistrust, because it suggested that the researcher couldn't keep his (on one level entirely justified) bias against his subjects out of his research. However much you personally want to fulminate against them or the "intelligent design" crowd is really quite beside the point.

As far as global warming is concerned, the issue again is that the matter is not a two-sided debate. When you start talking about "global warming deniers", you've bought into a moral crusade. But anyone who has watched the tremendous explosion of geologic knowledge in the last forty years has seen the overturning the whole "balance of nature" paradigm that lies at the heart of "global warming" as a popular thesis. What is particularly ironic is that "balance of nature" is itself derivative of older versions of intelligent design, because its view of Nature as a system unconsciously evokes (especially to us) the image of an engine or factory or other designed contrivance. If you reject this image, then the other global-warming-doomsayer image-- that we can get the thing back on track by adjusting the knobs-- also falls apart.

If you want to understand what the state of atmospheric modelling really looks like, go read the forecast discussions on the NOAA hurricane center website. These guys are unquestionably pros at this-- and what you will find is that they use a whole suite of models and then do an awful lot of seat-of-the-pants adjusting to what comes out, not to mention restarting the models every day because they drift out of reality pretty quickly. It's a matter of course that one model disagrees pretty significantly with another. The lesson to take away is not that modelling is worthless (because it isn't; the models do help a lot), but that even in that narrowly defined field there is a lot of not-scientific art to using them. And if you go look at some of the other things that we know have a huge effect on climate-- volcanic eruptions, solar output, etc.-- you find that in a lot of those fields they don't think they know as much as the global warming crew attributes to them. In the middle of this we find a journal article saying "this is why you should believe in global warming" rather than "this is what we know about global warming". The attitude difference is subtle, but crucial; the latter is science reporting, and the former, political advocacy.

Posted October 10, 2007 7:22 PM by C. Wingate

P.S. In the old days, the way Sc