continuing to chew through old posts I had left for later. I had read
this already, but I just wanted to make a comment; this was part of
a conversation on global warming, but Ray took it on a bit of an
excursion on the way to making a point:
On Fri, 2 Dec 2011, Ray Harrell wrote:
[...]
Big systems require expertise and the knowledge of balance known in the arts
as truth and beauty. It isn?t linear and it requires years of practice
and 10,000 hours of rehearsal in order to handle its sheer size and steer it
with any kind of competency. Most of Western science resembles children
playing with new toys that only when someone dies do they pay attention.
Fracking is a good example. Scientists say it?s perfectly safe. If it
was they should have no problem signing an agreement with a land owner to
return the land in the same condition that they found it in the first place.
I note that in its november or december issue, Scientific American has
come out editorially against fracking as being not sufficiently
demonstrated as safe. This is the second or third interesting position
they have taken lately.
The John Rennie editing era at SciAm ended a little while ago, after
about 15 years of lowering the intellectual content of the mag to a pop
level with little if any mental heavy lifting required. I stopped buying
it basically because by the time I'd skimmed it at the store to see if
it had anything interesting, I had actually read the whole thing.
Anyway, Rennie was replaced in 09 by Mariette DiChristina, and I've been
watching to see what direction they would head under her direction.
So far, I've noted a decidedly upward drift in challenging content,
which is, I presume, partly due to reorganizations at the publishing
level - for most of my life, Sci-AM was owned, published, and edited by
Gerard Piel, then by Jonathan Piel, presumably his son, but in 1986, the
company was sold to a german corporate publisher. The younger Piel
stayed on for close to a decade, in the editor position, before Rennie
took over. At the time of Rennies's replacement by DiChristina, the
publisher moved the magazine into a subsection, the Nature Publishing
Group, where resides the prestigious journal Nature, which the publisher
had acquired in 1995. Thus, the magazine has been removed from the
general popular publications administration, to one that is more science
oriented. That explains the meatier content, but the activist flavour
is somewhat unexpected. It will be interesting to see how outspoken
they become, and how much notice will be taken of their pronouncements.
-Pete
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