Thanks Pete, Happy New Year. I didn't know the final chapter on this Scientific American saga. Mike Hollinshead had demeaned the article for the very reasons you stated below. The Germans had destroyed the American treasure. Nice to know the old U.S. of A is rising again even if the Robber Barons still control the place:>))
REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 1:54 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Suppression of climate debate is a disaster for science 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
