Thursday, July 22, 2004
Hope for our intellectual future, and a bit of fun with pseudoscience
A side-effect of blogging: I now realize there are many thousands of Renaissance men and women out there, who, besides their day jobs, have time to scour the net and write up their finds in rather nice prose. Crooked Timber is an example, but just the tip of the iceberg. So much for the idea that education is in perpetual decline. At worst its just getting more unequal, but at the high end, this generation of scientists/technologists/writers/literati is doing quite well, and probably much better for being linked together by the blogosphere.
Cool blog of the day: Majikthise, which you have to love for the name alone (I wonder if there's a Vroomfondel out there?). She notes that whatever Sandy Berger did (and it doesn't appear to be much), it pales in comparison to the usual Republican document cover up. Their modus operandi is the truck, pioneered by Kissinger, who stole thousands of public documents and hid them at the Rockefeller estate, so no one could question his history of Nixon's foreign policy. I've been waiting for someone to remember that.
And a rich page on pseudoscience, a topic of endless fascination (for me at least, but then is that a surprise). Warning, the author is a bit curmudgeonly, but he is a geologist who has to deal with creationist wackos insisting the world is only 6000 years old, so I cut him some slack. I especially like this bit on anti-intellectualism.
Cool blog of the day: Majikthise, which you have to love for the name alone (I wonder if there's a Vroomfondel out there?). She notes that whatever Sandy Berger did (and it doesn't appear to be much), it pales in comparison to the usual Republican document cover up. Their modus operandi is the truck, pioneered by Kissinger, who stole thousands of public documents and hid them at the Rockefeller estate, so no one could question his history of Nixon's foreign policy. I've been waiting for someone to remember that.
And a rich page on pseudoscience, a topic of endless fascination (for me at least, but then is that a surprise). Warning, the author is a bit curmudgeonly, but he is a geologist who has to deal with creationist wackos insisting the world is only 6000 years old, so I cut him some slack. I especially like this bit on anti-intellectualism.
