My Favorite Free Newspapers and Magazines on the Web

When The New York Times put up a paywall I stopped reading it.  I love The New York Times, but $180 a year is outrageous for what was once free.  I was even more shocked at that the same content costs even more to read on a tablet or smart phone.  I found ways around their monthly page limits, but ultimately I just gave up trying to regularly read the paper.  I’m not against newspapers and magazines charging money for their content, I just think it needs to be a fair price.  Of course a fair price is like beauty, and is set in the eyes of the beholder.  $15 a month might be the right price for upscale New Yorkers, but not to me.  If The New York Times charged $29.95 a year for digital subscriptions, I’d be a subscriber.  Instead I decided to go looking for other sources of news.

By the way, I have a weird concept about periodical pricing.  A newspaper that produces 365 editions a year sounds like it should cost more than a magazine that produces twelve issues a year.  But I can only read so much per day, and only involve with myself with so many periodicals.  On average, I read about as much from a daily newspaper as I do from a weekly or monthly journal, so in my mind, they each require a reading grazing fee, which should be about equal.  The difference between magazines and newspaper titles is not quantity, but quality of writing and the amount I can read.  Since I can only read an hour or less a day on periodical publications, I’m not willing to spend more than $15 a month total for my newsy reading.

As long as some publishers offer free content I’m going to consider it first.  The internet is full of free content, but which free source of essays and articles are the best?  What content is worth paying for if it was reasonably priced?  I pay $9.99 a month to Rdio for streaming digital music.  I subscribe to The Rolling Stone Magazine and The New York Review of Books on my iPad.  I’m open to paying for more content, but the price has to be right.

Commercial newspapers and magazines generally produce the best writing anywhere because they pay professional writers.  In searching for the best content on the web, I tend to find the highest concentration of quality writing at print magazine and newspaper sites.  These free sites are so good I would pay for them if I had to and the price was right.

And paywalls sites still offer lots of free content. The New York Times is very generous by allowing readers following links to read full articles.  Other sites, like New Scientist suck readers in but quickly cut off the flow of free words.  But even NS will offer some free complete reads.

The sample articles I use come from my Evernote clippings or from my Twitter feed, which I use to remember articles I read and like.

The Atlantic

Far and away, my favorite free online magazine is The Atlantic.  Their website provides content from their print magazine along with original content written just for the web.  I subscribe to their daily updates which recommends 3-5 articles to read each day.  The Atlantic’s web reporting equals their top tier print reporting.

• The Robot Will See You Now
• The Plague Years, in Film and Memory
• Think Artists Don’t Make Anything Off Music Sales? These Graphs Prove You Wrong
• 100 Years Ago, The 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade

 

Los Angeles Times

I started noticing the Los Angeles Times when Zite frequently sent me there to read book reviews.  Zite is a tablet app that does for article reading what Pandora does for music.  You thumbs up and down what you read and Zite finds more of what you like.  The LA Times evidently is writing more of what I like to read.

• In search of ‘The Searchers’ and the history behind the western
• The Operatic Life of Richard Nixon
• Farewell to Novels by David R. Slavitt

 

The Smithsonian

I can’t figure out if content for The Smithsonian is blocked or if they just end every article with “subscribe now for more coverage” to scare you into thinking there’s more to be had if you plunk down some dollars.  I keep finding plenty of free stuff to read.  Fascinating stuff.  Actually, more great stuff to read even if I read 24×7.  Here is the listing for the last March, 2013 issue.  And here is the start of the archive section.

• True Colors
• The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries
• The Meanest Girls at the Watering Hole
• The Lost Tribes of the Amazon
• Dickens’ Secret Affair

 

The Guardian

The Guardian is another newspaper that Zite often takes me to.   Zite and Google links me to foreign newspapers, which is one of the great pluses of the world wide web.  Zite knows I love book reviews and both the LA Times and The Guardian reviews a lot of books.

• Amazon rainforest tribe at centre of new cultural storm
• The top 100 books of all time
• World’s conservation hopes rest on Ecuador’s revolutionary Yasuni model

 

Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings isn’t a commercial newspaper or magazine, but it’s so professional that it should be.  Maria Popova is a professional writer who has created a beautiful web site that she calls “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.”  Brain Pickings is classy blog written by a professional writer with amazing graphic design skills.  I wish Auxiliary Memory was 1/100th as good.

• The Age of Edison:  Radical Invention and the Illuminated World
• The Best Science Books of 2012
• The Daily Routines of Famous Writers
• New Year’s Resolution Reading List:  9 Books on Reading and Writing
• 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design

 

Edge.org

John Brockman’s Edge.org is where the world’s smartest people hang out.  The site is built around conversations with cutting edge thinkers, but it also focuses on the latest science books.  The conversations are often a narrative overview of a current project.  Edge.org is not a newspaper or magazine, but the quality of content is so great that it competes well with professional journalism.  The contributors are major science writers and philosophers, writing about research on the front lines of new knowledge.

• The Normal Well-Tempered Mind – Daniel C. Dennett
• How Culture Drove Human Evolution – Joseph Henrich
• Linked Data:  Web Science and semantic Web – Tim Berners-Lee

 

Most sites on the web are free.  It’s hard to imagine that pay sites can compete with so much quality free content.  My six favorite sites are just a drop in the gigantic WWW bucket.  My goal is to find the right mixture of reporting that gives me the best puzzle pieces for mapping reality.  All too often we read news that is immediately forgotten.  I want to read articles that educate me with a lasting impact.  In fact, I often think reading less on the internet is better.

Like junk food with empty calories, the web is full of junk data and empty facts.  Brilliant articles that are available for all to share should have a great impact on our society.  It used to be people had to buy books and journals to get quality information.  Now all seven billion of us have access to a tremendous amount of free knowledge.  We can all be renaissance men and women.  The quest is to find the needle in the haystack article to read each day that makes a lasting impression.

Tools like Zite let me quickly review 20-30 newly published articles each day, out of thousands.  But the real goal, is to find the single article that’s worthy of study, contemplation and memory.

However, there is a problem with this system.  It only gets me the free articles.  What if the best articles still cost money?  Is the best knowledge being shared today, or withheld?

JWH – 3/3/13

Books That Show Us Reality–The Power of the Red Pill

We live in strange times. 

Science is under attack by the faithful.  Most people prefer fiction over fact.  We know more about the nature of reality than ever before, yet few people want to look reality in the eye.  Everyone claims they want to know the truth, but do they?

It’s like in the movie The Matrix, when Neo is offered the red and blue pill.  Morpheus tells Neo the red pill will show him the truth and the blue pill will return him to forgetfulness.  On this planet, most people take the blue pill.

What if you wanted to take the red pill? 

Naturally, a red pill to reveal the truth does not exist.  But there are read pills, called books, that do.

Up until the middle of the 20th century, an exemplary education involved the knowledge of the great books of the western world.  For the last fifty years we have been rejecting the great books kind of education, but we haven’t substitute a new canon.  A well educated person no longer has to know Greek, Latin and French, or the defining books of the classical world.  Science started in the 17th century, got up to speed in the 19th, and launched into orbit in the 20th. 

Yet few inhabitants of planet Earth embrace scientific thinking.  Fear of oblivion push many into the opium of religion, and most of the rest hide out in escapists fantasies and games.  Science is the only path to the truth, but few follow it.

What we need is a new set of great books, a new canon, whose content will define a well educated person.

I want to create a new definition of education.  Let’s start with a cockroach.  When you go into your kitchen in the middle of the night and turn on the light and see a cockroach run for his life, think about what it knows.  Think about what reality is to a cockroach.  The poor little fella knows nothing of physics, biology, history, mathematics, literature, or even language.  He has no tools to describe or analyze reality.  He’s a tiny little machine with sensors that help him search out food.  He also has a sensor that tells him to run for cover when the light goes on.  He doesn’t know your foot is about to squash his little body.  His awareness of reality is without thoughts.  His potential for education is nil.

Now, lets step up to a border collie.  Her awareness of reality is far richer than the poor cockroach.  We’re not sure if dogs think or have a language, although recently scientists claim that dogs can learn a couple hundred words, but they don’t perceive words like we do.  Our border collie is well adapted to education and can be trained to do all kinds of work and tricks.  She is even eager to learn.  But alas, she knows no more of physics, biology, history, mathematics, literature than our friend the cockroach.

We all approach reality like the blind men caressing separate parts of an elephant and speculating about the whole animal.  Some creatures can perceive more of reality than others.  Educated humans with all our senses are able to see the elephant complete in many dimensions,  even all its component molecule and atoms, and even trace its origin in its evolutionary past.  We see a lot of reality, but far from all – and nothing blocks us from seeing further.

Cosmologists see the largest aspects of reality.  Particle physicists see the smallest parts of reality.  Yet neither see the ultimate largest or smallest.  Our universe is probably one of an infinity of universes, so there is no end to big, and probably there is no end to small either.

Science has turned on the light, and scurrying humans can see it all, from immensely tiny particles to the furthest reaches of the universe, from the Big Bang until now.  Yet most people choose to hide in the cracks of darkness.

On a recent PBS show NOVA, “Earth From Space” they showed a map of the US with a squiggly ling running from New York to Los Angeles to represent the size of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The scientist interviewed explained the visual part of the spectrum we use to see would be about the size of a dime.  We have built new senses to see all of reality, we are way beyond biology.  We are now cyborgs.  But for the average human, there is little knowledge of our true capabilities.

My definition of education is learning to see as much of reality as possible.  Unfortunately, most homo sapiens hide from reality, lost in their fantasies of religion, desires, fictional diversions, games, routines, habits, impulses, etc.  We are closer to the cockroach when we spend so much time pursuing food and sex.  We are like the border collie when we learn to work and earn a living.  But we are the most human when we’re examining the scope of existence.

Now to the great books.  Books are a tool like the telescope, microscope, or interplanetary robot, they let us see further.  If we read the right book, we’ll add details to our personal model of reality. We never see reality directly, but model it in our minds.  Tragically, humans are prone to delusions and fantasies that distort their models of reality.  Think of the wretched conspiracy theorist who builds highly distorted views of reality, or the faithful who shape reality by ancient Bible stories that pander to their fear of oblivion by promising eternal life.

Yes, it’s easier to take the blue pill and forget.  Taking the red pill requires a lot of study and work.

A great education is developing an internal model of reality that closely mimics our external reality.  A great education is learning about all the models of reality that failed.  Plato’s model of reality is abysmally wrong, yet we still study Plato.  Science is a long history of getting it wrong, but it’s cumulative history is a collection of good working models.  The theory of evolution is one of the most successful models of reality ever imagined.  Evolution is now the key tool for understanding how reality works.  Evolution explains change, and reality is constantly changing.

It’s time to get to the nitty gritty of this essay. 

What books are the red pill for showing the truth about reality?  My knowledge and experience is limited, so I can only make a crude guess.  What I’d like to see a collective development of a canon of great science books.   The Scientific Canon needs a small set of introductory books that will illuminate the uninitiated into the world of science.  Then it will need a more extensive list of books for further study.

Coming up with a list of introductory books will be hard.  It won’t be like religion, with The Bible or Quran, where one book will do, science will take many.  And where do we start?  At the beginning with The Big Bang and cosmology, the science of the very big?  But to understand cosmology requires understanding particle physics, which is the study of the very small.  Science really doesn’t make sense without understanding evolution.  It really helps to grasp how unintelligent design, in a random chaotic system, can produce order even when the second law of thermodynamics exists.  Entropy is such a backasswards slippery concept to mentally wrestle.

Developing the Scientific Canon will be hard.  Obviously our school systems are failing at the job, even when they have a captured audience and powerful textbooks.  Can anyone list twelve books that will give the average person a basic grasp of science?  Even with a longer list, like Harold Bloom’s Western Canon list, how well verse in science can a reader become without knowing mathematics?  Is a scientific understanding beyond most people?

• 100 All-Time Greatest Popular Science Books (nicely divides them by various fields of science)
• The Great Pop-Sci Book Project 
• Best Science Books of 2012
• Best Science Books of 2011

Here are some books I’ve been very impressed with, but I can’t claim are the best volumes for the introductory list.

JWH – 2/15/13

Life of Pi–Is God the Better Story?

Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee have done an excellent job of adapting Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi to film.  When I read the book back in 2004 I thought at the time it would never be made into a film because the novel was too cerebral, too narrative heavy, plus, how could anyone get a tiger to do all that acting?

Life of Pi the film covered a surprising amount of the content of Life of Pi the book.  So far I can think of just three scenes I missed.  First, story of Pi’s family running into Pi’s three religious leaders.  Second, showing how Pi used turtles to survive, and finally, the scene where Pi is blind and hears people in another life raft.

Still, Lee and Magee beautifully succeeded with capturing the philosophical heart of the novel.  If you loved the book, go see the film, you’ll be surprised by how well it was filmed.

Is God the Better Story?

If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, don’t read beyond this point if you plan do either, because I’m going to analyze the philosophical statement of the book and it will spoil the story.

In the main story, a boy from India, Piscine Molitor Patel,  who wants to be called Pi, is shipwreck in a lifeboat with a zebra, orangutan, hyena and a tiger named Richard Parker.  Martel tells us this story very realistically and we are expected to believe it happened. But along the way, Martel takes us through scenes that are very hard to believe, like the carnivorous island with the meerkats.

Yann Martel has crafted a Zen kōan into a novel.  Most kōans are short, “What is the sound of one hand clapping.”   Yann Martel essentially asks, “Is God the better story?”

At the beginning of the novel and movie, in a pseudo introduction, the author is told by an older Pi, that he can tell the author a story that will make him believe in God.  Yann Martel creates two stories, one very long, elaborate, fantastic, awe inspiring – and brutal, and a second that is short and brutal.  We are asked which one we prefer.  Martel is right, everyone, including realists like me, will pick the story with Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger.

So where does God come in?  How can this story make us believe in God?  Analyzing fiction for symbolism is tricky, but for me, Richard Parker represents God though analogy.  At the end of the film and novel, when Pi has told his long fabulist story to two Japanese insurance investigators they refuse to believe him.  So Pi tells a shorter, ugly version that we know is true, but hate to believe.  Then Pi asks the investigators which story they prefer.

We all want to believe in the story where Richard Parker existed because it’s a better story than the one of madness, murder and cannibalism.

So what about the prediction at the beginning, that the story will make us believe in God?  I believe Yann Martel uses the desire to believe in Richard Parker as a stand in for God, creating an analogy, that the readers and audience must make on their own.  Pi desperately wants to believe in God.  Pi asks us to believe in Richard Parker because the story of surviving in a lifeboat with a tiger is a better story than going mad and surviving alone.

The whole point of the novel is to trick the reader into the question:  Which story do you prefer.  Of course everyone prefers Richard Parker to be real.  By transference, we’re ask to accept that belief in God is the better story, just like how we want to believe that Richard Parker existed.  We’re never explicitly told that wanting to believe in Richard Parker is the same as wanting to believe in God, but I feel it’s obvious.

Yann Martel tells us people prefer religion over reality because the story of God is a better story than reality.  And I ask:  “Is this why people refuse to accept the fact of evolution because they prefer the story with Richard Parker – oh, I mean God?”

The novel is an elaborate metaphor to explain why people believe in God.  It doesn’t say that God exists.  Nor do we know what Yann Martel believes.  It just says people prefers belief in God because it’s a better story than how we see reality directly.

What the novel is tricking us into confessing is that the belief in God, no matter how unbelievable that story might be, that it’s a better story than reality.  That when we’re pushed to the ends of our physical and mental limits, we want God even if he’s cruel, vicious and indifferent.  That the belief in God is what gets us through this life.

Has Yann Martel stacked the deck?  Is God the better story?  Yes, reality does sometime involve madness, murder and cannibalism.  And even in the God story, people die, animals are cruelly killed and eaten, people suffer.  If the audience was given the Richard Parker story, and a documentary about the evolution of the universe with cosmology and the evolution of life on Earth with evolutionary biology, is God still the better story.  I don’t think so.  Richard Parker is like a magician’s diversion.  If you could watch this movie and blot out the tiger, the reality of Earth is magnificent!  Richard Parker and God divert our attention to our fantastic reality.

God is only the better story when you don’t understand reality.  Richard Parker is ferocious, terrifying, cruel, indifferent and doesn’t answer prayers.  No matter how much Pi loves Richard Parker and wants his recognition, Richard Parker ultimately refuses to acknowledge Pi’s existence.

So why is God the better story if Richard Parker just walks away from us?  I know many people who have long given up religion but haven’t given up on God.  They say that God must have created us but walked away from the universe and is no longer involved.  Personally, I’m confident there is no God and the size, age and origin of reality is beyond our understanding.  I find it far more comforting to know the rules of our local universe and not feel the need to blame a superior being for bad things or beg for good things.  If a bacteria, shark, drunk driver hurts me badly, I just accept it was the luck of the draw and not a judgmental deity deciding I had done something wrong.

Where the metaphor of Richard Parker breaks down is Pi can see Richard Parker, and we never see God.  It’s actually easier to believe in Richard Parker than it is to believe on God.  Life of Pi is a wonderful novel.  I’ve read I twice now.  And each time I want to believe the Richard Parker story, even though I know the truth is the story about cannibalism.  How many times will I have to read this book before the realistic story is the better story?

What if the novel and movie had been about a boy that survived 227 days on the ocean and had endured the incident with cannibalism and madness and survived.  No tiger, no zebra, no hyena, no orangutan, just Pi, his mom, the Frenchman and the Buddhist sailor?  It would have been brutal, but the success of Pi surviving the ordeal would have been just as magnificent. 

Why do we want a better story?  Santa Claus is a better story than parents buying kids Christmas gifts from Target.  The Easter Bunny is a better story than throwing milk teeth in the garbage.  Heaven is a better story than dying.  But why is God a better story than reality?  Is God a better story than evolution?  If you understood evolution and cosmology, God isn’t the better story.  God is a simpler story, and God’s story is endlessly confusing and contradictory.  It’s just God is fantastically powerful like Richard Parker.

Even though I disagree with Yann Martel’s assertion, I love his fiction.  See, that’s the real revelation in this.  Fiction is the better story, and Life of Pi is very good fiction.  Humans embraces fiction with an intense passion.  Richard Parker is a better character than a cannibalistic Frenchman.  And for many people, all the stories about God, are a better story than the brutal aspects of reality.  However, there is nothing in fiction that comes within light years of evolution.  All stories about God are just crude children stories compared to the complexity and beauty of evolution.  Evolution is just as brutal as the Old Testament God – it’s just not personal.

Here’s the final kōan:  Did Yann Martel write this story to make us atheists or make us believers in fiction?

JWH – 11/28/12

Rethinking the Great Books of History

I am listening to “Books That Have Made History:  Books That Can Change Your Life” from The Teaching Company, taught by Professor J. Rufus Fears and I’m wondering if the “classic” books of history are being oversold.

I’m a life-long bookworm.  I got my degree in English Literature.  I study books about books, such as those by Harold Bloom, and I even study the Bible as literature although I’m an atheist.  I wish I had the time to master the great books.  And I started listening to these lectures expecting to expand on my knowledge of the great books of history.  However, Dr. Fears is making me think otherwise.

Books That Have Made History is a popular course for The Great Courses, but I think it has a fatal flaw.  And I’m not the only one to criticize this series, just read the customer reviews at the site.

Dr. Fears approaches these 36 lessons with the assumption the greatest books of history have great moral lessons to teach.  He expects great books to explore and answer four questions:

• Does God or do gods exist?
• What is fate?
• What do we mean by good and evil?
• How should we live?

Dr. Fears teaches these books with a firm belief in the answers.  He teaches each title by fitting them into his own theological beliefs.  In his opening lecture he discusses Dietrich Bonhoeffer and how he was imprisoned by the Nazi’s and hanged on April 9, 1945.  Dr. Fears said Bonhoeffer and the judge that sentenced him to die both read and studied the same classic books of history, and asks:  How did they come to such morally different conclusions?

Dr. Fears assumes the great books of history have answers to the great questions of history.  I think he’s wrong. 

Dr. Fears assumes there is a God, there is good and evil, that we’re expected to live by definite rules, and we have a fate or destiny in our lives.  I think he’s wrong.

Dr. Fears refuses to believe that the universe is accidental, that there is no good or evil, that there are no moral laws embedded in the universe, and the universe expects nothing from us.   I think he’s wrong.

Dr. Fears advocates The Iliad was the Bible for the ancient Greeks like the Christian Bible is for the western world, and that Homer was a singular real person.  I disagree.

Dr. Fears believe Moses was a real historical figure and there’s amble historical and anthropological evidence to support his story.  I disagree and even think many Jewish scholars disagree.

Now my point is not to say I dislike this lecture series because I disagree with the professor.  I’m asking why we should read the great books of history?  If they exist for the reasons Dr. Fears suggests, then I say, let’s forget them.  I’m dead tired of trying to puzzle out truth about reality from ancient thinkers.  I’m willing to read their books to understand the evolution of mankind and its history, but I have no interest in acquiring their beliefs.

Dr. Fears believes studying these books are valuable and relevant to teaching modern people how to think and act.  I think that’s wrong.  I think that’s why our world is confused and full of conflicting belief systems.

Great books make you think about life and reality, but they should give no answers.  Explicit answers are dangerous.  We live in the 21st century and we need to study the moment.  Now it’s actually impossible to study the current “now” in books, since books take years to write.  But for example, if you are studying cosmology, anthropology, or geology, or another other science, you really need to be reading books written in the last five years, and no more than 10 year old.

History and biographies can have a trailing edge of maybe 25 years, but that’s because some topics don’t get written about all that often.

If you’re studying the great books of history, I believe they should be read as primary sources to supplement current historical research.  Your research efforts should go into studying how and why they were written in context of their times, and not use them for acquiring personal beliefs.

This represents a schism in approaching reality.  If you believe that science has been the only consistent human endeavor to answer questions about reality, ancient knowledge will only be superstitious beliefs and endless philosophizing.  If you believe in God, then ancient writings are a goldmine of potentially revealed secrets.  Books That Have Made History falls in the later category.  My thinking falls in the former, so these lectures have little value to me.

However, they do make me ask:  Should or can we write current books that summarize good and ethical behavior for people to study?  If people are wanting to read books about how to live their lives in a “proper” manner, can’t we come up with something a little more current and based on contemporary knowledge?

JWH – 9/12/12

Studying Science in My Retirement Years–Breaking the Science Barrier

I am listening to From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll and although I can understand his words I doubt I understand what he’s trying to tell me.  The book is about time and entropy, and how they are seen from classical physics, relativity, and quantum physics.  I read and listen to a lot of science books, but I believe there’s a science barrier that I can’t break through.  I’ve also been reading Brian Greene and Lawrence M. Krauss, whose books often overlap what Carroll is covering.  These books are fantastic, both in the quality of writing and research, and in scope of topic.  They take the reader to the edge of space and time and describe the cutting edge of scientific knowledge.

The fruits of my study show a murky comprehension at best.  I can understand science at the level Galileo and Newton understood it, but 21st Century science is magical and closer to science fiction, lots of razzle-dazzle.  I’d like to truly see where science is pointing.  I’d like to grasp the experimental logic of how scientists got there.

I’m sixty years old and I never stopped trying to understand reality.  The older I get the more sure I am that religion has nothing to say about the nature of reality.  In recent years I’ve come doubt the validity of philosophy.  Logic and rhetoric can be very seductive, but also deceptive.  I am quite confident that science is the only system that explains reality. 

But I’m not sure I can understand science’s explanation!

What’s hilariously ironic, is we believers in science must take so much of what we’re taught about science on faith.

I struggle to make sense of quantum physics.  I wish they’d stop talking about cats and talk about actual experiments.  When science writers try to convey quantum physics they end up talking in metaphors that just don’t make a lot of sense.  Black holes and cosmology have a conceptual reality that makes sense, even though I can’t understand why information won’t be destroyed if it fell into a singularity.  I was very lucky to read The Information by James Gleick before reading these books, because information theory does make sense to me, just not at the quantum mechanics level yet.

When little kids ask their mommies where everything comes from and their moms answer “God created everything” – that’s a big convenient cheat.  Moms really don’t know or don’t want to take the time to explain what science has learned about the nature of reality.  The truth is out there, at least part of it, and it’s not what Fox Mulder and Dana Scully discovered with the help of Chris Carter, or anything you can learn from prophets and their religions, or even from Plato and Aristotle, and their philosophical descendants.

  

If you want to know the truth you have to study science.  It’s the only game in town.  Trust me.  I’ve read hundreds of books searching for the truth, and it all distills down to that.  Religion and philosophy can take you down years of blind alleys.

How badly do you want to know the truth?  Bad enough to study math?  Yeah, I thought so.  At 60, I don’t think I can go back and pick up where I left off after my B in Calculus I.  Without being a math whiz, how close can we come to really understanding science?  Without math, how close can anyone get to understanding what science has to teach?  I don’t want to accept science on faith.  Nor should anyone else.

In school and college I studied physics, chemistry and biology.  I know a fair history of science and great experiments, and how we gained the scientific knowledge we have up until around Einstein.  This is classical science.  It’s the science at the world’s eye view of things, where most experiments can be repeated in the classroom.  I’ve explored the larger world of astronomy with telescopes and books, and the mechanical universe makes sense too.  It’s when cosmology melds with particle physics and the quantum reality that my mind fails to grasp what’s going on.

Since I never had my own personal atom smasher, I’ve never really understood how scientists know what they know about the zoo of sub-atomic particles, much less quantum physics.  Because this world is invisible, and exploring it is so mathematical, science writers often resort to analogies, metaphors, similes, and thought experiments to explain this frontier of reality.  These stories sound wonderful, but they don’t help me see what’s really happening.  Classical experiments in gravity, optics and electricity have a immediate truth to them that doesn’t work when studying particle physics.  Chemistry is abstract, but models of molecular bonds help picture it.  The microscope gives biology a direct view.  Animations of the sub-atomic world help me picture things, but I’ve been told my whole life these animations are wrong.

What I need to do is go back to the 1600 and retrace all the experiments that were done to set the stage for particle physics.  That might help me conceptualize quantum mechanics.

I did find Following the Path of Discovery – Repeat Famous Experiments and Inventions – Hands on Activities for High School and College Students.

I once bought a CD-ROM copy of Scientific American’s “The Amateur Scientist” but I can’t find it now.  Too bad, it’s out of print and selling for $852 used.  But it contains the complete run of the “The Amateur Scientist” from Scientific American.  That would be a great way to spend my retirement years, doing those experiments myself.  But DIY science has gone out of fashion.  SciAm dropped “The Amateur Scientist” in 2001.  Heathkit and Edmund Scientific gave up on budding scientists years ago.  Make Magazine has rekindled the old DIY craze, but it’s not quite the same.

The big movement in Education now-a-days is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).  Maybe it will reignite a rediscovery of science learning through teaching classic experiments.

PBS should create a television series on historical science experiments.  There’s lots of stuff on the net about fun science experiments, like what Steve Spangler does, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  PBS NOVA comes close sometimes, but they don’t follow an experiment step-by-step, but instead create a historical summary of it.

And I might not need to see historical experiments performed to understand particle physics.  Studying the history of quantum mechanics from the beginning, starting with Michael Faraday, might do the trick.  I’m reading 21st century books when I might need to read 19th century books first, or good histories of that period.

I’ve often wondered if I should start a reading program that covered the history of science.  My problem might be I’m reading about modern science without enough historical foundation in science.

If I was an ambitious blogger I’d create a timeline of science history, and then link the best science books I could find to the timeline.  Maybe someone has already done that?  So far I haven’t found such a timeline, so I might get to work on it.  It would be a great retirement project that could take years.

Here’s an example.  In 1838, Michael Faraday noticed a strange light arc between the cathode and anode in a glass tube.  It took science until 1897 to discover this light was electrons.  At the time science thought atoms were the smallest bits of matter.  What are the best science books that cover those years and experiments?  How would I arrange such books on a timeline?  What other science experiments were going on between 1838-1897 that should go on the timeline too.  What books cover their history?

I’m rearranging my books right now, so this gives me an idea.  I want to start a reading project that starts with 1600 and moves forward in time.

JWH – 8/22/12

Living in a 2D World

I’m reading The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, and his chapter on stereoscopic vision made me think about my own vision and how I live my life.  I have a bad right eye and I have poor stereoscopic vision.  When I close one eye I don’t notice any difference.  I was told when I was young that my mind compensates with a pseudo-sense of 3D.  Dr. Sacks spends quite a bit of time talking about how much he loves his stereoscopic vision, that he’s even a member of New York Stereoscopic Society and has been a lifelong collector of stereoscopic cameras and viewers.  When he lost vision in one eye he wrote quite eloquently about what it means to live in a 2D world after being so attuned to 3D reality.  He also chronicles a patient that spent most of her life in a 2D world, and acquired 3D vision late in life.

Sacks mentioned several times in chapter 6 that many people have weak stereoscopic vision and have learned to compensate and don’t even know what they are missing.  I guess I’m one of them.  But then I got to thinking about my visual world.  I spend all day working in front of a computer, and all evening either at the computer, TV set, or reading books, and that means I spend a majority of my day looking at 2D fields, either of LCD or paper.  I also love paintings, cover art on books, CDs, LPs, magazines, and photography.  I also have a tablet computer and iPod touch – more 2D living.

I wonder if my lack of 3D vision pushed me into enjoying 2D hobbies and jobs?  I love hi-rez computer screens.  I’m happiest when I’m immersed in one of my 2D worlds.  But I’m not alone.  Is all our gadgets and screens pushing us all into preferring a 2D world?  If I had been born with great vision would I have become a bookworm and computer geek?  From reading The Mind’s Eye we are warned very vividly to expect a lot of changes and adapting to failing bodies and brains when we get old.  All his case histories are about people adapting, so I assume I adapted before I even knew I was missing anything.

I can’t recommend The Mind’s Eye highly enough.  It’s fucking intense.  It’s the scariest book I’ve ever read.  Most people will find this book immensely depressing and horrifying.  Zombies and vampires are kittens and puppies compared to what awaits us in old age.  It scares me and inspires me at the same time.  It’s about people with various kinds of brain damage, usually from dementia, stroke, aging, birth defects, etc., and how they coped when their way of life was greatly disturbed when one day one of their abilities were taken away.

What’s funny is most of the people that Sacks writes about deal with their disability with great bravery, but Sacks tells us how frightening and depressed he got when he chronicles losing vision in his right eye.  But even with all his physical failings, this 79-year-old man does more each day in old age than I ever did on any day in my prime. 

That’s why this book is so inspiring.  We’re all going to die, and more than likely, we’re all going to see our bodies and minds deteriorate before we get to take that long dirt nap.  It’s going to be painful, scary, depressing and hard.  But Sacks tells us stories about how people go through horrible conditions.  If I have a stroke in my future, then I’ve very glad I read this book.  I once had a stroke like incidence and the details in this book explained what happened to me.  For a short time I lost all language awareness.

We are used to thinking that aging means failure of our physical health.  But our brains wear down too, and in many ways.  Sacks profiles people who have lost the ability to read or recognize faces or objects, things when we read about them sound bizarre.  But if you’ve ever known people who have had a stroke, or dementia, you’ll recognize all of these horrifying failures of brain functionality.

We like to think of ourselves as little souls inside a body.  That if we lose a leg or have a heart attack it’s something that’s happening to our body.  We seldom contemplate what happens when our soul comes apart?  If you woke up one day and couldn’t tell the difference between your wife, mother and daughter, how are you going to react?  Quite a few of these stories are about people who have healthy eyes but can no longer process vision in a normal way.  Sacks explores many subprograms that make up our visual processing of reality.

If you read The Mind’s Eye you’ll see how everyone adapts their limited senses to reality.  No one is 100% functioning in all brain processing.  Reading this book makes me realize how I’ve adapted to living in a 2D reality.  My brain has adapted my vision so I can drive, walk down stairs, wash the dishes, play ball, catch a Frisbee, but from what I’ve read I’ve never known the beauty of stereoscopic vision as Dr. Sacks describes it.  When Sacks lost his 3D vision, he had trouble walking down stairs, taking ahold of objects, and did things like pour wine into people’s laps.

I hope I can remember this book, because when I experience brain damage or mental malfunction, I want to stay calm and not freak out.  When my brain starts breaking down and my consciousness observes the world going wacky, I want to go, “Hey, I know what this is, the area of my brain that processes written words must have conked out.”  Several people in this book described seeing words as if everything was written in a different language and alphabet.  Can you imagine how scary that would be?  Hopefully understanding the ideas in The Mind’s Eye might help deal with such experiences – if I can remember.

The thing I fear the most is not remembering who I am.  But you know what?  People adapt to that too.   

JWH – 8/8/12

Have the Climate Deniers Won the War–Or Just Built the 21st Century Maginot Line?

How often do you see a big documentary on Global Warming on TV now-a-days?  Sure, the nightly news often mentions global warming when it runs stories on hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and other extreme weather events, or when it does stories on habitat changes for animals, plants and insects, but you seldom see big documentaries about climate warming anymore.  Nor is climate change a hot political issue for the presidential elections.  Obama hasn’t made it an issue, and when climate change does come up in Congress or State Capitols it’s often by politicians suppressing climate change data or bills, or even writing laws against collecting climate data.

Read these articles to see what I mean:

• Climate-change deniers winning long-term fight
• Climate “Deniers” Winning the War
• Key Components of the Climate Change Denial Machine
• Besieged by Climate Deniers, A Scientist Decides to Fight Back
• The Dirty Dozen of Climate Change Denial
• Climate Cover-Up
• Climategate: What Really Happened?
• The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science
• What Exxon doesn’t want you to know
• Right-Wing Climate Denier Strategizes To Smear Wind Energy
• Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name
• Climate scientists not cowed by relentless climate change deniers
• World Climate Report

Are the climate change deniers and skeptical scientists right?  Do we have nothing to fear from global warming?  Or are they complete deniers of reality and have built a political Maginot Line to convince the American public we’re all safe from the global warming threat?

Many of the reports above are from writers attacking the idea of global warming and climate change.  They consider themselves fighting fear mongers.

Now you can read for yourself the reports about the climate from NOAA – State of the Climate.  This ain’t light reading and you have to concentrate on the data, charts and graphs.  If you search the web you can find reports from other agencies and countries.  On one hand you have the scientists studying the data, and on the other hand people, including some scientists, but mostly right-wing activists who say the data is all wrong, deceptive or incomplete.

Who do you believe?  The folks you want to believe?  Doesn’t that make us all reality deniers?

We spend untold billions on defense because we fear attacks on the United States.  If global warming is the threat scientists say it is, it’s more of a security threat than we’ve ever faced by any war.  We have a long history of going all paranoia over reds, but why greens?  Some people even believe the greens are the new reds.  But the greens are trying to protect America, but the public doesn’t want to believe that.

There is something deeply psychological going on here and I don’t know what it is.

If everyone is sticking their heads in the sand, what do you do?  If the collective says, “Let’s pretend nothing is happening, and it will all go away,” what do you do?

If you look at the climate history charts, the scientists appear to be right, so how long do we keep looking at the data and seeing it relate to reality before everyone with their heads in the sand and their butts in the air start thinking, “Hey, my ass is on fire!”

To tell the truth, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a huge scientific reality to denying.  That’s it’s part of human nature.  That no matter how bad things get, the deniers will keep denying global warming, and finding reasons to think things are okay.  That denying reality is MUCH bigger than science.  That if I read enough history I’d find that the deniers have always won the war on denying.

Or is it simply, to conservatives liberals always have to be wrong, no matter what, and on every subject.

JWH – 7/11/12

Why Humans Won’t Be the God of Robots

There’s a scene in the film Prometheus where an android asked a human why he would want to meet his maker?  The human replied that he’d like to ask his maker why he made him.  So the android said to the human, “Why did you make me?”  And the human replied, “Because we could.”  And the android then asked, “Will that answer be good enough for you?”

Science fiction has always loved the motif of man being the God of robots and AI machines – but I don’t think that will be true.  Not because artificial intelligence can’t exist, but because of how AI will evolve.

Please read “’A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveal About Artificial Intelligence” by Daniel C. Dennett at The Atlantic.  No really, take the time to read this essay, if you are at all interested in artificial intelligence because this is an elegant essay about how AI will evolve.  It’s also a unique comparison of Charles Darwin and Alan Turing that observes concepts I’ve never read or thought about before, especially about the nature of evolution.  But for those who won’t take the time to read the article, I’ll summarize.  Darwin’s theory of evolution, according to Dennett, proves that God or an intelligent designer didn’t create life on Earth.  And Turing, with his Turing machine, proves that computers can produce creative output with no intelligent mind at all.  What I get from this is simplicity can produce complexity.

But back to AI and robots.  For a long time we’ve thought we could program our way to artificial intelligence.  That once we learned how intelligence worked we could write a program that allowed machines to be smart and aware like humans.  The belief was if random events in physics, chemistry and biology could produce us, why couldn’t we create life in silicon by our own intelligent design?

The solution to AI has always been elusive.  Time and again we’ve invented machines that could do smart things without being smart.  Machine self-awareness is always just over the horizon.

What Dennett is suggesting, is artificial intelligence won’t come from our intelligent designs, but from programs evolving in the same kind of mindless way that we evolved out of the organic elements of the Earth.  That humans can create the context of AI creation, that humans can be the amino acids, but they can’t be the designers.  The programs that produce AI need a context to evolve on their own.  In other words, we need to invent an ecosystem for computer programs to develop and evolve on their own.  How that will work I have no idea.

This means we’ll never get to code in Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.  It also suggests that complexity doesn’t come from complexity, but the creative power of non-intelligent design.  There’s a lot to this.

I’m also reading Imagine by Jonah Lehrer and it discusses how creativity often comes from our unconscious mind, and through group interaction.  Often creative ideas burst out in an Ah-Ha! moment after we have digested the facts, chewed them over, worried, given up and then forgot about the problem.  We are not even the God of our own thoughts and creativity.  That intelligent design is the randomness of evolution.

Time and again the Lehrer book talks about creativity coming from process and not an individual expression.  If you combine what Dennett and Lehrer are saying you catch a whiff of spookiness about unconscious forces at play in our minds and life in general.  Conscious thinking become less impressive because it’s only the tip of the iceberg that surfs on the deep waves of the unconscious mind.  Evolution is a blind force of statistics.  Is creativity just another blind force like evolution?

If Dennett is right, our conscious minds will never be powerful enough to conceive of an artificial mind.  And Dennett also says that Charles Darwin by coming up with the theory of evolution indirectly proves that a God couldn’t have created us whole in a divine mind.  If you think about all of this enough, you’ll start seeing this is saying something new.  It’s a new paradigm, like the Copernican revolution.  We’re not the center of the universe, and now conscious thought is not the crown of creation.

[I didn’t write this.  Thousands of books that I’ve read did.]

JWH – 6/28/12

Does Science Fiction Hurt Science?

Science is under attack in America today.  There are more anti-science people than scientists.  And by scientists I mean anyone who accepts science as the best method for understanding reality, not just working Ph.D. scientists.  I just finished a book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and they carefully chronicle how fraud science is being used in politics to attack real science.

Most people have no idea how real science is conducted and communicated, thus it’s very easy to corrupt the general public about scientific knowledge.  Real science is done in peer reviewed journals and is rather plodding.  Popular science writing takes real science and tries to explain it.  This is the first level where unscientific noise enters the equation.  Most people do not read peer reviewed science journals so they must depend on textbook and popular science writers to explain science to them.

The third level down are writers (like me) who take what they’ve read in popular science writing and further spread the ideas or use the ideas in some applied political or practical fashion.  This is were a lot of imprecise and unscientific noise gets spread to readers in general.

I’m a life-long science fiction reader.  I spend a lot of time writing about science fiction and its history.  I grew up thinking science fiction promoted the study of science.  Now I’m not so sure.

Anyone can introduce a meme into the social network.  And they can claim the meme is scientific.   99% of Ph.D. climate scientists say global warming is happening, and it’s caused by humans, but if one non-science person who is good at communicating can convince a large group of people that global warming is a fraud, it will be believed, even more so than by the Ph.D. scientists.  The scientists have billions of dollars of the latest technology systematically researching the problem on a worldwide scale, and one person, with no expertise and equipment, but with good communications skills can destroy all their effort.  Ideas are more powerful than science.

We live in a world of seven billion gullible people who’d rather believe what they want than the truth.  People are self-delusional.

Science fiction is a powerful art form that generates non-scientific memes.  Is that good or bad?  Should we worry.

Thousands of years ago some human came up with the idea of angels and the meme has existed ever since.  In more recent times science fiction promoted the idea of faster-the-light traveling spaceships.  Is a warp drive any more real than an angel?  Battlestar Galactica had warp drives and angels.  I thought the show was a lot of fun, but I don’t believe in either, but many people do.  Create an idea and the believers will come.

The innocence of science fiction corrupting minds with junk science depends on fans knowing that science fiction is just for fun.  I’ve argued this point before and some of my friends exclaim that it’s obvious that people know that science fiction books and movies are just for fun.  I don’t agree.  I think some people want to believe that their favorite science fiction can come true.  That the future of mankind includes galactic civilizations, time travel, downloading minds into clones and computers, and so on.

I think great science fiction takes real science and dramatizes it in ways that make readers speculate about the future.  The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a good example.  Wells used the idea of evolution to speculate about descendants of Homo Sapiens and the extinction of our race and the Earth.  The time machine was merely a gimmick to let the reader visit these speculations, but it’s that gimmick that’s stuck with the popular mind.

Other science fiction throws out far out ideas just to see what people will say.  There’s nothing wrong with fun speculation, unless people consider it science.  Take for instance the current film Prometheus which I’ve already written about.  What’s dangerous is if some people actual start believing that aliens visited the Earth and helped humans develop civilization.  Prometheus is only a continuation of 2001: A Space Odyssey back in 1968 and that led to Chariots of the Gods type thinking.

Now this kind of fun pretending is fine as long as you don’t think it’s science.  Science has a huge problem in America.  Few want to study it, fewer still want to accept it, and many want to corrupt it.  I have to ask if my favorite art form is contributing to undermining scientific thinking?

According to this recent Gallop Poll, 46% of Americans believe God created man in the last 10,000 years, according to Bible history.  Science is competing with that kind of thinking.  Does it help science to have science fiction generating all kinds of nonsense ideas too?  If you understand science, science fiction is fun, but if you don’t, how can you tell if the ideas are real or crazy?

Follow the link to the Gallop Poll and read the statistics about Americans and their beliefs.  They’re closer to fantasy and science fiction than science.  In fact, people who pursue scientific thinking makes up only a tiny fraction of the population.  We all depend on science for medicine, cars, airplanes, computers, weather prediction, etc., but few of us study how it works.  Scientists are the magicians of our times, and few understand how their magic works.

I’ve read popular books and magazines about science all my life.  I think of myself as an advocate for scientific thinking, but I’m far from a disciplined scientific thinker.  Science is a very misused word.  Our society is full of junk science, fraud science, pseudo science, fake science, and an emerging category I’m calling zombie science.

Some computer viruses take over personal computers and turn them into zombie computers to attack other computers and create massive denial of service attacks.  Conservatives waging a war on science and environmentalism have developed fake and fraud science to inject into people’s minds to spread zombie science.  They are taking over people’s minds to create a denial of science attack with their anti-science science.  This is very diabolical, but impressive.  Read Merchants of Doubt for the details.

What I’m asking is in this war on science, is science fiction helping or hurting?

Don’t just toss this idea off.  Think about it for awhile.  Everybody has a map of reality in their heads.  How functional or accurate that map is depends on how well it corresponds to actual reality.  That’s what science is about, validating the input of our senses.  It’s extremely easy to program humans to believe anything.  Not only can we be brainwashed but we all actively promote self-delusion.  Scientific thinking is an extremely hard discipline to pursue, much harder than Zen.

Remember Cypher in the film The Matrix, when he sells out to Agent Smith?  Cypher is willing to accept a delusional world because it gives him what he wants.  Most humans do that.  I wonder if our love of science fiction is like steak to Cypher?

People will dismiss this idea.  They will say only an idiot will believe the stuff in science fiction, that science fiction is only books you read for fun.  Well, how many people believe in the Bible?  It’s only a book too.  Don’t get infected by zombie science.

JWH – 6/23/12

Are You Naïve, Delusional, A Rube, A Chump?–The War On Science

Do you believe everything you read?

Can you verify everything you know?

How much of what you know is wrong?

People believe what they want to believe, and they always think they’ve right.  Would you even know when you’re wrong?  Does it matter, or would you really like to know the truth?

The reason I ask these question is because we’re in the middle of a war on science.  Like the rulers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are people who want you to believe what they want to believe and they know what they believe isn’t scientific, so their battle plan is to confuse people by attacking science and making it very hard to know what’s true and what’s not true.  Like those rulers in that famous dystopian novel, they’re willing to rewrite history and invent newspeak to fool people into believing their version of the truth.

Why trust what I have to say is the truth?  Well, you shouldn’t.  Never trust anyone.  The important thing is to learn how to verify facts for yourself.  It’s also important to learn how information is presented to you.  It’s very easy to be persuaded.  People are quick to believe anything.  It’s surprisingly easy to convince people to believe false information.  It’s devilishly hard to be logical.  People aren’t rational, even though we believe we are.  We’re geniuses at self-delusion.  Don’t trust yourself either.

Absolute truth is elusive in this reality.  We don’t live in a black and white world, but one with infinite shades of gray.  One of the biggest misconceptions about science is its knowledge is one hundred percent certain.  We know with absolute certainty that the Earth orbits the Sun.  Our knowledge of celestial mechanics is good enough that we can launch a satellite to Saturn and years later and billions of miles traveled, we’ll hit our target perfectly.  This is while the Earth, the satellite and Saturn all move independently tens of thousands of miles an hour in different directions, and the gravity of all the bodies in the solar system come into play.  This is fantastic knowledge that correlates to many decimal places.

Science is far less sure about the causes of breast cancer or global warming, but scientists know far more about those topics than you think.  The trick is, if you are worried about getting cancer or impending global warming, is to understand just how much they do know.  Evolution is closer to the fact of the Earth orbiting the Sun than the causes of global warming, and what we know about global warming is massive, but millions of people are fooled otherwise.

Now I can’t prove that in this essay.  It would take more words than I have time to write.  What you need to learn is how to examine news about science, and to do that I highly recommend reading Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.  Oreskes and Conway examine several public scientific debates that have occurred since the 1940s and they show how science works and doesn’t work, as well as how anti-science forces are corrupting science in the United States.

After World War II scientists began to tell people that smoking cigarettes was not safe.  Now the tobacco industry didn’t want people believing that, even though their own scientists told them it was true.  When the tobacco industry realized they couldn’t refute the actual science, they discovered they could confuse the public by attacking science in general and sowing doubt.  Oreskes and Convey show a history of how big businesses have refined these techniques to fight one scientific discovery after another that threatened livelihood.  And they use the public as their dupes.

Oreskes and Conway examine these battles like a court case carefully weighing all evidence presented by science and the anti-scientists.  One thing big business learned quickly was to hire scientists to attack other scientists, and Merchants of Doubt presents several men  and women who have made careers of being anti-scientists.  Oreskes and Conway try hard not to vilify these individuals, but I can’t help seeing them as evil.

But who is to say I’m right?  The point of Merchants of Doubt is to learn how scientific issues are studied and decide for yourself.

We all get email with a political agenda.  These emails have carefully crafted stories designed to convince us to believe something specific about reality.  It might be that global warming is a myth, or Obama isn’t a natural born American.  Why believe what you read?  Why be skeptical?  Because there’s a war going on and each side is recruiting.  One side wants you to be their chump.  It’s like computer viruses that convert your computer into zombies used for organized crime – someone wants to use your mind, and they want you to act for them.

Don’t get brainwashed.  Learn how to think for yourself.  Learn how to think scientifically.  Be skeptical.  Seek good evidence.

Real science works through peer reviewed journals.  A scientist will develop a hypothesis to test.  They will set up an experiment.  They will report their results in a paper and send it to a peer reviewed journal.   Fellow scientists in the same discipline will review the article and judge it for proper methodology.  If the article is accepted and published it doesn’t mean the results are facts.  Other scientists will read the article and devise new tests and go through the process again.  Topics under examination will be thoroughly researched over and over again until a statistical consensus emerges.  It takes a long time.  All too often one test result will be reported in the national news and causes a big brouhaha.  This is one reason why many people find science confusing.  They think one test result is suppose to tell the absolute truth and it doesn’t.

To further complicate scientific inquiry, people with a vested interest in a particular topic will make that topic newsworthy.  They will do everything they can to try their case in the court of popular journalism.  In peer reviewed journals only people who are specialists in the topic deal with the subject, but in regular journalism anybody can say anything.  You might get a food processing chemist proclaiming facts about climatology.  Or you might get high school dropout that just wants to get their opinion heard.

Don’t believe what you read about scientific concepts unless you thoroughly research them.  Few people are going to read peer reviewed science journals.  So what can you do?  Learn to read popular science books.  At least research Wikipedia.  Wikipedia can be untrustworthy, but many of its articles are a battleground between many points of view and a consensus often gets hammered out.

Another good realty check is Snopes.com.   Snopes often reviews silly topics, but all too often people believe silly crap.  When you hear about something new check Snopes.  A large percentage of internet gossip is fabricated.

Like I said, I highly recommend reading Merchants of Doubt.  Instead of saying anything more about the book please read Global Warming Deniers and Their Proven Strategy of Doubt to get a bit of the flavor of the book.

This isn’t the only book on this subject.  Journalists, writers and historians are beginning to see a pattern.

• Doubt is their Project:  How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels
• Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz
• The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney
• The Battle Over Climate Science – Popular Science

JWH – 6/21/12