Chad has a spectacular takedown of the latest Easterbrook nonsense. It is impossible to do much better. Plus, you get to read snark like:
His most recent effort is just a masterpiece of dumb, though. This is a desperately stupid bit of work, even by the standards of desperately stupid science interludes in Gregg Easterbrook columns. He packs more dumb into these nine paragraphs than I would’ve thought possible in a major media outlet.
Go give it a read, and enjoy.
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Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
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November 21st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
oh, thank Finagle.
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Easterbrook wrote:But most experiments from the bygone golden age of physics were done at private expense, not using tax subsidies.
mmm. Perhaps we should examine the tax codes of yesteryear as well. It seems that the tax rate for the very wealthy (unlike today’s anemic 17% or so) was greater than 60%, and in some states closer to 75%. These rates could be offset, and were, by tax-deductible giving, especially to the sciences and arts. Thus the “private expense” was a useful and highly productive tax-avoidance tactic. In those days universities would provide a vast menus of possible projects to wealthy donors suggesting how best to offload their tax debt. Today we have to hire whole departments of development bureaucrats, competing against other universities’ development departments, to find the funds for the next project, mostly to add capital to the endowment, or perhaps a wing of a building (and only rarely a science project–and almost never an art one).
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:34 am
you might find it funny to see the canon of things that scienceblogs.com has had to say about greg easterbrook over the years. you kind of wish he’d stick to football… if that…
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:53 am
Let’s not forget this gem, taken from the web site for Lee Smolin’s book,
“The Trouble With Physics”
“…the most important book about cosmology since Steven Weinberg’s 1977 volume The First Three Minutes.” Gregg Easterbrook, Slate, Sept. 14, 2006
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
That snark may actually be a boojum … with disastrous consequences.
A dark matter, indeed.