Comments on: Dark Worlds

By: p c

p c — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:48:31 +0000

I think this is going out of control.
There must be a filter to the comments…

By: Anders

Anders — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:09:27 +0000

always uh..thinking.

By: Anders

Anders — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:05:23 +0000

I made a comment suggesting that dark matter might interact with itself and other forms of invisible matter and create its own worlds on peter woits blog. it got deleted because it was off topic and probably not serious enough for Peter. I guess he should have paid more attention to the brilliance in his comment section and not be so prudent!! Some questions for future conteplation: Could there be endless parallel dark universes that are all dark in relation to each other? How do we explain the existance of our own specific consciousnesses in face of the impossibly small probability for them to have appeared at all? Is the baby universe theory the answer to this problem?

By: Marcel Kincaid

Marcel Kincaid — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:24:31 +0000

“I will not. Paying money for knowledge is just plain idiotic. ”

That may explain why you have so little.

By: It Is Not Evil To Get Paid For Work You Do | Cosmic Variance | ACE GUIDE -ART-CULTURE-EDUCATION-ENTERTAINMENT

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:33:32 +0000

[...] weird commotion has broken out in the comments on Mark’s post. Unfortunately not about new forces and interactions in the dark sector, which would be great, but [...]

By: The Beginning – A Halloween Tale | Cosmic Variance | ACE GUIDE -ART-CULTURE-EDUCATION-ENTERTAINMENT

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:32:14 +0000

[...] “Remember what we always talked about? How one day we’d crack the system? How we’d ride this cosmology gig all the way to the bank? And how we’d make these poor saps so v…” [...]

By: TimG

TimG — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:38:33 +0000

So I’m guessing Darius has never bought a book before. Or, say, gone to college. After all, “paying for knowledge is idiotic.”

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:56:40 +0000

I’m truly amazed at much of this discussion. I’ll just make a few points:

1) Just for the record, authors get paid a trivial amount for an article in Scientific American – just a small honorarium. The money goes into, among other things, paying for the wonderful artwork and editorial help we got. And I think that should be paid for. No scientist would ever write an article like this for the money.

2) This is not a research paper reporting on the results of my publicly-funded research. Any one of you can go and read those for free. for example, some relevant to the SciAm article are

http://arXiv.org/abs/0808.1105

http://arXiv.org/abs/0709.1128

I don’t hear complaints when people write popular books about science, and this is like a very small version of that.

3) You may not have noticed, but I, and others on this site, actually do an awful lot of free public science education. this includes some of the posts written here, public lectures, science cafes, panel discussions and speaking at schools. It is also worth pointing out that we do not need to do anything like this amount of work, and, without criticizing them, note that most scientists do none of it. I’m not looking for a pat on the back – merely to balance some of the nonsense above.

4) As far as reaching an audience, I don’t have much to say about the eventual structure of the distribution of knowledge in society, but one thing is entirely clear. The way things run today, this one article is likely to reach many more people who are interested in science than anything I could post for free anywhere. Most certainly it will reach some new people who have not read other things I have done. And at the end of the day, by the way, this is why people write for Scientific American. The idea that one should feel bad about this is, frankly, ridiculous.

By: Cynthia Typaldos

Cynthia Typaldos — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 05:10:53 +0000

There is another business model besides a paywall — social payments. Yet not a single traditional media company has even experimented with social payments….they are rushing willy-nilly to slap-in-the-face paywalls.

By: Timon of Athens

Timon of Athens — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 08:17:05 +0000

“You may have written a brilliant and inspiring article… but you are an idiot.”

Dear Darius: as I wipe away the tears of laughter, I have to point out that if everyone on the extreme left cut themselves off from all sources of information, then they would have to start making stuff up. Oh, wait, you do that already….

By: Garrett

Garrett — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:52:21 +0000

Hey Mark,
Congratulations on the Scientific American article! The point, voiced rather caustically, that reading the article requires payment does have some substance, which might be addressed constructively. Scientific American and contributing authors go to a lot of effort, as you described, to produce an excellent magazine, and it is right and good that all be compensated by readers paying directly. But it is also customary for scientists, most of whom are publicly funded, to present their work openly and without charge, as a gift to society. I believe SciAm accommodates this, as in several cases I have seen unabridged and unedited versions of SciAm articles appear on the arxiv, available for free, a few months after they appear in print. This seems like a good solution, worth suggesting to you and your coauthor, both to escape the space constraints on your writing and to appease your voracious and violent horde of blog commenters.
Best,
Garrett

By: Doug Watts

Doug Watts — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 08:36:53 +0000

Shorter Mark: “Hey, read my story! It’s really great !!! But it’s behind a paywall! Ha ha!!!

By: Quick Links | A Blog Around The Clock

Quick Links | A Blog Around The Clock — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 03:40:33 +0000

[...] Dark Worlds [...]

By: Tweets that mention Dark Worlds | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine -- Topsy.com

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:54:23 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sean Carroll, Michael Hayes. Michael Hayes said: RT @seanmcarroll: What did the world do before there were blog comment sections? http://is.gd/gsKLT [...]

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:50:10 +0000

Completely serious. Of course, there are many different kinds of “awesome.”

By: S.G.

S.G. — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:26:41 +0000

Darius, you’re an ass. And if Sean is serious he is too. If you don’t manufacture a specific product and you’re not in the service industry, you trade in information. What the hell do you do?

By: bornyesterday

bornyesterday — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:24:44 +0000

I wonder how he’s accessing the internet.

By: Brandon Swift

Brandon Swift — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:24:03 +0000

A hearty “like” for #3 from Sean.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:21:34 +0000

That might be the most awesome comment ever posted on this blog.

By: Darius

Darius — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:58:37 +0000

“Just like the newsstand version, the online version of the article costs money of course. But if you do read it, I hope you enjoy it.”

I will not. Paying money for knowledge is just plain idiotic. So people with money can’t have the knowledge? Are you saying that the knowledge should stay with the elite that control our world? Sorry but paying for information and knowledge is a huge peeve of mine especially this day and age. Just recently I tried to get some de-classified ‘free information’ from the UK and they wanted to charge me 3.50 pounds (per document) just to download the bloody thing. You may have written a brilliant and inspiring article… but you are an idiot.