There’s a good article over at Slate this week about science versus science communication versus public relations. It makes some valid, and I’m afraid rather depressing, points:
There are obvious reasons why science communication is a necessary and worthwhile endeavor, but a huge one is that there’s a politically motivated push to destabilize scientific authority. At a Heartland Institute conference last month, Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House science committee, told attendees he would now refer to “climate science” as “politically correct science,” to loud cheers. This lumps scientists in with the nebulous “left” and, as Daniel Engber pointed out here in Slate about the upcoming March for Science, rebrands scientific authority as just another form of elitism.
I would add that one thing science writers and speakers lack is a viable career path. Most do it as an unpaid hobby, a lucky few do it as a under-paid part-time side job, while juggling full-time jobs and other responsibilities. Only a tiny handful are able to make a full-time living at it. Our opponents on the other hand are fed by a money nozzle that plugs into the wealthiest corporations and billionaires on Earth.
- Tomorrow on Sunday Kos we’ll be looking at Montana. It truly is the fossil treasure state!
- There’s a March for Science today.
- This is probably not the headline a smartphone maker wants to see.
- In celebration of Earth Day: the image above shows Earth as a distant dot as seen through the rings of Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. If you check the mission homepage, you might just make out our over-sized moon, too. It may not look like much, especially compared to other breathtaking images harvested from sharp camera eyes courtesy of our world-class space program, but Carl Sagan put it in cosmic perspective:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.