Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU!lindsay
From: lindsay@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (Donald Lindsay)
Newsgroups: sci.misc
Subject: Re: Omni-Americans
Message-ID: <1064@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: 8 Mar 88 18:56:39 GMT
References: <5017@uwmcsd1.UUCP> <2790@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Sender: netnews@PT.CS.CMU.EDU
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
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In article <2790@gryphon.CTS.COM> edk@gryphon.CTS.COM (Ed Kaulakis) writes:
>	Omni, unlike Scientific American, erodes the scientific ethos, which
>I care about, and you should too unless you want to be Japanese vassals...
>	Science is not facts. It's not theories. It's most certainly not 
>pretty images. It's a world view based on a class of bullshit detectors...
>
>It has no place for democratic determinations of what is the case..
>
>That's why I think Omni is a sort of Trojan Horse for the marching morons.


"... Marconi, who discovered radio, because he had accidentally been working
on the problem for years ..."	   [ Monty Python ]

The trouble with gee-whiz slick-photography speculative science is that it
supports the idea of effortless instant breakthroughs. Sure, penicillin was
discovered accidentally, one day, when a scientist noticed some
contamination on a slide. Sure. He only happened to have spent years
becoming a trained researcher with a lab full of equipment, and able
collaborators, and he only happened to spend the next several years of his
life on the grubby details. 

It's this long-haul aspect that makes high standards necessary. An edifice
constructed of a thousand contributions, can withstand only so many pieces
containing bullshit. If the Royal Society had had Omni's standards, we would
still be speculating about how migrating birds turn into toads.

I suppose that Omni-bashers are accused of stuffiness, and lack of
imagination. Hmm. Seems to me that the truly great leaps of imagination were
by people like Einstein, and Darwin, and Curie, and Pasteur. No Joe Newmans
in that crowd.

-- 
	Don		lindsay@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu    CMU Computer Science