Yet Stephanie Meyers, who can barely string together a coherent sentence, is an incredibly successful author.

Did anyone actually read Wilson's article... including the irate, myopic blogger who is projecting his own bias while criticizing Wilson for the same?

In my fifteen-or-so years as an academic scientist, I have found this observation to be 100% correct and I have worked with some incredibly famous and well-respected scientists not unlike E.O. Wilson.

In other words, math skills have nothing to do with creativity and science is driven, at its most fundamental level, by creative thinking.

Math is a descriptive language, not an engine for discovery, duh.

Modern science is too complex for one generalist to do everything (and to take credit for it). These days everyone is a specialist, with a PhD in a very specific subject, and they all work together to bring ideas through to discoveries and eventually to technology. Would anyone argue that the POTUS runs the entire federal government by himself, being a world-class expert in everything from speech writing to foreign policy? Then why is it so hard to imagine that great discoveries are supported by the collaborative efforts of many, with one generally receiving the lion's share of the credit for the actual discovery?

The response of the blogger focuses on the idea that Wilson is an outlier and that, like Bill Gates dropping out of college, his resume should not be used as a template. But Wilson is not arguing that he was successful because he was semi-literate at math, he is arguing that you can be successful by focusing on what your good at, and complimenting your abilities with fruitful collaboration. His reason for making this argument is simple; too many people that would otherwise make talented scientists shy away from the sciences because they aren't good at math.

My two cents: there are, very broadly speaking, two principle kinds of scientists (with many exceptions). There the creative types, who are rarely good with math, often lack attention to detail, but who are astonishingly good at creative problem solving. Then there are the analytic types, who are too skeptical to be creative, are often detail-oriented, but who are astonishingly good at analyzing and understanding raw data. The best science is performed by teams comprising both types of people who respect and trust one another.

And from my experience, publishing dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles, your experience is the exception. In fact, many sciences do not even utilize technicians. In the ten or so laboratories that I have worked in/with and the labs of the numerous professors that I talk with about their publication policies, exactly zero will allow someone authorship on a paper that they don't see until it's "basically finished." I'm sure some fall through the cracks, though certainly not the majority. However, I would not generalize my experiences and neither should you.

You also minimize the role of "those who secured the funding." Let me translate that phrase: "Those who came up with the ideas, spent countless hours writing proposals, will lose their job if they cannot secure said funding at a regular clip, and actually did the work putting together the collaborative team, which they hand pick, train/supervise, and for which they provide a state-of-the-art lab." Let's not forget that they were on the receiving end, as the first or second author, often for over a decade, before earning the right to that asterisk by their name.

...where a giant company worth billions--just because people in suits say so--is building state-of-the-art data centers around the globe to store crappy photos of mundane activities and asinine conversations about nothing in order to collect data on consumers for advertisers so they can sell them more gadgets to take even crappier photos of even more mundane activities. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.) Meanwhile the funding agencies that drive the creation of all this technology are being gutted to shave a few fractions of a percent off of the federal budget, Wikipedia is begging users for cash, and NASA had to scrap its shuttle program. Our priorities are a joke.

And I can't figure out the point in spending $1500 on a pair of glasses when I already wear glasses to, you know, see. Speaking of which, I wonder if they will offer prescription Google Glass or if they expect the bespectacled amongst us to wear contact lenses.

For $100? Links?

Not only that, but you're paying through the nose for increasingly locked-down consoles designed with the EA mentality of bleeding your bank account dry while you play. Personally I'm done with Nintendo/Sony/MS consoles and their push to lock you into some sort of on-line somethingaverse where you spend Itchy and Scratchy money on stuff that should have been included with the $60 game that is locked to your specific console for no justifiable reason. And as someone that travels between countries, don't get me started on region locking and the "helpful feature" of switching to the language of whatever country your IP address originated from. I don't care about on-line multiplayer, I don't want to create an avatar, I'm not interested in being called a faggot by some preteen with too much free time, I don't want to have to sign in to a server to play a single player game, and I will only tolerate DRM that is as unobtrusive as Steam... and by that I mean I'm willing to pay because Steam is actually easier than pirating.

And that is why I ordered one. XBMC runs amazingly well on my Tegra 3 tablet; I want a little Android box that can hide behind my TV and run XBMC. Bonus for a dedicated "remote" (and navigating XBMC with a game controller is a pleasure.) Gaming is certainly a feature, but I already have a PC for that.

This bombing is similar to the foiled MLK day bombing in Seattle that turned out to be some crazy neo-Nazi. And by "foiled" I mean someone basically stumbled on the bomb before it went off in the middle of a very crowded parade.

As a former resident of Boston, that city will always have a special place in my heart. Attacking the marathon is just the lowest of lows. I hope they catch whomever did this and lock them up for good in the rapiest prison they can find and don't turn it into some empty-headed left versus right shouting match on cable news.

For discrete molecules, you can only win a "composition of matter" patent on something that does not exist naturally. You can, however, patent a method for extracting, manipulating, packaging a natural product or even a specific use for it. The courts seem to have created a distinction between polynucleotides and small molecules; i.e., awarding a patent for a sequence of DNA is basically the same as awarding a composition of matter patent on a natural product and should not be allowed. If anything, they should treat unique, non-natural sequences under copyright law like we do with patterns of symbols/widgets that represent information. Any idiot can make DNA--I'm doing it right now--but any idiot cannot design a sequence of DNA that folds into a smiley face.

Drug companies may exchange the anion of a salt or use an ethyl group instead of a propyl group, but to get the composition of matter patent, they must prove that the new molecule rises to the level of "intellectual property" in that it changes the properties and is non-obvious to an expert. Over the years, "non-obvious" has been fairly rigorously defined by trial and error and the input of a lot of experts. Thus, I really don't see how the Supreme Court needs to get involved in this case. They are scientifically illiterate and susceptible to irrelevant philosophical arguments about life, evolution, etc. A better fix, IMHO, is to treat all polynucleotides as natural products and only allow patents on the methodology of their isolation/use/etc. If a company really, truly comes up with a crazy break-through based on a heretofore unknown sequence of DNA/RNA, then treat it like a trade secret. It works for Coke.

The current system for awarding patents for what is basically a series of A, C, G T/U that you dug out of a longer series encoded in a polymer unquestionably stifles innovation because it allows companies to block anything involving a particular gene. (They already exclude personal use for obvious reasons, i.e., you can't tell your cells to stop expressing a specific gene.) A trickier issue arises with organisms that have been designed for particular experiments, like a strain of yeast, or a mouse with a particular set of genes knocked out or a bacteria that is programmed to insert a section of DNA from a specific plasmid template. The designers of these organisms put a lot of work into them, but the final product can be cloned, not unlike an MP3 of a song. Unlike an MP3, however, they will do it themselves (given enough Barry White), so you can buy one and then just keep a population going in the lab. So how do you balance the rights of the inventor to profit without competition for a limited time (i.e., incentive) against the slippery slope of patenting entire organisms? Last I checked, they limit these patents to organisms whose genes were manipulated artificially, but it won't be long until humans fall into that category.

If you are just starting out in a tenure-track position, you have about five years to show that you are capable of pulling in funding, getting talks accepted to conferences, and publishing papers that get cited. It's easy to say that fake journals are simple to spot because "everyone" knows what the real journals are, and besides, I wouldn't waste time publishing anywhere but in the best journals... True if you are still a PhD student or postdoc, but wait until your adviser's name no longer appears on your author list. Suddenly results that you know you could have published in a top journal are being scrutinized by referees at a bread-and-butter "specialty journal" who have no reason to believe in your competence.

Now imagine you get an email from a shiny new open-access journal asking you to be on their editorial board. You think "gee, I'd like to support open-access" and hey, look at that, someone I know is already on the editorial board. Suddenly you are getting phone calls asking for the title of the talk that you have been invited to give at a conference in Vegas (for which you are certain to be billed after the fact). And you find out that your job as an editor is to submit papers to their journal. You of course don't want to, because a paper with zero citations is worse in many ways than no paper at all. But your doe-eyed grad student, who has just had a string of bad luck, really needs a paper for their CV. You feel responsible for this person's future and guilty that their project isn't producing ground-breaking papers every other week. So you let them write up a paper for this crappy journal, which is when you find out that they charge even their editorial board for "publication fees." And the best part is that, when you politely explain to them that you can't afford $3000 to publish a paper no one will ever read, they start negotiating the price with you! Classy.

Then there are the legitimate journals and conferences that are put together by, for example, a bunch of foreigners that you have never heard of. It's neigh impossible to determine the legitimacy of such things and, because of your recent experience serving on an editorial board, you are extremely skeptical. The end result is that we are right back where we started; only participating when we see other scientists who we know and respect. But, see problem above--they only need to con one person into lending their name before it cascades. (And good luck getting your name removed from their editorial board.) It creates a chilling effect for unknown/up-and-coming/young scientists to organize conferences or to try to innovate in the publication/conference sphere.

Fake journals are a symptom of a broader problem, which is for lack of a better term the "neoliberalization" of science. Each science has a few gatekeeper publishers who we all trust and who therefore has editors that we've all heard of. We read them, we cite them, and we know that any new journals they roll out will likewise be active and highly cited. If you want to have access to such journals, you must be at an academic institution that can afford massive subscription fees to thousands of journals. Papers are, however, the currency of academic science, so academics will expend enormous effort to get grant money to do research to ultimately publish a paper. These fake journals have spotted a nice opportunity to skim some of that money the same way spammers work, by relying on that 1-2% that gets duped into publishing a paper, once, or agreeing to serve on an editorial board, once, or agreeing to an "invited talk," once. And the closer they are to an industry, the worse the problem. Drug manufacturers, for example, have a profit motive to publish garbage in pseudo-peer-reviewed journals with real-sounding names.

Fake journals, the publish-or-perish model, the evaporation of research funding, the over-production of PhD scientists, etc. have combined with the power of the Internet and digital publishing to, ironically, push science back to exactly where we don't want it; where prestige and name recognition reign supreme. You identify a network of your peers and develop a reactionary distrust of anything that isn't endorsed by that network. It makes it harder to build a career, creates increasingly insular fields of research, reinforces "legacy hires" (i.e., hey you worked for someone famous, you must be good), drives decision-making into smoke-filled back rooms, and generally undermines the purported wonders of the Information Age. And even there, people find ways to exploit the system. There are universities popping up in the Middle East, funded by "royal oil" that back dump-trucks of money up to very high-profile scientists to lend their good name. Some of these universities are amazing on paper, boasting dozens of famous scientists "on the faculty," even though most will rarely, if ever, set foot on the campus. Those are obviously easy to spot, but we end up reinforcing them because, seriously, dump-trucks of unrestricted funds.

But we'll get over these growing pains eventually and find a balance... hopefully before I retire.

You're not kidding. I periodically take a look at logs and network traffic on my home server and it is a constant barrage of disease-ridden hookerbots soliciting my innocent electronics. An un-patched OS doesn't stand a chance.

I gave an old laptop to a co-worker who is not even remotely tech savvy. I put a fresh Ubuntu installation on it because it was less resource intensive than Windows 7. At first she and her husband balked at the new interface, but now that they know which program to use for which task, they love it and have even switched their desktop over.

Meanwhile, I have trouble keeping my Win7 partition smooth and bloat-free and I use it literally only for Steam and games. I bitched about it on /. and was lampooned for not being willing to "just wipe the partition and reinstall Windows" every n months. I think Windows users have Stockholm syndrome.

Svante Arrhenius correctly predicted the greenhouse effect by empirical observation in the 19th Century, and he was not alone. In the 1970's climate models were already predicting catastrophic shifts in weather, which were increasingly being validated by ice core samples, etc. About that time, people with no business wading into a scientific debate (e.g., oil companies) starting muddying the waters and throwing around baseless accusations like "junk science." And now people with no scientific background whatsoever attack details of climate modelling that they don't understand.

Let me reiterate; the mechanistic underpinnings of global climate change have been known since the 19th Century. What we are arguing about now is the ability of incredibly complex models to make hyper-accurate predictions in an unfathomably complex system. Does anyone care that the Standard Model of physics has no idea what gravity is? I mean, if they can't understand something as simple as gravity, and are continually refining their models to account for new observations, should we not dismiss all of theoretical physics as "junk science?"

What fascinates me about the ignorant people who fall for this type of FUD is how little they care about any other field of science. Where are all the skeptics pushing back against the Higgs Boson research coming out of CERN? How about the debate that surrounded RNA silencing? Why don't I read articles in the popular press about the validity of Landauer approximation with respect to single-molecule (ballistic) contacts? How about the formation of charge-transfer states at donor/acceptor interfaces in excitonic solar cells? I'm sure Rush Limbaugh has an opinion about that debate, which is currently raging in the scientific literature.

Perhaps we don't drag every little detail of scientific research into the mainstream of debate because such complex issues should be left to people with decades of training and experience. It is simply impossible for a layman to seriously debate climate science because they have no fundamental understanding of how science works, what scientific debate looks like, how models of complex systems are validated and, importantly, have no idea that they are picking the same type of knits that surrounded the scientific debates that lead to all important discoveries throughout history. The very process of scientific discovery is rooted in the ability to undermine existing hypothesis with new observations until a consensus is reached. And there will always be dissenting opinions and data. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011 is a microcosm of this phenomenon.

You're a witch!