No, it isn't. Watson proved himself incapable, after a good 39 years as Chancellor of the Cold Harbor Laboratory, a publicly funded scientific research institution, to continue to successfully function in that position. Like it or not, carrying out such a prominent, highly-paid job puts demands on a person to act and speak responsibly, with the object of maintaining the image of the institution who trusts him to represent it.

A programmer who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.

A scientist who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.

A Chancellor who who can no longer the job he is paid to perform, well, he becomes Chancellor Emeritus with a $375,000 salary.

NB: The claim that it is up to everyone else to debunk Watson is incorrect. As a man of science he had the responsibility of being able to support his assertion.

Sorry, affirmative action for influential wealthy white men does not wash. Nothing unfair here.

And in the words of the article he "draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus" which according to this calculator puts him in the top 2% of Americans. This is assuming that he had no other academic income which we do not know to be the case. Heck, The Double Helix is available right now in five different formats, and so must being in some income.

Efforts to pain Watson as beleaguered and impoverished are bizarre to say the least.

Odd. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire seems to correlate far more closely in time with the adoption of a homophobic religion.

You don't have to go back in history at all. Consider present day Saudi Arabia. Its society is quite alien to the experience of modern Americans, and the status of women right now is as bad, or worse, than any historical examples given here, and quasi-slavery (various forms of trafficking and forced servitude) are still practiced.

1990s of course.

Here, here!

For nearly 40 years I have read TNR off and on, trying to divine why it was regarded as a thought leader among Liberal/Left/Progressives. All I could conjecture was that is was a combination of their culture writing, and left-over reputation from an earlier era before I was old enough to read it, which it was gliding on. It's articles about economics, and social and foreign policy were fairly consistently disturbing and decidedly right-wing.

If only that were a fact, rather than that staple of the right, a lie made up on the spot. In fact the available evidence shows that not is the truly rich heavily Republican, that they even more heavily favor Republican economic and policy prescriptions than party ID would indicate.

Wasn't always so. Sullivan used to self-identify as a Republican. Self-identifying as a Democrat today, when that party is moderate Conservative, while the Republicans have abandoned Conservatism for a race to the fringes of radical right-wing wing-nuttery is absolutely what any honest thinking Conservative would do.

It is significant, I think, that the last public turn that honest thinking Conservative William F. Buckley took before his death was to reflect with satisfaction on his role in running the radical right-wing wing-nuttery of the John Birch Society out of Republican politics. He lived to see the reincarnations of the John Birch Society take over the Republican Party in the early 1960s.

Needless to say, the implicit rebuke went unnoticed on the right.

You must live in a location without wind. A solar panel must be mounted such that it will not blow away in a 100 year wind (if you want it to survive with high probability over the 30 year panel life). This requires a very robust motorized mounting in most places. A very significant expense.

Two strikes for you - first you make a poor analogy (In a completely deflated state the rubber is the entire volume and mass of the balloon), and second you missed the opportunity to make it a car analogy.

A better analogy would be that paint (or enamel) is pretty scarce on a car since such a tiny fraction of its total mass consists of paint, even though us "surfacists" consider the paint a very important characteristic of the car.

Answers to various comments/questions on this sub-thread:

Time dilation at 1/3 c is 5.7%, quite a noticeable amount, but not remotely close to to turning billions of years into millions.

Tidal effects are small for super-massive galactic black holes. I doubt tidal disruption of Earth-like (i.e. fairly close) orbits would occur, especially for cool M-type stars (the most common kind).

While individual particles of cosmic dust hitting the planet at 1/3 c won't be a problem, (they will simply explode high in the upper atmosphere), the energy flux hitting the atmosphere from interstellar gas would be considerable. Average interstellar space has something like 1,000,000 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. At 100,000 km/sec every second there would be 100,000*1,000*1,000,000= 10^14 hydrogen atoms hitting each square meter of atmosphere. The kinetic energy of those atoms would be about 1000 J, so roughly 1000 watts/m^2 of heating from interstellar hydrogen. Earth gets 1400 watts/M^2 of heat from the Sun, so it would roughly double the heating of an Earth-like world until it cleared the galaxy plane. If it ran into a denser patch (all of the region in the galactic center would be denser than the average I quoted) then the heating could be 10, 100, even 1000 times higher for a bit. I think this would cook any existing Earth-like planet.

Once in interstellar space though the heat load would drop by a factor of 10,000 to 100,000 of the average interstellar value and would cease to be significant. From there on the planet and star system would evolve on their own, and a new biosphere could come into existence.

Thames and Kosmos. Their Chem 5000 set is the real deal, at least equal to, and probably better than, the ChemCraft sets of yore that I loved as a kid.

About five years ago I was casting about for a chemistry set for my daughter, and heard about Thames and Kosmos. Unfortunately at that particular moment they were retooling their offerings, and none were available - but they are back on the market, better than ever.

ICBMs can cover much of the Earth, but not all of it. The U.S. submarine fleet, consisting of multiple mobile missile fields, can. Submarines can be positioned closer to the target, and can thus put a warhead on it faster than an ICBM (not clear why you think shaving minutes is so important though).

Not at all clear that this true today, with modern communication systems. Silos have serious problems with communications when warheads land on top of them.

What effective "active defense" do you imagine exists in the world today against the U.S. SLBM fleet? They patrol a couple of thousand miles off the coast, if they need to, and there is no effective anti-submarine force in the world to target them. The Russian submarine fleet is less than 1/4 the size that it was under the Soviet Union.

You may have heard of the U.S. carrier battle groups of which the U.S. has 11, versus none for the rest of the world. SLBMs have the option of operating from the protective umbrella of battle groups, which makes the notion of them being effectively target truly ridiculous.

And the bombers have cruise missiles with a range of 1500 miles, so the effectiveness of active defense against them is questionable.

Sorry you are grasping at ancient, worn-out straws trying to prop up the case for the ICBM fleet.

You must be talking of ICBMs and SLBMs that belong to some other country - certainly not the U.S.

The U.S. SLBM, the Trident II D5, is a much heavier missile than the Minuteman III (130,000 vs 78,000 lb) so with the same warhead loading will travel much farther than the Minuteman. The shorter range you see quoted is only due to the fact that it carries up 14 warheads, versus a maximum of 3 for the Minuteman.

The maximum range of Minuteman III missile is about 13,000 km, but the farthest place in the world from U.S. missile fields is 20,000 km away. A good part of the Earth is outside of U.S. ICBM range.

But here is the kicker - the farthest point of land from an ocean in the world is the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility which is only 2645 km from the shore. So we can place submarine warheads truly anywhere on Earth.

"Scaling down" does not seem to be the solution. As long as there are some ICBMs this problem will persist, and it is a bad idea to have any nuclear weapons under the control of a dysfunctional organization like this. It should be outright elimination.

There should be no "launch on warning" period. It is a deadly dangerous posture, and is unnecessary - we have subs that will survive any sudden strike, and airplanes that can scramble, then return to base if there is no strike (and continue to their targets, with real-time re-targeting if there is).

It seems very unlikely that this problem can be fixed while retaining the ICBM force. The Air Force being what it is, only the fly-boys and fly-girls will get the promotions. Silo sitting is a career dead-end from the beginning. The reward structure in the Air Force is deeply embedded from the time of its creation, and it is all but impossible (and perhaps flatly impossible) to fix a deep organization-wide reward structure like this without wholesale rebuilding of the organization itself - a remote scenario to say the least.

The triad is not holy writ, immutable and divinely inspired. It was something of a historical accident, a product of the way technologies matured during the days of the nuclear arms race, a race that ended 25 years ago. In terms of service turf (an important consideration in Washington) the Air Force still has its nuclear armed bombers, so giving up the ICBMs will still leave them their "nuclear manhood".