You know you've lost a lot of intellectual capital when ridiculous parodies of your work generate hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube - and threatening to sue is just making the whole thing sillier.

Michael Mann of Penn State isn't happy.   Everyone who had any sort of a clue knew his hockey stick regarding global warming wasn't literal but it also wasn't unethical.  An internal investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing despite the unfortunate use of the word "trick" by researchers referencing his methods and "hide the decline" has become something of a rallying cry for detractors.  But he is getting made fun of just the same and he doesn't like it.

I get asked a lot about Science 2.0® and why I chose to start something like ScientificBlogging.com, because science is such a niche.   Is it?  65 million people respond to surveys that they are interested in science. Since there are just over 300 million people in the US and 10% of those can't read due to age or infirmity, that means almost 25% of America alone considers themselves science fans.

3 NASA employees out of the 22,000 people about to lose their jobs sat in a room full of loyal Democrats and listened to President Barack Obama talk about how much he loved NASA.  Then he talked about how he was gutting it.

Not everyone is buying hope in this instance.  Buzz Aldrin agrees with Pres. Obama that the Moon has been done but Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, and Gene Cernan, the last, think it is a  big step backwards to instead go to an asteroid.   I am probably not the first to say it but it seems we will now boldly go where no one really wants to go.

Science, outside some in the climate community (*), is anti-authoritarian.   There is no voting to create a consensus in science, no appeals to authority - science is vulnerable every single day of the year, to experiments, to revisions and to complete debunking by new generations of scientists who, like gun-slingers in the Old West, want to make their name taking down the big guys.   

Great thinkers like Einstein and Aristotle have been slain by the scientific method so it can happen to anyone - and that power is what made freedom possible, according to Timothy Ferris, emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and book author.