A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I've more or less stopped following the news. A couple of weeks ago I unsubscribed from NPR's daily five-minute news-summary podcast, after four years of listening, and that basically severed me from the world of regular general-interest updates. Through the internet, and through internet-enabled friends, I find that most things I care about will filter their way to me through other channels quickly enough, while things I don't care about stop competing for my attention.

The danger here lay in shutting myself away from serendipitous discovery. You benefit from information that, while of no obvious value at first, nonetheless takes up residence in your brain, mingles with with other whims and fancies for a while, and eventually dope-slaps you with a freshly synthesized new Idea one day, while you're walking down the street. I live for this phenomenon, and I don't want to endanger its frequency in my own head by narrowing the flow of my information intake.

But I'm willing to wager that the time and attention I'll save avoiding non-genre news outweighs the risk that I'll miss any gems buried in the garbage heaps of trite infojunk. So long as I'm careful to stay plugged in, and keep my list of active info-channels well groomed, I think I'll be OK.

Congratulations to Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait for accepting the position of James Randi's intellectual heir, and the presidency of the JREF. This puts him at the head of one of the oldest and most dedicated organizations focused on stemming the tide against the world of pseudoscience, hokum, and self-delusion. They lead the fight in never giving an inch to creationists, global-warming deniers, and others who would reverse the flow of science for their own purposes.

I used to read of Randi's weekly column at randi.org regularly, and was familiar with his ongoing concern of not having any clear candidate for passing his torch on to. Recent shifts in my online newsreading habits led me to start reading Plait's stuff without getting around to re-subscribing to Randi, so learning about his new role was an unexpected but welcome surprise this morning.

Plait's explosive enthusiasm, which he's maintained over a solid decade of science (and anti-anti-science) blogging, makes for quite a counterpoint with Randi's grumpy curmudgeonliness. I look forward to seeing what emerges. (I don't know how much their age difference is a factor in their relative personalities, since I have only been familiar with the online writing of the elderly Randi. But based on what I know of his many decades of service to the skeptical cause, including his celebrated string of appearances on The Tonight Show during Carson's era, I suspect he's always rather been like this.)

Apparently a lot of Manhattan, as I type this, smells like the chemical that power companies add to natural gas to make it smell like danger. I'm watching the CNN screen in the Grand Prix cafe now and they're going koo-koo over it, reporters standing on mid-town streets saying they can't really smell anything but have heard reports from all over about the smell.

There's apparently no indications of actually dangerous concentrations of combustible gas yet. But what a strange and interesting thing, to have your whole city smell like you need to disconnect its stove.