What are you reading?

[Dragonfly]

I agree with the last posts. My subscription to The Scientific American started in 1969. I've two shelves with bound copies of the magazine (except for the last years), dark blue with real gold lettering. It was indeed an excellent magazine, which could explain science to a layman (everyone is a layman outside his own field) without becoming superficial. The illustrations were also excellent. Ah, the mathematical games, with the introduction of the game of life and the programmed worms, which I immediately programmed myself on the mainframe at the university. At the time there were only text-mode terminals, so I printed the life configurations on large sheets of chainpaper, using a lot of paper that way. And good old Dr. Matrix with his daughter and assistent Iva. At first I thought he really existed...

And then the deception when the idiots took over. All that flashy stuff, 10 cm letters in different colors, the illustrations no longer instructive, but only glitter and glamour. I remember in particular a picture of some pollen, probably from a scanning electron microscope. They had given every individual pollen grain a different color!!! It didn't have any function, it was only done to look pretty. Apparently black and white would have been too boring for the morons they were targeting now. It was just one small insignificant picture, but it symbolized perfectly what was wrong with the new regime: no content, just show. Out of frustration I wrote a very angry letter to the editors, telling them that they should fire the idiot who had ruined the magazine. The straw that broke the camel's back was their scandalous treatment of Bjørn Lomborg, that was the final argument for me not to renew my subscription. Sic transit gloria mundi.

[John Dailey]

Dragon:

~ Ok; I'll bite: "Tell us, Johnny...who WAS Bjorn Lomborg?" (Please excuse my keyboard's ignorance of proper non-English characters.) --- Was HE the noted illustrator I asked about? Or the one who did the Mathematical Games section at the end?

LLAP

J:D

[Ross Barlow]

...who WAS Bjorn Lomborg?"....

John,

Bjorn Lomborg wrote *The Skeptical Environmentalist*, in which he criticized the more radical claims of environmentalists. I have not read his work, but there has been a lot of heated controversy surrounding it – as you can imagine.

I have read Crichton’s *State of Fear* (2004) and really liked it a lot.

-Ross Barlow.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I have read Crichton’s *State of Fear* (2004) and really liked it a lot.

Ross,

Hear, hear!

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

I'd like to join in the cheers for "State of Fear".

[John Dailey]

~ Thanx, RB. Not familiar with TSE, though.

~ Now, about that 'illustrator'...Does he still do anything elsewhere?

LLAP

J:D