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1. MENDING: SORRY TO HAVE MISSED A WEEK.
August is usually a slow month in Washington, but much is happening and it's not good news. Well try to catch up.
2. THE DEBT DEAL: STRONG MEDICINE OR A DOOMSDAY MACHINE?
"Take some more tea," the March Hare said. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied, "so I can't take more." Last month a House panel voted to stop building NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and to flat-fund the National Science Foundation. I didn't write about it at the time because it seemed unthinkable. The debt agreement, however, is about setting spending ceilings, not floors. Floors are for taxes. The Tea Party and the Republican freshman class favor regressive taxation, under which those who benefit most from our economic system contribute least to its support. This may be inevitable when the major determinant of success in election campaigns is fund-raising.
3. THE POPULATION: DEBT CEILINGS ARE SIMPLY A DISTRACTION.
The real problem is that there are too many of us. The need to limit population on a finite planet was explained in 1798 by the Rev. Robert Thomas Malthus in "An Essay on the Principle of Population." Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, helped motivate the "Green Revolution" and "the Pill." With the famine in Somalia on front pages, the world population reached 7 billion, double that in 1968 when Ehrlich issued his warning. Last week, Science magazine devoted a special section to population. Unfortunately, it treated it as a problem of the developing world. It's a mistake to think of overpopulation just in terms of starving masses. It's much more: Its the Hubbert peak, global warming, disappearance of the great ocean fisheries, floating garbage patches in ocean gyres, shortages of fresh water and phosphate rock, perpetual warfare, and a faltering green revolution. Every problem the world faces is driven by excess population. Yesterday, "The Local Living" section of the Washington Post featured a positive article about a married couple and their 11 beautiful, healthy kids. Tax exemptions for dependents subsidize profligate fertility and should be abolished.
4. ArXiv: THE FUTURE OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION.
I can't resist mentioning Paul Ginsparp's reflections in yesterday's issue of Nature. Twenty years ago at Los Alamos National Laboratory he launched an electronic bulletin board to rapidly share results in a narrow field of physics online. Could one person, even one with the energy of Paul Ginsparg, change the future of scholarly communication? It happened. Next month the site will be taken over by the Cornell University Library. Paul will remain on the advisory board.
Image Credit: James Cridland (via Flickr)
