Electric Josh

2-2
In honor of the good guys winning a well-played game against the Yankees and evening things up at two games apiece, this space points to David Brooks in the Times:

It's interesting, for example, to turn and watch Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watch a game. As the game goes on, they almost never display pleasure, contentment or joy. Instead, during the game they experience long periods of contempt interrupted by short bursts of vindication.

If one of their players has just grounded out, they regard him with a gaze that suggests he has just betrayed his country. If he has hit a home run, they treat it as evidence that the pathetic bum on the field has finally lived up to the standard set by their superlative fandom. Then comes the taunting.

This piece provides yet another data point supporting my theory that all successful columnists write in one-liners, like Kurt Vonnegut.

Now back to our regular boycott of publications that disappear behind paywalls.
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PLoS
Something called the Public Library of Science has opened its doors. Free (capital F) science journals---apparently only biology for now, though. How can they do this? Well, computers and the internet have reduced the cost of running a real live peer-reviewed scientific journal basically to zero plus the cost of getting other scientists to do the peer reviews, which is, and has long been, zero. (Yes, the cost of the reviewer's time is zero.)

This is a Very Good Thing. The whole point of science is to contribute knowledge to the public domain for the public good, so why the hell should I, the researcher, pay someone to publish my work? Why should I be unable to promote myself and my research by republishing the papers I've written for publication in Nature or Physical Review or whatever?

Most importantly, why should students in poor countries, freelance researchers, or anyone else without access to a university's super-expensive subscription to such a journal be denied access to newly common knowledge? This is precisely one of the primary reasons the internet was developed. Yay, internet!
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