"Scientific" American

Sorry, insane liar, bought and paid for denialist lie site.

SA trashed itself long ago, about the time they stopped the Amateur Scientist feature.

I'm not at all surprised SA still touts "Global Warming" even though IPCC has dropped the term (since they grudgingly admit the data don't support the contention) in favor of "Climate Change" which is easier to defend because it's so so nebulous, it's harder to raise specific questions about it.

Mark L. Fergerson

I want a Nobel Prize too!

My Chlorine Scrubbing Derigibles for Antarctica are REAL solutions.

Instead of harvesting pine for homes, we should grow hemp. It makes a better R factor "particle" board, and it grow two feet per month instead of two feet per year, like pine. It sucks up CO2 and spews Oxygen like nobody's business.

Yeah, but it has a fatal flaw that no Liberal will ever be able to overlook; it's profitable.

Mark L. Fergerson

Archimedes' Lever Inscribed thus:

Smokes well too. :-)

Some of those projects were amazing - DIY X-ray machines and linear accelerators!

Too much potential liability exposure? Or just a new management team that wanted to make a fresh start with the layout and contents? There are probably a few days of rants on either lawyers or managers.

However, a CD archive of the Amateur Scientist columns, plus some nifty extras, is available over at

There's also a website that is in the tradition of do-it-yourself science by the same gentleman at

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It has another flaw, discovered by a nearby farmer who=20 tried a test field: the idiots kept trashing the field to=20 steal the hemp, despite it being the non-happy kind.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

I also like...

The quality has declined - which I why I didn't review my subscription this year - but they do have Viscount Christopher Monckton and Science and Public Policy Institute bang to rights, unpalatable as this may be for the sort of right-wing nitwit who takes US Senator James Inhofe seriously.

There's nothing particularly nebulous about "climate change". It does talk about increasing temperatures over periods of decades, which does exceed the right-wing attention span, and the current rate of warming

- about 0.12C per decade - is hard to see against a background noise of perhaps 0.2C rms on the global temperature, averaged over a whole year.

The projections see this rate of increase doubling by the end of this century, which will make it easier for the right-wingers to see what is going on.

I don't recall the IPCC "admitting" that the current temperature data doesn't reflect global warming, It also happens to be reflecting the usual noise on the global temperature record, but the long term trend- line is still going up.

Ravinghorde wants to see the particulary intense El Nino of 1998 as a turnaround point, but in fact it is obviously just one more random spike.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Nice site but jeez... links in all-caps with blue letters on a black background? Ouch!

Yes. And they stared using up surface area with idiotic artists's conceptions instead of real graphs of real data, and replaced science with politics and preaching. I guess they were scared by Mechanics Illustrated on one side and Discover on the other.

SA has abandoned science for populism, figuring it will sell more mags. I don't know if it does.

John

Just watching this one

Here's a nice one...

I suppose I can see the liability issue, thought the oldies also carried what I consider adequate warnings.

Consider also the fact the oldies kinda shot the wad of what an amateur can do with whiz-bang physics. OTOH I'd love to see a Santa Claus machine article!

Yeah. I'm *almost* tired of bragging that my wife bought me that for my birthday some years back. ;>)

My big accomplishment was finally building the UV "air laser" I fell in lust with when it was first published. Sadly it got destroyed during a move.

Not to mention such gap-fillers as the Instructables:

A lot of their stuff is flashy showy crap, cosplay props and such but there's some fairly serious physics stuff in there too.

Mark L. Fergerson

This is amazing:

John

Ingalls, Stong & Walker did a fine job up to 1990. They accidentally appointed a creation scientist called Mims in 1990 and it all fell apart acrimoniously. It is unclear whether Mims would have fulfilled the role successfully. I think he might have done despite his odd religious outlook as his stuff for Radio Shack was OK. For my money C L Stong was the best of them by far and I still remember building his cloud chamber and getting it to work.

Carlson successfully resurrected the column as a regular author in 1995 but was forcably retired in 2001 by a new management seeking to maximise profits and minimise overheads. It is now a science comic.

A friend built the Van de Graff part of that project successfully. The second stage proved more tricky and 2MeV electrons do not carry quite the punch of protons. It ended up recycled as a planetarium projector head.

Surplus shed has most of the same material on CD for less.

I wonder if the now illegal vivisection articles have been pulled from the SciAm AmSci archives? They were excised from Sciam books published in the UK by around 1980.

Regards, Martin Brown

That problem is easy to solve as well.

Take it OFF schedule 1, thereby making it no longer a controlled substance, and instantly rendering all state laws about its possession or sale defunct.

Then, any idiot that wants it, can grow their own.

Making it a criminal substance was the worst thing this country ever did, and it is also part of the reason why EVERY drug you could ever be prescribed costs about 3 times what it should.

The FDA is part of "the problem with health care". A BIG part of it.

ur

d.

Uh, same disc.

AFAICT the online archives are completely gone. But then, I won't pay to access "SA Digital".

Mark L. Fergerson