Time for another traipse through the scientific undergrowth, scuffing our way along to see if we can scare up something interesting. Science reports that N IH grant reviewers are feeling squeezed as they try to make good calls on the very, very large number of submissions, which have to be shoehorned into a much smaller budget. It’s no bed of roses. Nature asked the main candidates in the French presidential election about their views on the state of science and scientific research in that country, and what they would do about it all in case of their election. French pols are starting to sound very much like American pols, or maybe all pols are the same, but the answers were safe, and unexciting, as you might expect. Still, even in translation, the replies, somehow sounded more elegant. Nial Ferguson, who writes modern history, considers a new book by N. N. Taleb…The Black Swan. It’s a critique of forecasting, modeling and predictive studies and excercises generally. The shtick is that events out of left field, the black swan of the title, play a much bigger role in human events than we like to think. The Rumsfeldian “Stuff happens” is appropos. By the way: why does nothing but Stuff happen, and why does the same old stuff keep happening, over and over? I would like somebody to tell me that. Anyway, sort of on the same track is a piece in The Guardian by Dr. Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science. He discusses some common notions about luck and randomness, and our reliance on intuition, which can get us into trouble. Try evidence instead. Robert Fulford of Canada’s National Post reviews a new book about email, called SEND, and opines that SEND may be the most dangerous four letter word of our era. There are some stories of SEND booboos, and apparently a good deal of prescriptive advice about dealing with email’s perils. I think the SEND button should have some kind of cap or shield, like the firing trigger in a fighter plane, which the pilot has to remove deliberately before you pressing the trigger. Might save a lot of embarrassment. And, Fulford quotes NY’s Governor Elliot Spitzer about keeping your head on your shoulders in politics; never talk when you can nod, never write when you can talk, and never, never put it in an email. And so endeth the Lesson.

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The Grouch has suspected, and for quite some time now, that this century and the last one need to be taken down a peg or two. It has seemed that these two centuries were getting way too big for their britches. Instead of all this fussing and preening about modern wonders and miracles and all the rest of the jabber, our people should wake up and realize that they need to be much more modest than has been their custom. Even leaving aside such 20th Century triumphs as the concentration camp, mass starvation as a political weapon, Fascism, Communism, and so on, it’s time for us all to realize that, in many ways we are living on the intellectual capital of the Nineteenth Century, and we should acknowledge our debt more freely, and more openly, than we do, instead of dislocating our arms patting ourselves on the back . Think about it. Most of what we call “science” really got going during the Great Nineteenth. The procedural and methodological basics were laid down, and numerous, real, lasting discoveries were made, in every field, and discipline. Mass literacy was made possible by the steam-driven printing press. History exploded as a field of study, with path-breaking accounts of the histories of England, France, Germany, Pre-Columbian America, the Papacy, and on and on. In all too obvious contradistinction to academic writing nowadays, many of these histories were models of style and elegance and forecful expression. Who could forget Francis Parkman’s remark on the treaty concluding the Seven Year War: “Half a continent changed hands, at the scratch of a pen”. Hieroglyphics were deciphered and then long march of Egyptology began. The Cities of the Plain…Ur,Nineveh, Babylon were unearthed, and their languages deciphered, for the first time in millenia, read again. Art, Music, Engineering, all had almost explosive flowerings during the Nineteenth Century. Am I getting carried away? Well one other guy at least doesn’t think so and he wrote two books to prove it

Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Vaclav Smil. x + 350 pp. Oxford University Press, 2005. $35.

Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences. Vaclav Smil. x + 358 pp. Oxford University Press, 2006. $45.

These are the subject of a generally sympathetic review by Prof. David Nye in the American Scientist, which continues to earn the Grouch’s rarely bestowed praise for its enlightened practice of reviewing lots of books very well. Keep it up. AS! Nye has his own ideas on various points of interpretation, and he speaks his mind. All the better.
AS
PPS: speaking of history, let’s not forget Charlie D. and the greatest History of them all.