First off, maybe somebody who really loves and understands opera will get a kick from John Tierney’s spoofing column today. It is inspired by an AP brief on the commission in Italy of an opera based – and yes this is worth satire – on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Contrarian Tierney imagines the libretto’s evolution. One guesses that he worked maniacally hard on this. It has some giggles and gems. But the main impression is of a concatenation, in Italian, of cheap shots. It starts with the canard that Al Gore, aka Prince Algorini in Tierney’s version, thinks he invented the internet and continues in that vein.

Speaking of the internet, look at the ScienceTimes lead story by Alex Wright (a freelancer and “information architect” worth knowing about: home page). It is a delight. Historians of technology in Belgium are preserving the remains of one rather odd, brilliant fellow’s effort pre-World War II to create a telegraphically-linked library of information with users all over the world, complete with what we’d today call chat rooms or perhaps just digital social networking. It’s wonderful – including techno-seer Kevin Kelly’s declaration the effort included a “Steampunk version of hypertext.” The Tracker had to look up Steampunk. It’s the perfect term.

Other notable headlines:

William J. Broad – Scientist at Work | Norman T. Uphoff / Food Revolution That Starts With Rice ; Broad goes outside the gizmo techno-geopolitics beat to profile a big-picture agronomist named Norman and not Borlaug. It’s a story of a hypothesis, fierce argument, and a field test on the way that may settle the matter.

John Collins Rudolf – Tiny, Clingy and Destructive, Mussel Makes Its Way West ; Invasive alien zZebra mussel finally meets a worse alien mussel. Quagga mussels in the Colorado and Great Lakes shove it aside, and we’re not the better for it. It’s important but no scoop (see earlier post, last year).

Claudia Dreyfuss – A Conversation With Manil Suri / Professor Finds the Art in Both Numbers and Letters ; Q&A with an Indian-born mathematician novelist.

Bina Venkataraman – In the Art of a DNA Graph, the Colors of Uniqueness ; It’s about the artistry of genome-wide association studies’ data sets, but manages not to use that tongue-stubber of a term.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. – Index Ranks Pharmaceutical Groups According to Third World Outreach ; It’s just a brief, but its topic could inspire some much longer, penetrating news.

As usual, plenty more. Whole section. It’s not easy to make a direct link but every week editor David Corcoran assembles a well-produced podcast on the section and other of the week’s science news. It’s on the section page.

-CP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.