Rare Science and Mean Spoofs

space.com has a very badly written short story on the AMNH "Asimov" debate on Rare Earth, see story here.
Alarm bells went off when Goldreich and Tremaine's names were spelled incorrectly. I hope the debate was better and more informative than the story.

While I am on it, go visit AMNH and the Rose Planetarium if you're in NY. Went there for the opening of the planetarium. Good show.

Peter Woit at Columbia has an often interesting and provocative blog. For April 1st he had a joke entry on the new STRINGS institute at Stanford. Sorry, not funny, though I was glad to catch up with what happened to Gerry Cleaver, a classmate of mine from Caltech. I'm not the worlds biggest string theory fan, though I spent more time on it than I care to think about now. There is probably something to it, in that the mathematics have captured some essential aspects of the theory, but we are still lacking some fundamental physical insights. But it is possible to give string theorists a hard time without getting personal.