Ira Flatow: Science Tuesday

I went to see Ira Flatow's City Arts & Lectures talk Tuesday night. It's always strange to see an accomplished interviewer interviewed, but he had some really good things to say about paying more attention to the politics and budgetary policies surrounding science in this country. I very much agree with him, that our current messianic administration and affiliated allies are really trying attack science and put unverifiable faith on equal footing with science. It's truly a sad state of affairs, but he also said some very encouraging things about science education and education in general being local issues and not federal and that it was up to local voters and communities to voice up in how they want their schools to be run. But too many otherwise liberal well-meaning people are pretty cheap when it comes to ponying up for even their own local schools.

He also said some interesting things about the unknown future of radio broadcasting. Apparently the Science Friday podcast has 6 million downloads, while all the other NPR podcasts have about 13 million downloads. Of course, most of the other popular NPR shows are being sold as downloads on audbile.com rather then podcasted, which is a whole other topic, the increasing commercialization of public broadcasting.