Friday roundup

Fantastic column on spicergate.

In the former Soviet Union, there was misinformation everywhere but people knew what was going on.

This was self-consciously an attempt to create a valid and verifiable news source. The Chronicle demanded that its contributors be “careful and accurate” with any information they passed along and even ran regular corrections to previous items (pioneering a practice some Western media organizations only adopted years later). As the scholar of Soviet dissidence Peter Reddaway, writing in 1972, put it, “the Chronicle’s aim is openness, non-secretiveness, freedom of information and expression. All these notions are subsumed in the one Russian word, glasnost.”

Superbugs, brought to you by the pork industry.

Sunday's assault was not United's first rodeo. Here are some collected responses to the incident.

I love this, from the man who gave us lithium-ion batteries.

When I asked him about his late-life success, he said: “Some of us are turtles; we crawl and struggle along, and we haven’t maybe figured it out by the time we’re 30. But the turtles have to keep on walking.” This crawl through life can be advantageous, he pointed out, particularly if you meander around through different fields, picking up clues as you go along. Dr. Goodenough started in physics and hopped sideways into chemistry and materials science, while also keeping his eye on the social and political trends that could drive a green economy. “You have to draw on a fair amount of experience in order to be able to put ideas together,” he said.

Don't read that awful NY Post piece from the man who'll no longer date "hot women." It is unfortunately not satire but two excellent pieces of satire have emerged in response.