Tom Friedman has returned to the good guys. “Wouldn’t it have been wise for the U.S. to take the initiative at Cancún, and offer to reduce our farm subsidies and textile tariffs, so some of the poorest countries, like Pakistan and Egypt, could raise their standards of living and sense of dignity, and also become better customers for U.S. goods? Yes, but that would be bad politics. It would mean asking U.S. farmers to sacrifice the ridiculous subsidies they get from our federal government ($3 billion a year for 25,000 cotton farmers) that make it impossible for foreign farmers to sell here.”
The Guardian has an interesting roundup of the so-called citation superstars, the 25 scientists whose work is the most cited in the world. For any follower of popular science — even serious popular science — what’s revealing is that essentially none of these stars are known outside their fields (a few Nobel prizewinners excepted).