The point of paper receipts is that you don't keep it, you verify it and then put it in a regular ballot box. That way if there's any question about the electronic tally, there can be a manual recount.
I don't see this as hypocrisy - I see it as holding studies of psychic phenomena to the same standards as other scientific studies, i.e., well-documented methods, peer-reviewed results, and demonstrated repeatablility.
The additional skepticism most people apply to claims of telekenesis probably comes from the fact that is an overwhelming number of counter-examples in everyday experience. Can you move objects with your mind? I can't. Therefore I am not very likely to readily believe that anyone can. This is different than saying, for example, "I can't play piano, therefore I doubt anyone can," because playing the piano is an ability which is a matter of degrees. If you can push a key, you can imagine someone playing a fugue. If you can walk, you can imagine running a marathon. But if every experience of your life confirms that you can't move objects just by thinking about it, not even a little bit, it is reasonable to hold someone who claims they can to a very high standard of proof.
I can't believe that a serious report would put psychic teleportation on the same scientific grounds as quantum entanglement... Quantum physics has produced plenty of weird and wonderful phenomena, but not all strange experimental results are equally credible (or incredible). The author seems to have no sense of scientific skepticism. These two quotes jumped out at me:
"A comprehensive literature search for vm-Teleportation within the genre of spacetime metric engineering yielded no results. No one in the general relativity community has thought to apply the Einstein field equation whether there are solutions compatible with the concept of teleportation."
(Or maybe the idea simply hasn't gotten by peer-reviewed publications?)
"The conditions for fraud and sleight of hand [in the psychic teleportation experiments] were totally eliminated, and multiple independent outside witnesses (technical and military-intelligence experts) were present at all times to ensure total fidelity of the experiments."
(Sure... Isn't that what they all say?)
I guess it might be worthwhile in a very preliminary report to give all of the options equal consideration, but to suggest that they all deserve funding for further research makes the study kind of pointless. I wonder if they people who commissioned this report can actually take it seriously?
The microwave background didn't come from the big bang though. It was actually emitted from the surface of last scattering when the universe became transparent for the first time--around 300k years after the big bang.
Exactly... Just to make the point more clear, the "surface" of last scattering is really a point in time - the photons that were released at the time of the last scattering (last interaction with matter, when it changed from opaque to optically thin) filled the entire universe at that time. The wavelength stretched and the number density decreased (now ~400 per cubic cm) as the universe expanded, but the microwave "background" radiation still fills all of space uniformally, so it isn't really correct to think about it as coming from some spherical surface centered around the Earth at a particular point in time.
What is true, though, is that as we look farther into space, we are simultaneously looking back in time, and the limit of what we can see is the surface of last scattering. This surface is centered on our location, by definititon - anyone looking out from a different point in the universe would see the same thing.
First, I haven't heard of anybody who capitalizes "sun."
Just by way of information, the proper name of the Sun is "Sol", equivalent to "Mercury", "Venus", "Earth", etc. The general distinction in astronomy is to capitalize words like Galaxy if it refers to our galaxy (the Milky Way) and use lowercase when it is a general term. Same with "sun" vs. "the Sun" and "earth" vs. "the Earth".
I think it would be quite reasonable to maintain this kind of distinction between "internet" (as in "internet access", for example) and "the Internet".
There's something horribly ironic about this lawsuit... if you read past the first few verses of the song (the most widely known ones) you realize that this is not exactly a patriotic hymn...
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side.... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!
Chorus
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office - I see my people And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' If this land's still made for you and me.
Chorus (2x)
Anti-property, anti-government... and they're worried that a satire aimed at Bush/Kerry will "damage" this "icon of americana"?? This is what the original folk music was all about! It seems to me that the copyright holders are just looking for an excuse to come down on these people. I doubt Woodie Guthrie would have approved the suit...
(PS. Just to be clear, I love this song - in its entirety - and was listening to it last week during a drive across the U.S. I wish the original message wasn't getting so lost...)
It's just a silly way of changing any identifying details... From the 3rd paragraph: "S. Pammer is of course not his real name, nor does he sell canned meat."
I thought it was interesting - but not terribly surprising - that the access was cut off just prior to the anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre. It's odd to be able to access a Chinese site from the US that is blocked there... (Or has the block been lifted?) In any case, I was poking around and found their page on Tianenmen. Some of the pictures are familiar - I wonder how many people in China would find them as familiar as I do? Too bad they can't see them.
Still, I think this is a stopgap measure at best. The wikipedia is an easy target because it's a clearing house for links to information, but as long as there is any internet, there will be a way for this information to be passed around. A better model for disseminating information underground would be a highly decentralized system - harder to navigate, but more robust.
I also thought it was odd that there were only 100 regular contributors, out of a country of 1 billion+ people. Is it lack of computer access? Or fear of reprisals? I have to have admiration for the people who put the zh.wikipedia together in the first place.
which was then the farthest planet from the Sun Yeah, I hate the way they keep adding new planets. Oh, you meant farthest known...
No, they meant that Pluto has an eccentric orbit, which crosses the orbit of Neptune. Between 1979 and 1999, Pluto was the 8th planet from the sun, and Neptune the 9th.
The article didn't even mention one of the most important reasons this is interesting - so far the only stellar-mass blackhole candidates are in binary systems (where you can infer the mass of an unseen object from the orbit of the visible star). Otherwise, you can't see find a black hole unless you know where to look - and now we do.
(I guess you could also theoretically look for black holes by their gravitational lensing effects, but you would have to monitor a huge number of stars and hope that a black hole intercepts your line-of-sight to one of them, so not very practical.)
Also, the collapse into a neutron star or black hole would have been almost instantaneous... So we're not exactly watching the NS/BH being born - more like waiting for the dust to clear so we can see what's in there.
It's interesting that the last 100m of ice should be so difficult. I wonder if there are any additional complications from waiting until November to finish the drilling... At that depth, they say the ice is just above the melting point from geothermal heat, so I'm assuming that it is somewhat plastic and under huge pressure from the 3km of ice above it. I wonder if they had to take precautions against pressure closing the hole before they finish drilling?
Very impressive, anyway. I hope they manage to complete the ice core this time. It's amazing to think of how long that ice has been there, untouched.
I'm not going to get into a debate about the acceptable uses of various ways of representing data (which I think is more subjective than you make it out to be), but I want to respond to your last paragraph:
I'm always torn about trying to explain science to the masses, since they're clearly too dumb/uninterested to ever truly understand.
Have you ever considered that few people would want to listen to someone who starts out with that attitude about them?
I work with a project that places cosmic ray detectors in schools. The goals are both scientific and educational. I have had school security people drop by after their shift to talk and learn more about what we're doing. This - making science accessible and interesting to people - is one of the most rewarding parts of my work. You might be surprised how much "the average joe" can grasp, given the opportunity and the right resources.
Is it worth it to only give them half the facts?
No one is dishing out half-truths. All the relevant information is there. In the original article it clearly states:
The cosmic sound waves stretched 20,000 light-years, moved at half the speed of light, and were about 50 octaves below what people can hear. Dr. Whittle shifted the sounds to the human audible range...
I have never seen a similar presentation that didn't include some explanation of how it was done and what the relationship to the original data is.
It seems to me like you are asking, "Is it worth trying to disseminate interesting science even though it might be only partially understood?" To that my answer is that getting some of the information across is enough to make science outreach a worthwhile excercise.
I think it is more important to find creative and interesting ways of engaging people in science than making sure they've got all the facts straight right away. After all, if they you can get someone's interest, they will be motivated to learn more, and then any original misconceptions can be disspelled. If you start out expecting people to learn science by picking up the nearest Astrophysical Journal, it just won't happen.
Don't forget, it's legislators who only understand half the facts that cause most of the problems that/.ers complain about.
Again - more information, not less, is the answer. There's nothing wrong with presenting data any way you feel like it, as long as you explain what you did. If more scientists were working to publicize their research like this guy is, maybe everyone, politicians included, would realize that science is not something which is the exclusive domain of the specialists in ivory towers. When science is accessible, I think people are more likely to feel that it is of true value, and hence more willing to fund it with their tax dollars.
The fundamental principle of General Relativity is the idea that an accelerated reference frame is indistinguishable from a reference frame in a gravitational field. We can equally well interpret the effects of a gravitational field as the curvature of spacetime. In addition, Einstein postulated that the curvature is related to not simply mass, but the mass-energy-momentum tensor, which is where the E=mc^2 comes in.
So I would say Einstein's theory of relativity had everything to do with gravity...
I think these are all files for individual orbits, while the ocean sound I generated came from the addition of thousands of individual binaries. But of the ones given on that page, I think the eccentric orbits are the most interesting (i.e., they generate the most complicated and varied waveforms).
The ones I like best are called (humorously) zoom-whirl orbits, because the inspiraling mass makes one or two large orbits [low-frequency]followed by a series of very fast, close orbits [high-frequency] - the result is a kind of funny popping sound superimposed on the more-slowly varying sound. There are more details in this paper by Scott Hughes. (See page 37 for a graph of a zoom-whirl orbit.)
Unfortunately I don't have sound on this computer to double-check which of the sound files on his page are the ones I'm thinking of, but try the ones under "Generic Kerr Inspirals, Kludgy Results" with e=0.95 or 0.7 for starters.
It's the acoustic equivalent of a false color image.
Yes, exactly. And false-color images are used in astronomy all the time for a very good reason: they take information measured in wavelengths beyond the visual range and present it in a way that can be quickly understood by a human. It's not just about making pretty pictures (although I would say that's a bonus in some cases) - it's about presenting information in a human-understandable form. Of course you could process your IR or X-Ray astronomy pictures in a way that never involves making a visual representation of them, but then you miss out on the insight that comes from processing the image visually, which our brains are designed to do.
Likewise with gravitational waves: we have no biological way of experiencing them directly. We can measure them with sophisticated intstruments like LIGO and LISA (or at least we hope to soon). Any representation of a waveform is artificial, whether it be a plot, a datafile, or and audio file. And each format can be used to emphasize a different aspect of the data. In the case of gravitational waves, some of the frequency bands overlap with the sound frequencies the human ear is sensitive to - no need for artificially tweaking the frequencies to make it audible.
So I would strongly disagree that such representations interfere with understanding. As long as you are not misrepresenting the process you use to make a sound file or false-colour image, I would say they can only enhance our experience and understanding - for scientists as well as the general public.
People have also turned gravitational wave simulations into sound files. Gravitational radiation can be a hard concept to explain to people, but make it into a sound file and it helps people (non-physicists) grasp the idea. Here's a page with a set of audio files for inspiral into Kerr Black holes.
A few years ago I made an audio file out of the gravitational wave background in our galaxy (from white-dwarf binary stars). It sounded rather like listening to the ocean... I wish I had kept a copy.
Actually I think he answered the question quite well. But perhaps you meant to ask something else? Such as, "Is peer review necessarily limited to for-pay journals?"
In that case, the answer is obviously "no"... there is nothing stopping a peer-review system from being developed in the author-pays system. However, the incentive to provide reviewed content comes from the readers, who are willing to pay for it. Under an author-pays system, the only incentive to keep the quality high comes from preserving the journal's reputation. Not to say that isn't a very strong motivator... it could work, under the right circumstances. I was just trying to explain why the current standard in science has evolved to be the way it is, as opposed to other disciplines which are more subjective.
In the case of music, there is no absolute judge of what is good music or bad music - it's a personal choice. But there is an objective difference between good science and bad science. Unfortunately, most people either don't have the qualification or the time to carefully judge the merit of every scientific paper - instead we rely on the peer review system of respected journals to make that distinction for us. And people are willing to pay for that service.
If you want to read all the crazy ideas people want to print, there's already a medium for that - it's called the internet. Lots of things get submitted to the LANL arXiv (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) that are "fringe" science.
As much as I think it would be great for scientific literature to be made freely available to everyone, I see a couple problems with the "author pays" model.
1) Journals are businesses, and will inevitably cater to their source of income. Under the reader pays system, they have an incentive to deliver what the reader wants: quality research papers. Under the author pays system, they have an incentive to simply publish as much as possible.
2) Publication of scientific research should be a meritocracy. Any system which puts large fees on publishing is going to impede smaller projects from publishing their results, no matter how worthy. Not all science is done with huge budgets.
The answer to making research more publicly available is already here: libraries. In my opinion, all university libraries should be open to the public. If they start to move their collections online, they should have computer access from the library also. If libraries are underfunded, that is a different problem entirely...
Steven Kurtz sounds like a bit of a nutjob to me. Unless his 'proposal for the release of mutant flies in restaurants' is Johnathan Swift style satire.
Most biotech scientists would support labelling of GM foods. Only the Monsato's of the world oppose this. It's a reasonable, conservative viewpoint.
Ironically it's because of fanatics like Kurtz that the GM companies oppose labelling. People who are set on convincing the world that all GM food is harmful force the companies into the position of feeling they have something to hide.
It's too bad that the people holding the "reasonable, conservative viewpoint" don't usually feel motivated to do crazy things to get that message heard. We need education - not performance art with mutant flies...
Slashdot Mirror
The point of paper receipts is that you don't keep it, you verify it and then put it in a regular ballot box. That way if there's any question about the electronic tally, there can be a manual recount.
I don't see this as hypocrisy - I see it as holding studies of psychic phenomena to the same standards as other scientific studies, i.e., well-documented methods, peer-reviewed results, and demonstrated repeatablility.
The additional skepticism most people apply to claims of telekenesis probably comes from the fact that is an overwhelming number of counter-examples in everyday experience. Can you move objects with your mind? I can't. Therefore I am not very likely to readily believe that anyone can. This is different than saying, for example, "I can't play piano, therefore I doubt anyone can," because playing the piano is an ability which is a matter of degrees. If you can push a key, you can imagine someone playing a fugue. If you can walk, you can imagine running a marathon. But if every experience of your life confirms that you can't move objects just by thinking about it, not even a little bit, it is reasonable to hold someone who claims they can to a very high standard of proof.
(Or maybe the idea simply hasn't gotten by peer-reviewed publications?)
(Sure... Isn't that what they all say?)
I guess it might be worthwhile in a very preliminary report to give all of the options equal consideration, but to suggest that they all deserve funding for further research makes the study kind of pointless. I wonder if they people who commissioned this report can actually take it seriously?
The microwave background didn't come from the big bang though. It was actually emitted from the surface of last scattering when the universe became transparent for the first time--around 300k years after the big bang.
Exactly... Just to make the point more clear, the "surface" of last scattering is really a point in time - the photons that were released at the time of the last scattering (last interaction with matter, when it changed from opaque to optically thin) filled the entire universe at that time. The wavelength stretched and the number density decreased (now ~400 per cubic cm) as the universe expanded, but the microwave "background" radiation still fills all of space uniformally, so it isn't really correct to think about it as coming from some spherical surface centered around the Earth at a particular point in time.
What is true, though, is that as we look farther into space, we are simultaneously looking back in time, and the limit of what we can see is the surface of last scattering. This surface is centered on our location, by definititon - anyone looking out from a different point in the universe would see the same thing.
First, I haven't heard of anybody who capitalizes "sun."
Just by way of information, the proper name of the Sun is "Sol", equivalent to "Mercury", "Venus", "Earth", etc. The general distinction in astronomy is to capitalize words like Galaxy if it refers to our galaxy (the Milky Way) and use lowercase when it is a general term. Same with "sun" vs. "the Sun" and "earth" vs. "the Earth".
I think it would be quite reasonable to maintain this kind of distinction between "internet" (as in "internet access", for example) and "the Internet".
Anti-property, anti-government... and they're worried that a satire aimed at Bush/Kerry will "damage" this "icon of americana"?? This is what the original folk music was all about! It seems to me that the copyright holders are just looking for an excuse to come down on these people. I doubt Woodie Guthrie would have approved the suit...
(PS. Just to be clear, I love this song - in its entirety - and was listening to it last week during a drive across the U.S. I wish the original message wasn't getting so lost...)
It's just a silly way of changing any identifying details... From the 3rd paragraph: "S. Pammer is of course not his real name, nor does he sell canned meat."
This is the first time anyone has been able to use atoms (as opposed to photons) in quantum teleportation.
I thought it was interesting - but not terribly surprising - that the access was cut off just prior to the anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre. It's odd to be able to access a Chinese site from the US that is blocked there... (Or has the block been lifted?) In any case, I was poking around and found their page on Tianenmen. Some of the pictures are familiar - I wonder how many people in China would find them as familiar as I do? Too bad they can't see them.
Still, I think this is a stopgap measure at best. The wikipedia is an easy target because it's a clearing house for links to information, but as long as there is any internet, there will be a way for this information to be passed around. A better model for disseminating information underground would be a highly decentralized system - harder to navigate, but more robust.
I also thought it was odd that there were only 100 regular contributors, out of a country of 1 billion+ people. Is it lack of computer access? Or fear of reprisals? I have to have admiration for the people who put the zh.wikipedia together in the first place.
No, they meant that Pluto has an eccentric orbit, which crosses the orbit of Neptune. Between 1979 and 1999, Pluto was the 8th planet from the sun, and Neptune the 9th.
The article didn't even mention one of the most important reasons this is interesting - so far the only stellar-mass blackhole candidates are in binary systems (where you can infer the mass of an unseen object from the orbit of the visible star). Otherwise, you can't see find a black hole unless you know where to look - and now we do.
(I guess you could also theoretically look for black holes by their gravitational lensing effects, but you would have to monitor a huge number of stars and hope that a black hole intercepts your line-of-sight to one of them, so not very practical.)
Also, the collapse into a neutron star or black hole would have been almost instantaneous... So we're not exactly watching the NS/BH being born - more like waiting for the dust to clear so we can see what's in there.
No pictures?! This screams for pictures! It's not even worth posting without pictures! Pictures!
Nature story with pictures.
It's interesting that the last 100m of ice should be so difficult. I wonder if there are any additional complications from waiting until November to finish the drilling... At that depth, they say the ice is just above the melting point from geothermal heat, so I'm assuming that it is somewhat plastic and under huge pressure from the 3km of ice above it. I wonder if they had to take precautions against pressure closing the hole before they finish drilling?
Very impressive, anyway. I hope they manage to complete the ice core this time. It's amazing to think of how long that ice has been there, untouched.
I'm always torn about trying to explain science to the masses, since they're clearly too dumb/uninterested to ever truly understand.
Have you ever considered that few people would want to listen to someone who starts out with that attitude about them?
I work with a project that places cosmic ray detectors in schools. The goals are both scientific and educational. I have had school security people drop by after their shift to talk and learn more about what we're doing. This - making science accessible and interesting to people - is one of the most rewarding parts of my work. You might be surprised how much "the average joe" can grasp, given the opportunity and the right resources.
Is it worth it to only give them half the facts?
No one is dishing out half-truths. All the relevant information is there. In the original article it clearly states:
I have never seen a similar presentation that didn't include some explanation of how it was done and what the relationship to the original data is.
It seems to me like you are asking, "Is it worth trying to disseminate interesting science even though it might be only partially understood?" To that my answer is that getting some of the information across is enough to make science outreach a worthwhile excercise.
I think it is more important to find creative and interesting ways of engaging people in science than making sure they've got all the facts straight right away. After all, if they you can get someone's interest, they will be motivated to learn more, and then any original misconceptions can be disspelled. If you start out expecting people to learn science by picking up the nearest Astrophysical Journal, it just won't happen.
Don't forget, it's legislators who only understand half the facts that cause most of the problems that
Again - more information, not less, is the answer. There's nothing wrong with presenting data any way you feel like it, as long as you explain what you did. If more scientists were working to publicize their research like this guy is, maybe everyone, politicians included, would realize that science is not something which is the exclusive domain of the specialists in ivory towers. When science is accessible, I think people are more likely to feel that it is of true value, and hence more willing to fund it with their tax dollars.
5) Black holes (the most extreme form of gravity) are the same thing as a woman's memory nothing _ever_ escapes.
Hmm... Posting bad jokes about women in my thread? I won't forget this, Mr. Maxbang! : P
The fundamental principle of General Relativity is the idea that an accelerated reference frame is indistinguishable from a reference frame in a gravitational field. We can equally well interpret the effects of a gravitational field as the curvature of spacetime. In addition, Einstein postulated that the curvature is related to not simply mass, but the mass-energy-momentum tensor, which is where the E=mc^2 comes in.
So I would say Einstein's theory of relativity had everything to do with gravity...
I think these are all files for individual orbits, while the ocean sound I generated came from the addition of thousands of individual binaries. But of the ones given on that page, I think the eccentric orbits are the most interesting (i.e., they generate the most complicated and varied waveforms).
The ones I like best are called (humorously) zoom-whirl orbits, because the inspiraling mass makes one or two large orbits [low-frequency]followed by a series of very fast, close orbits [high-frequency] - the result is a kind of funny popping sound superimposed on the more-slowly varying sound. There are more details in this paper by Scott Hughes. (See page 37 for a graph of a zoom-whirl orbit.)
Unfortunately I don't have sound on this computer to double-check which of the sound files on his page are the ones I'm thinking of, but try the ones under "Generic Kerr Inspirals, Kludgy Results" with e=0.95 or 0.7 for starters.
It's the acoustic equivalent of a false color image.
Yes, exactly. And false-color images are used in astronomy all the time for a very good reason: they take information measured in wavelengths beyond the visual range and present it in a way that can be quickly understood by a human. It's not just about making pretty pictures (although I would say that's a bonus in some cases) - it's about presenting information in a human-understandable form. Of course you could process your IR or X-Ray astronomy pictures in a way that never involves making a visual representation of them, but then you miss out on the insight that comes from processing the image visually, which our brains are designed to do.
Likewise with gravitational waves: we have no biological way of experiencing them directly. We can measure them with sophisticated intstruments like LIGO and LISA (or at least we hope to soon). Any representation of a waveform is artificial, whether it be a plot, a datafile, or and audio file. And each format can be used to emphasize a different aspect of the data. In the case of gravitational waves, some of the frequency bands overlap with the sound frequencies the human ear is sensitive to - no need for artificially tweaking the frequencies to make it audible.
So I would strongly disagree that such representations interfere with understanding. As long as you are not misrepresenting the process you use to make a sound file or false-colour image, I would say they can only enhance our experience and understanding - for scientists as well as the general public.
People have also turned gravitational wave simulations into sound files. Gravitational radiation can be a hard concept to explain to people, but make it into a sound file and it helps people (non-physicists) grasp the idea. Here's a page with a set of audio files for inspiral into Kerr Black holes.
A few years ago I made an audio file out of the gravitational wave background in our galaxy (from white-dwarf binary stars). It sounded rather like listening to the ocean... I wish I had kept a copy.
Actually I think he answered the question quite well. But perhaps you meant to ask something else? Such as, "Is peer review necessarily limited to for-pay journals?"
In that case, the answer is obviously "no"... there is nothing stopping a peer-review system from being developed in the author-pays system. However, the incentive to provide reviewed content comes from the readers, who are willing to pay for it. Under an author-pays system, the only incentive to keep the quality high comes from preserving the journal's reputation. Not to say that isn't a very strong motivator... it could work, under the right circumstances. I was just trying to explain why the current standard in science has evolved to be the way it is, as opposed to other disciplines which are more subjective.
In the case of music, there is no absolute judge of what is good music or bad music - it's a personal choice. But there is an objective difference between good science and bad science. Unfortunately, most people either don't have the qualification or the time to carefully judge the merit of every scientific paper - instead we rely on the peer review system of respected journals to make that distinction for us. And people are willing to pay for that service.
If you want to read all the crazy ideas people want to print, there's already a medium for that - it's called the internet. Lots of things get submitted to the LANL arXiv (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) that are "fringe" science.
As much as I think it would be great for scientific literature to be made freely available to everyone, I see a couple problems with the "author pays" model.
1) Journals are businesses, and will inevitably cater to their source of income. Under the reader pays system, they have an incentive to deliver what the reader wants: quality research papers. Under the author pays system, they have an incentive to simply publish as much as possible.
2) Publication of scientific research should be a meritocracy. Any system which puts large fees on publishing is going to impede smaller projects from publishing their results, no matter how worthy. Not all science is done with huge budgets.
The answer to making research more publicly available is already here: libraries. In my opinion, all university libraries should be open to the public. If they start to move their collections online, they should have computer access from the library also. If libraries are underfunded, that is a different problem entirely...
Which brings us to the obligatory... "Missuz Kurtz... she dead...."
The horror!
Steven Kurtz sounds like a bit of a nutjob to me. Unless his 'proposal for the release of mutant flies in restaurants' is Johnathan Swift style satire.
Most biotech scientists would support labelling of GM foods. Only the Monsato's of the world oppose this. It's a reasonable, conservative viewpoint.
Ironically it's because of fanatics like Kurtz that the GM companies oppose labelling. People who are set on convincing the world that all GM food is harmful force the companies into the position of feeling they have something to hide.
It's too bad that the people holding the "reasonable, conservative viewpoint" don't usually feel motivated to do crazy things to get that message heard. We need education - not performance art with mutant flies...