May 6, 2013

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Texas vs. North Carolina Steel Cage Match in Science Stupid

By Scott Huler

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Look out, North Carolina -- Texas is not going to let you run away with the title of State Most Shamefully Committed to the Stupid Political Ruination of Science. Despite North Carolina's impressive recent yearlong streak of stunning science-related legislative psychosis -- from legislating against the sea itself to removing scientists from scientific commissions to giving up on such scientific staples as counting -- Texas won't give up without a fight.

Witness congressperson Lamar Smith, who has floated a bill for the U.S. House of Representatives that would require scientific research to pass political litmus tests. Smith gained notoriety a week before the bill when he sent a letter to the NSF demanding explanation of some science that didn't seem to live up to his exacting standards.

I don't know what Smith majored in in college, but he has admitted he couldn't hang in freshman physics and has expressed his doubts on climate change, too. He graduated from Yale -- which it seems to me has some explaining to do.

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I'm not sure whether I'm telling you this as a warning, as a way to comfort myself that North Carolina legislators aren't the craziest in the country every second of every day, or just as a way to keep away from the scotch for as long as it took to write this post. Anyhow, I've told you.

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

More by Scott Huler

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