Legacy

It's been a frigid winter in much of the United States, but Greg Laden notes that the country covers only 1.5% of the Earth's surface, and overall the planet just experienced the fourth-warmest January on record.  Meanwhile global warming denialists are resorting to every rhetorical trick in the book, such as comparing their increasingly outnumbered position to that of Galileo.  While it's tempting to recount the history of science as that of a few brilliant mavericks overthrowing established consensus, Greg writes "Science hardly ever gets Galileoed, and even Galileo did not Galileo science…
"Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known." -Ronald Reagan Earlier today, Sally Ride, the first American woman ever to fly in outer space, passed away at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer. To many different people, her life, her achievements, and her death means a great diversity of things. To anyone with a love of outer space, human exploration, and achieving your dreams, her story will likely resonate with you, too. I'd like to share with you what are,…