If you are anything like me, reading is an essential part of life itself. For my generation, newspapers, books, and magazines are so intertwined with who we are and what we do that we almost can’t imagine a world without them.

In junior high and high school I hid paperback science-fiction novels behind my textbooks; in boring parts of class, I’d fly off in imaginative excursions through the universe. My parents belonged to the Book of the Month Club, and every four weeks some new enticing brochure describing novels and nonfiction books arrived with literate little essays to let us know what the club’s editors thought every intelligent family should be reading. My mother ordered lots of those books. And at least some of them we read. They were hardback—this was well before the era of trade paperbacks.

Our northern Colorado farm town’s little public library was a place of magic. Go up one flight of stairs above the town hall, and you entered a place so wondrous that I still remember the smells and sounds today. That wonderful new-book smell, there’s nothing like it, and the sounds of our shoes crackling on those varnished hardwood floors. All the new young person’s adventure novels awaited me, in their stylish, plastic-covered covers. There wasn’t a book I wanted that I couldn’t find. (I’m sure by all modern standards that was a very small library, and its quantity of books couldn’t have been very great. But at the time it seemed all I needed.)

I was also a newspaper junkie from early on. By ninth grade, we had a journalism class with another in high school taught by a fine teacher. I wrote the editorials for our high school newspaper, which was typeset, laid out, and published every Thursday as a well-read page in our town’s weekly newspaper. It was quite a heady experience to see your words in print every week, for every person in town to read. Every single person you knew.

So it is no wonder that after a brief flirtation with physics as a major, I ended up in journalism school (with a science emphasis but still a hard-news disposition). I worked three summers on newspapers, then a full year as a working newsman in the Denver bureau of UPI, and then went on to graduate school in journalism in New York at Columbia.

When I started at Columbia (fall of 1965), New York City had six daily newspapers. Then there was a major newspaper strike. It went on for a long time, as I recall, a sobering circumstance when you are studying to become a newspaperman. By the time I graduated, or at least shortly thereafter, New York had only four daily newspapers. The Journal-American and the Herald-Tribune, the latter a very fine newspaper, had fallen victim to harsh economics.

Newspapers have been under economic pressures from television since the ’50s, but their rapid decline now—in this new Internet age—is unprecedented. And sad. I am still a newspaper junkie. We get the Sunday New York Times delivered before sunrise on Sunday mornings to our house in Albuquerque—nearly two thousand miles from New York. We read it throughout the week. All other mornings I spend at least forty-five minutes with our local morning newspaper. I like the feel of the newspaper in my hand or on the table. Up until this past year, my wife Ruth and I had similar rituals in the early evening, often over dinner or a TV program, reading our local afternoon Scripps-Howard newspaper. It died last summer. We are no longer a two-newspaper city.

Kids these days don’t read newspapers. They barely know what they are. I know that. I’ve seen it. I worry about it. It is terrible for newspapers and those who love them. It may be terrible for education and for democracy. But I have to realize that I—and maybe all of us of our age group—are looking at the matter through our own generations’ prism. We may need to look through a newer, more high-tech prism to find signs of hope there. I think we might.

Recently we had some of our family over for dinner. Thinking about this article, I asked our grandson, Tenzin (who in December turned eighteen): “I know you don’t read newspapers or watch the evening television network news like we do, but do you nevertheless consider yourself well-informed? And exactly where do you get your information?” I think I kind of knew the answer, because he’s very computer-literate, but I wanted to hear it from him. He’s a smart young man, bright, studious, well-read (he reads books, lots of books; that’s another story), aware, already in college. Perhaps not altogether typical of most young people but still a youngster of his generation (in most ways).

“I think I am fairly well-informed,” he began thoughtfully. He explained that he gets his news off a variety of Internet sites. And then he said something about himself and his peers that to those of us in publishing is chilling but no longer unexpected: “We don’t think we should have to pay for information.”

There. He said it. That’s what the current debate is all about. Information should be free, on the Internet. Free is good, as the editor of Wired maintains. But Tenzin quickly added, in constructive fashion: “Newspapers and magazines just have to get a new business model. We may not think we should pay for information, but we don’t mind wading through ads to get to it.”

There, in a one young family member’s microcosm, was the core essence of the debate. I’ve seen this debate played out endlessly in heart-felt discussions about the future of newspapers and magazines in blogs, the Columbia Journalism Review, other magazines, and newspapers themselves.

We in publishing know we have to embrace the modern electronic information age, and most all of us are doing so in various ways; but how do we make it pay? Not pay in order to make a profit—because most of us aren’t really in this work for profit—just in order to stay in business at all. In order to research, report, write, edit, making a whole bunch of professional judgments along the way, and then get that encapsulated information out to the world that needs it. What in the world is the business model based on “free is good”? The debates are ongoing, and they are endless. No one, I think it is fair to say, really yet knows the answer. We don’t yet know how this is going to play out, which is very unsettling.

The tools of delivery are rapidly changing, and that’s where all the stress and worry comes in. But we must remember that most other industries in the corporate world have also undergone stresses and changes in recent years and decades; how well they responded to and adapted to those changing circumstances helps determine whether they’ll survive or not. (Plus an occasional ten-billion or so government subsidy—something those of us in the media can’t quite expect.)

In publishing we cling emotionally to the physical printed books, newspapers, and magazines we love so much—a history going back more than 500 years now. It’s no wonder. We do love them, and we should. But it is what goes into them that counts, not the exact physical output. It is their product of the human brain, heart, and imagination that we seek, and what form it happens to get to us in is less important. Isn’t it? I think that may be true anyway. Intellectually, I say so.

It is hard for me, though, living as I do in a large house with at least five of its rooms (two of them Skeptical Inquirer offices) lined with books. Bookcases everywhere. Many thousands of books over all. They are everywhere. I love their look, their feel. Their variety, their design, their content, the way they represent our wide-ranging interests and values. They are a part of my identity. (Ruth’s too, I think. She reads books far more than even I do.) With newspapers on the counter. With magazines of every type and description on display. I keep some in magazine file boxes to refer to in the event that becomes necessary. (Yet even I now am more likely to go immediately to the Web to do my research.)

I mentioned that newspaper and other publishers are struggling with these matters as we speak. On November 1, the New York Times’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote (again) about some of these painful problems. Although the Times has the largest newsroom of any American newspaper, Clark reported that the Times was about to cut 100 newsroom people (of their 1,250 reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, graphic artists, videographers, and more) through voluntary buyouts and, if needed, make layoffs in the weeks before Christmas. It is hardly alone. The Baltimore Sun is down from 400 journalists to 150; the Los Angeles Times news staff has been cut by more than half. Most large newspapers have closed or drastically curtailed their foreign bureaus. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. The Associated Press may have to enact layoffs to get payroll down 10 percent.

Since the Times and all other publications have enlarged their online presence dramatically, the new question is: Can you charge for that online access? Hoyt says many readers are suggesting the Times do so, and they are willing to get out their credit cards. Times executives are still studying that issue. But Bill Keller, the Times executive editor expresses caution: “It’s a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go.”

The paradox is that newspaper circulations are declining, rapidly, while in many cases newspaper readership is up. Many readers prefer reading their newspaper reports on the Web. But making that pay—again, that is the key dilemma. No one has yet found a reliable way.

Magazines are in similar situations, under tremendous cost/circulation pressures. Sixteen thousand titles are published in the U.S., but every month notable ones drop by the wayside. Many others are struggling. You would think that magazines with unique niches, the Skeptical Inquirer among them, would have some advantage over general-interest ones. Perhaps they do, but the flight to the Internet is debilitating for all.

My view is that for most periodicals the subscriptions should include both the printed and electronic version (or an option of one or the other). Thus subscribers (but not nonsubscribers) would have full access to the entire publication online. Most scientific journals have already gone that way. But I realize implementing that kind of action for more public periodicals is difficult and fraught with uncertainties.

But let’s get beyond economics and questions of the survival of media outlets and whole media industries. There are even larger issues: reading and literacy. They are essential to modern democratic civilization. Is the Internet age decreasing or reducing reading and literacy? I don’t know for sure. It is easy for us oldsters to condemn the newer generation for their addictions to texting, twittering, chat-rooming, social networking, blogging—and the incredible handheld devices that make all this possible anywhere, anytime, twenty-four hours a day. But I think we have to be careful. Our own prism may be obscured.

I am tentatively encouraged by the view of Stanford University professor of writing and rhetoric Andrea Lunsford. She has organized a huge project collecting more than 14,000 student writing samples—in-class assignments, formal essays to be sure, but also e-mails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions, reported in a recent column in Wired by Clive Thompson called “The New Literacy” (September 2009) are worth thinking about seriously:

“I think we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford [Thompson reports], technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. . . .It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment.

The question arises: is this explosion of writing good on a technical level? Thompson argues that the answer is yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to get their point across. Says Thompson: “The modern world of online writing. . .is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago. The fact that students today almost always write for an audience….gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing.”

I am not totally convinced, and I am sure you are not either. But perhaps it is a glimmer of hope.

Here’s what my computer-literate oldest grandson e-mailed me when I shared a draft of this essay:

I’ve read the Wired article you mentioned (online, for free :p), and I believe that in many ways the author is absolutely correct. Knowing your audience and conveying tone is especially important in online communications, not only because vocal cues cannot be relied upon, but also because the quality of writing is often used to judge the merit of a claim where other tools are not available. Writing like a middle schooler gives the message the weight of a middle-schooler’s opinion. It’s also, as the article mentioned, a fundamentally different form of communication than an essay.

As far as sheer volume goes, I have written far, far more for the Internet’s consumption than I have for school. Over the last three weeks, I’ve almost six thousand lines worth of irc communication (a form of instant messaging/chatroom), and have read many times that amount. That’s in addition to many dozen of forum posts, ranging in length from a single sentence to a mini essay. I may be atypical, but our generation certainly does communicate in large part via text.

So, if his experience is at all typical, perhaps there is way more than a glimmer of hope. We must embrace the new technology, use it ourselves to the degree we’re comfortable, and encourage the newer, younger generation to use it in every way possible for all constructive purposes.

My title mentions the New Skepticism. Here’s one thing I mean. All these new tools allow us to go out there and assess and investigate claims and assertions like never before. Those who use them now have tools to access information that we could only have hoped for in our student and early adult years. Inquirers can now quickly call up ten sources on the Web and cross-compare them for inconsistencies and discrepancies, and therefore begin to sift likely correct statements from possibly incorrect ones.

Earlier this year, at the Center for Inquiry conference in Bethesda, Maryland, we had a late-afternoon special section on the New Skepticism. It was filled with a lot of the newer generation of eager young people with great new ideas and energy to devote to the skeptical movement.

They didn’t need me, but here’s a little of what I told them anyway, at the beginning:

What a revolution that has been over the past two decades!

There is no point lamenting what has been lost—instead we must capitalize on what has been gained and become adept at using all the new tools that the Internet and other modern electronic communications have made possible.

All this to better communicate among ourselves and present to the millions worldwide the differences between bad science and good science, sense and nonsense, reason and unreason—in general and in specific case after case—and the rewards and unfettered joy of science and skeptical inquiry.

Use these new tools. . . . The next generation, and the one after that, find these new tools natural and should not be held back by our old allegiances to the print media and central broadcast media.

The November/December 2009 special issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, guest edited by our managing editor Ben Radford, was devoted to just these issues. It’s titled “Skepticism 2.0: What’s Next?” A dozen invited representatives of the new generation of skeptics write provocatively and passionately about their view of the new skepticism. Because they work in a decentralized way and use so many different electronic media, their viewpoint may differ from the classic skeptical movement founded by Paul Kurtz, Martin Gardner, James Randi, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Philip Klass, Ray Human, and the others a third of a century ago. Many are well aware of CSI and SI and the pioneering efforts of these early heroes of skepticism, and the history of the movement. But others aren’t; they’re just out there doing their skeptical thing. On their own. And in many cases, remarkably well. And that’s mostly a good thing.

I highly commend that entire issue of SI for a refreshingly different view of the skeptical movement as it draws in younger people and embraces all the modern technologies now available.

Conventional books and magazines will continue to struggle, with electronic distribution of books coming rapidly to the fore and more newspapers and magazines succumbing or going online only. The losses are dreadful. The reflective judgments their editors bring to the editorial content may be sorely missed. Future readers may never know the tactile delight, that almost visceral feel, of a book or a newspaper in the hand. But they will read, in some form, in some way, the thoughts and ideas and collected wisdom authors convey and the important information people (and search engines) compile. The communications tools have changed and multiplied, and, as realists and rationalists, we must recognize and apply their enormous new power and promise.

The Center for Inquiry’s 12th World Congress in Washington (Bethesda, Maryland, actually) was grandly yet appropriately titled “Science, Public Policy, and the Planetary Community.” In one way or another it covered just about every topic CFI and its affiliated organizations the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer) and the Council for Secular Humanism (publisher of Free Inquiry) deal with.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it. The day afterward, CFI founder and chairman Paul Kurtz called the congress “exhilarating.” As he said, “The responses of our readers and supporters were overwhelmingly positive. What a stunning response that we received from them!” Ron Lindsay, CFI’s CEO and president, likewise called the conference very successful and said many attendees commented favorably to him “that they noticed the skeptical/scientific side of our organization was on display more than usual, which they appreciated.”

That’s true, I think. Many people in the audience told me at various times how much they appreciate and value the Skeptical Inquirer. SI and its articles and the work of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry got a lot of public mention, too, in the talks, intros, and sessions.

Here are a few highlights for me:

• The opening session on Darwin and Lincoln, evolution, ID and creationism, and legal challenges of church-state separation involving the latter. Civil rights lawyer and CFI board member Edward Tabash emphasized repeatedly that in opposing creationism, we are “fighting not religious belief but the infusion of religious doctrine into public policy.” Philosopher/historian Barbara Forrest updated developments in the intelligent design wars since the Dover decision in 2005, including the latest troubling activities of antievolutionists in Texas and Louisiana. And Lincoln/Darwin historian David Contosta said: “I am convinced Lincoln was a deist. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ. He was not baptized. He questioned miracles of the Bible. He liked to tell jokes about preachers.... He probably couldn’t get elected today.”
• Former twelve-term U.S. Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder’s rousing talk defending good science against political indifference and, worse, interference. Her lively title tells the story:“The United States, a Former Global Leader in Science, Apologizes for the 2001–2008 Service Outage.” In her current job she represents textbook publishers for grades K–12. She warned that only a handful of people pick the textbooks your children use. “They are not teachers, usually. They are scary people, some of them.” She lamented that just the previous week in Texas opponents of evolution in textbooks declared an “insufficiency of evidence” for natural selection.
• Author Susan Jacoby’s (The Age of American Unreason) litany of “anti-intellectualism and sheer intellectual laziness” in America over the past forty years. “We are in serious intellectual trouble. We don’t value knowledge enough.” She gave a long series of examples of what she calls “junk thought,” ideas that are “impervious to evidence.” She also defended the virtues of reading, a practice much marginalized in today’s hectic age of instant electronic communications.
• Paul Kurtz’s luncheon address on the planetary perspective. He said humanism includes genuine caring for others and a respect for the dignity and value of every person on the planet. “We have common ground with all members of the human family.” He said we need a new planetary ethic that mitigates human suffering and increases the sum of human good and happiness. “As skeptics and rationalists, we need to cultivate a new planetary ethic. We need to be concerned with the planet Earth. It seems to me that is the positive statement of humanism.”
• Astrophysicist John Mather’s (the first NASA scientist to win the Nobel Prize) beautifully illustrated talk on the entire history and future of the universe, from its origin in the “Horrendous Space Kablooey” (as he calls the Big Bang) 13.7 billion years ago to the time when the Sun goes out 7.6 billion years from now ... and beyond.  He reported on the 1998 discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating, the mystery of dark energy, the plans for the next big space telescope to be launched in 2013 (the James Webb Space Telescope), and the quest to directly observe more exoplanets. Cosmology may have no practical benefits, he said, but space science sure does. People often forget that their weather reports, GPS devices, telephones, and television all “depend on things out there in space.”
• NASA climatologist Drew Shindell’s full report on “The Science of Climate Change.” He noted that our knowledge of climate change comes from detailed scientific observations, and he reviewed the interplay and repeated testing that goes on between scientific observations and computer models of climate. Some conclusions: the planet is getting warmer, natural forcings (solar variation, volcanoes, etc.) have been flat in recent years, the twentieth-century warming is largely caused by greenhouse gas increases, and the rate of future warming is likely to increase. He noted that apathy and resistance to change in this area goes back to the 1840s when a smokestack-cleaning technology for ships of the Royal Navy was squelched by industry.
• James Randi’s lively participation in many sessions, hallway discussions, and his own late afternoon talk about how easily we all can be fooled. “I know the art of deception. I know how people are fooled. And I know how to do that.” He described repeated examples of very smart people being fooled by trickery. “You can be fooled as well,” he said. It’s the conjuror’s warning not to take at face value any proclaimed evidence of psychic powers. At the end, Randi announced that his famous one-million-dollar challenge to claimants for proof of paranormal powers under controlled test conditions, which was to end, will in fact be renewed. “It was going to terminate in 2012,” he said, “but now it will continue.”
• Major awards to Paul Kurtz, Randi, and Lawrence Krauss.
• A session I moderated on Skepticism and Science seemed well received (due especially to the presentations by the witty and lively Richard Wiseman, with lots of video demos on perception and misperception, and equally so Elizabeth Loftus, with her research demonstrating false memory, plus Joe Nickell, on investigating rather than just debunking, and Armadeo Sarma, on alternative medicine fads in Germany and the rest of Europe).
• A small lunch given by Paul Kurtz for international participants in the congress, including the Chinese delegation (where we were able to renew acquaintances with several of the Chinese colleagues we met in Beijing in October 2007) and those from the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, and Senegal.
• A lively audience-participation, packed-house session at the end of the afternoon Saturday on The Future of Skepticism. Run by Ben Radford and myself, I gave some introductory comments. Barry Karr and James Underdown also participated. Sean McCabe of the James Randi Educational Foundation (he also writes a skeptical blog for the general public at www.weirdthings.com) emphasized the positive messages of skepticism, noting that there are now nine network TV shows featuring scientists or science oriented. Proclaimed McCabe: “Skepticism is cool ... and it’s getting cooler.” We then opened it to the audience. A lot of good ideas and discussion came out of the session.
• A sobering presentation by Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy on the very recent Talibanization of Pakistan, even in Islamabad, where he teaches at a university. It has become very dangerous, he said. Terrible things have begun happening there in just the past several months. (The day after the conference ended, news organizations reported the imposition of Islamic law by the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. Further Taliban inroads have prompted subsequent military action.)
• The Saturday evening awards banquet featured a live oratorio of composer Richard Einhorn’s new original composition (personally introduced by Einhorn) “The Origin,” a celebration of the life and work of Darwin based on Darwin’s own words in On the Origin of Species.
• Awards banquet speaker Lawrence Krauss’s (a CSI fellow and Arizona State University physicist and author) talk on “Science and Public Policy: An Oxymoron.” He concluded with the call, “We must all become evangelists for science. We cannot tolerate unambiguous nonsense in a democracy.”

The Nobel foundation obliquely acknowledged that situation by saying the prize went for the discovery of the virus, not for detection of the link between the virus and the AIDS disease (SI News and Comment, January/February 2009).

Biomedical scientists (106 in all) from seventeen countries have published a letter in a prominent scientific journal saying Gallo deserves equal credit. And a major event is planned in May honoring Gallo on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his co-discovery.

In a letter titled “Unsung Hero Robert C. Gallo” (Science, 323: 206, 2009), the international group of scientists say that while Nobel Prize recipients Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier “fully deserve the award, it is equally important to recognize” Gallo’s contributions.

“Gallo definitely proved HIV-1 as the cause of AIDS through the successful isolation and long-term cultivation of HIV-1 and developed a diagnostic kit that prevented new infections and saved thousands of lives. These contributions . . . warrant equal recognition. . . .”

The letter continues: “Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier isolated a virus but . . . could not establish whether it was the AIDS virus, an achievement accomplished by Gallo and colleagues just one year later. Gallo . . . learned to grow the virus and, furthermore, discovered its role, saved the blood supply, and opened the way for drug and vaccine development. Without Gallo’s contributions, the relevance of the virus to AIDS might not have been recognized and many thousands more lives would have been lost. Given the enormous impact of these developments on the lives of countless thousands globally, Gallo’s contributions should not go unrecognized.”

Gallo also has been outspoken against those who try to deny that HIV is the cause of AIDS (“AIDS: Denialism vs. Science,” September/October 2007).

An endnote to the Science letter says the letter-writing initiative was done independently of Gallo’s influence. The coordinator of the letter effort is Guido Poli, head of the AIDS Immunopathogenesis Unit at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy.

Poli says he and the letter writers, many of them leaders in the HIV field, felt the Nobel committee had an unfortunate anti-Gallo bias. Poli worked at the National Institutes of Health for seven years and witnessed the development of AIDS research during its first years.

He told the Skeptical Inquirer he hadn’t heard from Gallo directly, “although people in his staff told me that he was happy about the letter.”

May 4, 2009, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gallo’s paper in Science reporting his findings identifying the AIDS virus. To commemorate the discovery, the University of Maryland School of Medicine is hosting a three-day celebratory event in Baltimore May 9–11. It includes a gala honoring Gallo, “Celebrating a Visionary’s Quest for Discovery,” and a symposium, “25 Years After Discovering HIV as the Cause of AIDS.” The National Cancer Institute, where Gallo did his research, is co-sponsor.

Poli told SI he has been invited as a speaker to the celebration. “I interpret that as a way to say ‘thanks!’”

Concerns by some parents have kept alive the idea of some link, which has not been supported by the scientific literature (see “The Anti-Vaccination Movement,” SI November/December 2007).

Jeffrey S. Gerber and Paul A. Offit of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia published a review in the February 15 (2009) Clinical Infectious Diseases (48:456–61) of twenty peer-reviewed scientific studies published between 1999 and 2004. The studies show no connection.

The authors examined three specific claims some have proposed: the combination measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism by damaging the intestinal lining; the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, formerly in some vaccines, is toxic to the central nervous system; and the simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines overwhelms or weakens the nervous system.

They reviewed the relevant epidemiological evidence and found no support for these claims. In one study, for instance, researchers in England evaluated 498 autistic children born from 1979 through 1992. No change in the rates of autism diagnoses after the 1987 introduction of the MMR vaccine was observed. A study in Denmark compared the incidence of autism in children who had received two different levels of thimerosal or no thimerosal at all. There was no relationship between thimerosal exposure and autism. On the third claim, they note that vaccines “do not overwhelm the immune system . . . even conservative estimates predict the capacity to respond to thousands of vaccines simultaneously.”

“Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism,” conclude Gerber and Offit. “These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufficient to detect even rare associations.

“These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on more-promising leads.”

The new Italian peer-reviewed study was carried out over a ten-year period and published in the February issue of Pediatrics. Thousands of healthy Italian babies in the early 1990s were given two different amounts of thimerosal as part of their routine vaccinations. Ten years later, 1,403 of those children were identified and given a battery of brain-function tests. Researchers found small differences in only two of twenty-four measurements, and “they might be attributable to chance,” they said. Only one case of autism was found, and that was in the group with the lower thimerosal.

“Put together with the evidence of all the other studies,” said the study’s lead author, Alberto Tozzi of Bambino Gesu Hospital in Rome, “this tells us there is no reason to worry about the effect of thimerosal in vaccines.”

The moon and bright Venus (upper left) loom far above closely paired Mercury and Jupiter (lower right), very low in the twilight sky above the lights of Albuquerque, New Mexico (and just above the small tree), early on the evening of January 1, 2009. On this first night of 2009, Mercury was above and to the left of brighter Jupiter. (Photo by Kendrick Frazier 1.3 sec exposure at f3.5 w/ Nikon zoom lens at 18 mm)

Will the new presidency of Barack Obama usher in a more welcoming age for science and reason? We at least have cause for hope. A president’s intellectual outlook is only one of many things that shape changes in culture and society, but the early signs are encouraging.

The Bush administration chalked up so many negatives in regard to scientific thinking, reason, and open inquiry that there may be no way to go but up. The president himself was a born-again and encouraged the far-right evangelical wing of his party; he ascribed to the “equal time” strategy of creationists in their opposition to teaching evolution, for example. His political appointees left a long and well-documented record of ideological interference in the recommendations of scientists at NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and on and on. He restricted stem cell research, and only begrudgingly came to accept global warming. He actively practiced a “from the gut” style of decision making that marginalized well-informed rational analysis and caused a litany of international problems.

Obama, elected by a 53 to 47 percent margin, is the stark opposite in many key respects. His background is multicultural and his outlook international. He espouses learning and education, including science education. He has exhibited a welcome centrist, moderate, pragmatic outlook that seems to eschew ideological extremes on either side of the political spectrum. He has repeatedly demonstrated intellectual agility, a critical awareness, and an ability to synthesize and plan. He has shown an obvious willingness to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints before making decisions, one mark of a critical thinker. He has shown every tendency to welcome the best minds to his administration, including former rivals, and to listen to them. He signaled early on that he quickly would rescind the Bush administration’s rulings against research on new lines of stem cells. He recognizes that climate change is real and says, “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

His lengthy written response during the campaign to the top fourteen science questions facing America (www.sciencedcebate2008.com) was shaped by numerous scientific notables including Nobel laureates—a welcome sign in itself—and said everything a science-minded person would like to hear. (The topics were climate change, energy, education, national security, pandemics and biosecurity, genetics, stem cells, ocean health, water, space, science integrity, research, and health.) He promised to defend scientific integrity: “I will restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

His appointment of Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary harks back to a welcome tradition when distinguished scientists not politicians headed the top energy agency (the Atomic Energy Commission, a forerunner to the Department of Energy).

Some scientists called for him to quickly appoint a top-flight science advisor and give that person prominent status in the White House. Obama had pledged to strengthen the role of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and to restore the credibility and role of the Office of Science and Technology Policy as an office within the White House structure. But it didn’t happen immediately. The first month of Obama’s post-election transition was necessarily devoted to responding to the sudden US and world financial crisis that brought the most serious downturn in the economy since the Great Depression. He rapidly assembled his economic and national security teams before beginning the rest of his cabinet and other appointments. Given the urgent circumstances, few would dispute that priority.

Word about Obama’s Science Advisor appointment then came on December 19, the day after he completed his cabinet appointments. His Science Advisor is John Holdren, a respected physicist long known for his work on energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Holdren is director of the program on science, technology, and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006.

Obama’s appointee as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key science appointment, is marine biologist Jane Lubchenco. She is professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and the OSU Distinguished Professor of Zoology. She is a MacArthur Fellow and, like Holdren, also a former AAAS president. “When has NOAA been headed by a member of the National Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society?” commented Andrew Rosenberg, a University of New Hampshire professor of natural resources and a former NOAA deputy director under the Clinton administration. “That’s exactly the right signal¿. It establishes NOAA as one of those key scientific agencies.” He called her an “absolutely world-class scientist” and said the appointment means science agencies now have a role in policy.

In his science team rollout radio address of December 19, Obama not only announced those appointments but also revealed that science notables Harold Varmus and Eric Lander would be co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, along with Holdren. “Together, they will work to remake PCAST into a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy proposals,” said Obama.

Varmus is a 1989 Nobel laureate in medicine, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Lander, is director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, and was, as Obama proudly said, “one of the driving forces behind mapping the human genome—one of the greatest scientific achievements in history.”

So the Obama White House could hardly have a more distinguished set of people in the key science positions. And it sounds as if Obama sees them as more than figureheads.

“It is time to once again put science at the top of our agenda and work to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology,” said Obama, words that should please all who have long been warning of America’s slippage in the world of science. And for those concerned about the integrity of science and its previous abuses, his words were an early Christmas present: “The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth, and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as president of the United States—and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.”

So the outlook is tentatively hopeful for a time in which scientific thinking, education, learning, and unfettered inquiry will have some greater support and encouragement from the highest position in the land. And that is welcome.

Nevertheless, there are limitations to how much a president can do. Money is the top problem. The federal budget was under serious pressures even before the October-November financial meltdown and the resulting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-financed bailouts. Obama’s first large spending program announced as president-elect was to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, surely a welcome and much-needed enterprise. But that spending will further restrict his options on funding new programs of scientific research. Unless and until the economy can begin expanding again, science will have access to one piece of a shrinking pie.

An early sign of this problem was a statement from his new economic council director Lawrence Summers that while an increase in federal research and development is good for the long-term health of the economy, R&D would not be included in the economic stimulus package. The Association of American Universities subsequently released a proposal sent to Obama for just such a stimulus, including “academic research facilities modernization and $1.8 billion to research universities to hire more young scientists and engineers.

Secondary-school education in the U.S. is funded mainly at local and state levels, and those entities are likewise under new financial constraints. And, even if they weren’t, money isn’t the sole solution. Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, announced in December, show U.S. students are doing no better on this international science exam than they were ten years ago, while a number of other countries’ performances rose. One bright spot was U.S. students’ performance in mathematics. The average score among fourth-graders has jumped 11 points since 1995, to 529. Eighth graders also earned a higher average score than in 1995 and were better than their counterparts in 37 countries (but still less than China, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong). Educators and policy makers have been focused on improving math education in recent years. One can hope science education and scientific literacy will likewise get a new emphasis in American culture.

And while it will be wonderful to have a president who doesn’t doubt evolution, national political leadership can only go so far in shaping attitudes in this area. Well-funded evangelical groups are still mounting intense media campaigns denouncing evolution as false science, or worse, and extolling two-thousand-year-old biblical stories as real science. Much of this effort takes place on religious television broadcasts, in churches, and in political action at the local and state level. As communications researcher Jon D. Miller has said, America is out on a limb by itself in its rejection of evolution. Polls show the U.S. is thirty-third out of thirty-four countries in evolution acceptance (only Turkey rates lower). That’s not going to be fixed by a new president, no matter how enlightened.

Whether the economy and budget considerations end up trumping the hopeful plans and intentions of the Obama administration remains to be seen. But he represents a welcome breath of fresh air and a sense of hope not only to the population at large (both in the U.S. and worldwide) but to all who support science-based inquiry and the use of rationality and reason in examining issues important to us all.

Will the new presidency of Barack Obama usher in a more welcoming age for science and reason? We at least have cause for hope. A president’s intellectual outlook is only one of many things that shape changes in culture and society, but the early signs are encouraging.

The Bush administration chalked up so many negatives in regard to scientific thinking, reason, and open inquiry that there may be no way to go but up. The president himself was a born-again and encouraged the far-right evangelical wing of his party; he ascribed to the “equal time” strategy of creationists in their opposition to teaching evolution, for example. His political appointees left a long and well-documented record of ideological interference in the recommendations of scientists at NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and on and on. He restricted stem cell research, and only begrudgingly came to accept global warming. He actively practiced a “from the gut” style of decision making that marginalized well-informed rational analysis and caused a litany of international problems.

Obama, elected by a 53 to 47 percent margin, is the stark opposite in many key respects. His background is multicultural and his outlook international. He espouses learning and education, including science education. He has exhibited a welcome centrist, moderate, pragmatic outlook that seems to eschew ideological extremes on either side of the political spectrum. He has repeatedly demonstrated intellectual agility, a critical awareness, and an ability to synthesize and plan. He has shown an obvious willingness to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints before making decisions, one mark of a critical thinker. He has shown every tendency to welcome the best minds to his administration, including former rivals, and to listen to them. He signaled early on that he quickly would rescind the Bush administration’s rulings against research on new lines of stem cells. He recognizes that climate change is real and says, “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

His lengthy written response during the campaign to the top fourteen science questions facing America (www.sciencedcebate2008.com) was shaped by numerous scientific notables including Nobel laureates—a welcome sign in itself—and said everything a science-minded person would like to hear. (The topics were climate change, energy, education, national security, pandemics and biosecurity, genetics, stem cells, ocean health, water, space, science integrity, research, and health.) He promised to defend scientific integrity: “I will restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

His appointment of Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary harks back to a welcome tradition when distinguished scientists not politicians headed the top energy agency (the Atomic Energy Commission, a forerunner to the Department of Energy).

Some scientists called for him to quickly appoint a top-flight science advisor and give that person prominent status in the White House. Obama had pledged to strengthen the role of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and to restore the credibility and role of the Office of Science and Technology Policy as an office within the White House structure. But it didn’t happen immediately. The first month of Obama’s post-election transition was necessarily devoted to responding to the sudden US and world financial crisis that brought the most serious downturn in the economy since the Great Depression. He rapidly assembled his economic and national security teams before beginning the rest of his cabinet and other appointments. Given the urgent circumstances, few would dispute that priority.

Word about Obama’s Science Advisor appointment then came on December 19, the day after he completed his cabinet appointments. His Science Advisor is John Holdren, a respected physicist long known for his work on energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Holdren is director of the program on science, technology, and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006.

Obama’s appointee as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key science appointment, is marine biologist Jane Lubchenco. She is professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and the OSU Distinguished Professor of Zoology. She is a MacArthur Fellow and, like Holdren, also a former AAAS president. “When has NOAA been headed by a member of the National Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society?” commented Andrew Rosenberg, a University of New Hampshire professor of natural resources and a former NOAA deputy director under the Clinton administration. “That’s exactly the right signal¿. It establishes NOAA as one of those key scientific agencies.” He called her an “absolutely world-class scientist” and said the appointment means science agencies now have a role in policy.

In his science team rollout radio address of December 19, Obama not only announced those appointments but also revealed that science notables Harold Varmus and Eric Lander would be co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, along with Holdren. “Together, they will work to remake PCAST into a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy proposals,” said Obama.

Varmus is a 1989 Nobel laureate in medicine, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Lander, is director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, and was, as Obama proudly said, “one of the driving forces behind mapping the human genome—one of the greatest scientific achievements in history.”

So the Obama White House could hardly have a more distinguished set of people in the key science positions. And it sounds as if Obama sees them as more than figureheads.

“It is time to once again put science at the top of our agenda and work to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology,” said Obama, words that should please all who have long been warning of America’s slippage in the world of science. And for those concerned about the integrity of science and its previous abuses, his words were an early Christmas present: “The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth, and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as president of the United States—and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.”

So the outlook is tentatively hopeful for a time in which scientific thinking, education, learning, and unfettered inquiry will have some greater support and encouragement from the highest position in the land. And that is welcome.

Nevertheless, there are limitations to how much a president can do. Money is the top problem. The federal budget was under serious pressures even before the October-November financial meltdown and the resulting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-financed bailouts. Obama’s first large spending program announced as president-elect was to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, surely a welcome and much-needed enterprise. But that spending will further restrict his options on funding new programs of scientific research. Unless and until the economy can begin expanding again, science will have access to one piece of a shrinking pie.

An early sign of this problem was a statement from his new economic council director Lawrence Summers that while an increase in federal research and development is good for the long-term health of the economy, R&D would not be included in the economic stimulus package. The Association of American Universities subsequently released a proposal sent to Obama for just such a stimulus, including “academic research facilities modernization and $1.8 billion to research universities to hire more young scientists and engineers.

Secondary-school education in the U.S. is funded mainly at local and state levels, and those entities are likewise under new financial constraints. And, even if they weren’t, money isn’t the sole solution. Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, announced in December, show U.S. students are doing no better on this international science exam than they were ten years ago, while a number of other countries’ performances rose. One bright spot was U.S. students’ performance in mathematics. The average score among fourth-graders has jumped 11 points since 1995, to 529. Eighth graders also earned a higher average score than in 1995 and were better than their counterparts in 37 countries (but still less than China, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong). Educators and policy makers have been focused on improving math education in recent years. One can hope science education and scientific literacy will likewise get a new emphasis in American culture.

And while it will be wonderful to have a president who doesn’t doubt evolution, national political leadership can only go so far in shaping attitudes in this area. Well-funded evangelical groups are still mounting intense media campaigns denouncing evolution as false science, or worse, and extolling two-thousand-year-old biblical stories as real science. Much of this effort takes place on religious television broadcasts, in churches, and in political action at the local and state level. As communications researcher Jon D. Miller has said, America is out on a limb by itself in its rejection of evolution. Polls show the U.S. is thirty-third out of thirty-four countries in evolution acceptance (only Turkey rates lower). That’s not going to be fixed by a new president, no matter how enlightened.

Whether the economy and budget considerations end up trumping the hopeful plans and intentions of the Obama administration remains to be seen. But he represents a welcome breath of fresh air and a sense of hope not only to the population at large (both in the U.S. and worldwide) but to all who support science-based inquiry and the use of rationality and reason in examining issues important to us all.

“By December 1941 American cryptology was a system that was stretched to the limit and pushed in too many directions,” they write. The American intelligence people had “conflicting missions” and too “few resources.” The ordersto monitor commercial Japanese broadcasts for a Winds execute message was just one more burden—“one more apple of chaos tossed into an already turbulent crisis.”

“The result of this skewed emphasis was that many messages encrypted in cryptographic systems other than Purple [Japan’s high-level cipher machine used for diplomatic traffic] usually took days, even weeks, to get processed to the point where a translation could be produced. After Pearl Harbor, when American codebreakers got around to decoding and translating some of the pre-attack diplomatic traffic, they discovered that many messages carried important details about the Japanese intentions.”

An example was a Tokyo message sent December 6 to its diplomats in Bangkok. It noted that “X-Day,” or “Declaration Day,” was set for Sunday, December 7 (December 8 in Tokyo). “Notice” was to be given on that date. That message was translated on December 8.

This “X-Day” was never mentioned in any Purple messages to Washington intercepted and worked by the Americans.

The report is filled with many other examples of how potentially critical intelligence was missed due to delays in translation.

A new critical investigation by the National Security Agency confirms that a Japanese so-called ‘Winds execute’ message was not heard until hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor began on December 7, 1941, and, in any event, contained no actionable intelligence.

It is not every day that one receives a report in the mail from the supersecret National Security Agency. NSA is the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence. And when the report investigates the history of one of the long-disputed contentions about the worst war of the twentieth century, it deserves special attention.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, continues to inspire suspicion in some quarters that the U.S. knew it was coming. Some revisionist and conspiracy writers, historians, and critics of the Roosevelt administration contend that the U.S. intercepted a Japanese message that was a clear warning of the impending attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Some further contend that this so-called “Winds Message” had been revealed to senior American military and civilian leaders. The implication is that the attack might therefore have been prevented.

The story long ago acquired near-mythic status in some circles and has never quite gone away. This group of believers may even have grown in recent years due to the proliferation of Web sites on the Internet with entries about the Winds message.

Historians Robert J. Hanyok and the late David P. Mowry of NSA’s Center for Cryptologic History have now published a new, detailed documentary history of the Winds message controversy in an attempt to clear up the issue and provide source documents for historical scholars and researchers. NSA recently issued the 327–page report (“West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy”), which includes images of all the standard critical documents—as well as many never before seen. The authors debunk the view that a clear warning message was monitored before the attacks.

Hanyok told the Skeptical Inquirer that he believes his report “will dispel any further reference to a ‘Winds execute’ message being heard before the attack,” at least in conventional and academic circles. He says he holds few such hopes regarding most conspiracy-theory bloggers, unless they actually read the report. “Some conspiracy buffs might change their minds if they read my book.”

In a foreword, NSA historian David A. Hatch says Hanyok and Mowry “have made a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of two of the event’s controversies, the Winds Message and the state of U.S. communications intelligence prior to the Hawaiian attack.”

Japan’s coded Winds message was intended by the Japanese foreign ministry as an emergency method to alert Japanese diplomats abroad that relations between Japan and the U.S., Great Britain, or the Soviet Union were about to take a downturn. They could then destroy cryptographic materials or sensitive messages.

One method involved placing innocuous-sounding phrases about the winds in weather forecasts transmitted by short-wave radio. For example, “Nishi No Kaze Hare [West Wind Clear]” repeated twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language short-wave voice news broadcast meant Japan-Great Britain relations were in danger. The phrase “East Wind Rain” signaled damage to U.S. relations. The U.S. intercepted and decrypted the late-November 1941 messages giving these meanings and instructions—as had Great Britain and Australia. Allied monitoring stations were then tasked to search for and monitor any messages bearing these phrases.

Many scholars and researchers have been skeptical or critical of the various revisionist or conspiracist claims revolving around the eventual Winds execute message. Some suggest that the claims are based on a selective reading of testimony and evidence that subsequently surfaced (eight investigations into the Pearl Harbor attacks ensued, from 1942 to 1946). Hanyok and Mowry thought this material might allow them “to examine important aspects of the Winds message story in a deeper fashion than before.”

Battleship Row, where the most damage occurred during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

On December 7 in Hawaii, at 1:32 pm, Honolulu time, five and a half hours after the attacks began, a monitoring station on Hawaii heard a Japanese-language news broadcast from Tokyo breathlessly describing the day’s attacks by Japanese forces, including a “death-defying raid upon the American naval and air strength in the Hawaiian area.” The announcer then interrupted with a weather report: “West Wind Clear” (relations with Great Britain are in danger). He repeated the phrase and did so twice more at the end of the program. This Winds execute message was also monitored at Portland, Oregon, at 7:02 pm, Eastern Time. It also was: “West Wind Clear.” Again, this was hours after the attack. The code phrase referencing relations with the United States was absent from these messages.

Hanyok and Mowry conclude that the Winds message was neither actionable intelligence nor a useful war warning. “A Winds Execute message was sent on 7 December, 1941,” the authors say. “The weight of the evidence indicates that one coded phrase, ‘West Wind Clear,’ was broadcast according to previous instructions some six to seven hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.” They say it is possible that a British site may have heard a broadcast one to two hours after the attack, “but this only substantiates the anticlimatic nature of the broadcast” (p. 88).

Inside the shrine room of the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor.

“From a military standpoint, the Winds coded message contained no actionable intelligence either about the Japanese operations in Southeast Asia and absolutely nothing about Pearl Harbor. In reality, the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began—useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it.”

They further find that the controversy was in fact an artificial one, pumped up by misunderstandings and the imaginings of one of the key participants, whose narratives “ranged so far from the documentary evidence and the memories of all the other participants that it was completely detached from actual events.” And they say revisionist and conspiratorial writers since then have further strayed from the documented truth.

“There simply was not one shred of actionable intelligence in any of the messages or transmissions that pointed to the attack on Pearl Harbor” (p.95).

The “primary, and almost exclusive, source fueling these claims of a conspiracy surrounding the Winds message,” say the authors, was Captain Laurance Frye Safford, the founder and first commander of the U.S. Navy’s code-breaking unit, OP-20-G. Safford first publicized his views in early 1944 in the Hart Inquiry, the second of the eight investigations after the attack. He repeated his story in Army Board and Navy Board investigations later that same year. He was well regarded within the cryptologic and intelligence communities and therefore taken seriously.

In their report’s final section, “The Winds Message and the Historical Process,” Hanyok and Mowry are highly critical of Safford and later conspiratorial writers.

“The ‘conspiratorial’ version of the Winds incident was solely the product of Captain Laurance Safford’s imagining of events that had occurred prior to Pearl Harbor in the Washington, D.C., offices of naval and army intelligence,” say the authors (p. 99).

“Put to the test, though, Safford’s narrative about the Execute message simply failed to stand up to cross-examination. The Joint Congressional Committee shredded Safford’s story. The committee reduced it to the collection of unsubstantiated charges that all along had been its foundation. The documentary evidence he said was available simply did not, nor did it ever, exist. In truth, Safford produced nothing upon which any further investigation could proceed.” They say the most charitable assessment of his actions was that he was “mistaken.”

The story should have ended there, the authors say. But thirty-four years after the congressional committee report in 1946, a few private scholars resurrected Safford’s allegation of a conspiracy and with it the whole Winds controversy. These writers “inverted the normal rules of evidentiary argument,” insisting that “the government had yet to disprove Safford’s charges regardless of the fact that he never had produced any evidence to substantiate them thirty-some years earlier,” say Hanyok and Mowry (p. 99).

“The scholars and researchers who championed Safford’s version of the controversy abandoned the rigorous evidentiary requirements of the historical profession in order to advance their thesis. . . .

“Safford’s case was built on mistaken deductions, reconstructed, nonexistent documents, a mutable version of events, as well as a cast of witnesses that Safford conjured up in his imagination.

“In the end, the Winds message controversy was and remains an artificial historical phenomenon. . . . The artificial controversy that grew around the Winds message never advanced historical knowledge of the events of early December 1941. In fact, the Winds controversy distracted investigations and later historical analyses from far more important issues about the attack on Pearl Harbor.” These include, the authors say, “the fundamental organizational and operational shortcomings of American cryptology” and the “arrogant dismissal by American military and naval leaders of a Japanese capability and willingness to conduct such an operation.”

“That the Winds controversy persisted over decades is more a result of the misplaced belief by some that history is controlled by conspiracy than history being the product of human folly” (p. 100).

Hanyok told the Skeptical Inquirer that if there is anything he wanted to add to his book it would have been on “Captain Safford’s reason behind his dogged persistence in pushing his conspiracy theory.” Says Hanyok: “I came across some additional material after my book was at the printer. Safford firmly believed that radio intelligence could discover what the Japanese were up to. He was absolutely certain that the intelligence that tipped off the attack on Pearl Harbor was somewhere in the files of the Navy or Army. When he could not find what he was sure existed, he began to suspect that the files had been picked. So the vague sense of conspiracy came first. Then he began to fit the ‘pieces,’ no matter how untenable they were, to the story.”

He says some “conspiracy bloggers” have already dismissed his book as the work of “court historians.” This, he says, is “a curious insult considering that I blew the whistle on the Gulf of Tonkin coverup!” Says Hanyok: “This group is so committed that they will never change their collective mind. Believing in a conspiratorial view of history is a comfortable and comforting ideology.”

Note

1. West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy—A Documentary History. By Robert J. Hanyok and David P. Mowry. United States Cryptologic History, Series IV: World War II, Volume 10. Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, Ft. George Meade, MD 20755-6886, 2008. The report was Hanyok’s final publication for the CCH before his retirement in August 2008 from a long career in government; Mowry died before its publication.

Without his knowing it, as I am sure he did for countless others, Clarke shaped and guided my professional life and interests. I remember as a school kid in the ’50s coming across in our school library the newsletter of the British Interplanetary Society, which he then headed. That was so cool! Here we hadn’t even gotten into space yet, and already there was an “interplanetary” society. Science and space seemed to be the future, and we wanted to be part of it.

His science fiction, like Heinlein’s and Bradbury’s and Asimov’s, let loose our imaginations. We may have lived in small, isolated towns, but our minds were free to roam the universe. His writings, fiction and fact, were always a combination of clear-thinking, science-informed intellect, and soaring creativity expressed in prose of absolute clarity. What a rare and wonderful combination!

His books influenced generations of us. A glance over my own shelves finds these volumes, a mere sampling of his tremendous output: (Nonfiction) Interplanetary Flight, The Exploration of Space, The Coming of the Space Age, Profiles of the Future, Report on Planet Three, and the aforementioned Carbon-Based Bipeds; (short story collections) The Nine Billion Names of God; (novels) Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Songs of Distant Earth, Fountains of Paradise, and of course the 2001 novel series: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. I am now rereading my copy of The Lost Worlds of 2001, Clarke’s account of the writing of his novel and the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick, combined with never-used “outtake” chapters he wrote for the novel. These were fully developed alternative scenarios written and discarded as Clarke’s and Kubrick’s ideas clashed and evolved. Interesting reading still today.

I heard him speak in person only twice, in my Washington days, once at the Smithsonian Institution (where he inscribed my copy of Profiles of the Future to my wife and me) and once at the National Geographic Society. But his novels and nonfiction works were all freely available, and with new books coming out regularly, we didn’t have to talk with him to benefit from his inspiration. Shortly after becoming editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, I was delighted one day to receive a humorous letter to the editor from him intriguingly titled “Martian Technology,” inspired by our Viking landings on Mars and whimsically suggesting we must have found a way to camouflage the Martian canals (I published it in our Winter 1978 issue; I’m sure you all still have your copies!).

Over the ensuing years, we corresponded congenially from time to time. He was such a firm exemplar of reason and rationality, we could always count him as a friend and colleague.

In my 2000 review of Carbon-Based Bipeds, I took appreciative note of his included essay “Credo,” which stated his decidedly skeptical views about religion, and lamented that I hadn’t known of it to include in our then most recent Science and Religion issue, in 1999. We rectified that. With Sir Arthur’s kind permission, it appeared in our September/October 2001 Science and Religion special issue.

In his later years he was quite ill and friends didn’t want to bother him too often. But my one regret is that I didn’t try to engage him in discussion of a question that I think is important to our times: How disillusioned was he that we hadn’t maintained the promise and momentum of the Apollo years in pushing outward into space? The first moon landing of 1969 came almost as early as anyone could possibly have envisioned. But Clarke and most other enthusiasts thought that would be just the beginning. The year 2001 was still a long way off, and routine manned trips to the moon and beyond by the early twenty-first century seemed fully credible. How disappointing that since Apollo 17 in 1972 we haven’t even ventured beyond Earth’s orbit.

Yes, cheaper and safer unmanned spacecraft have been doing the exploring for us to wonderful effect, but no one back then thought the manned space program, once it got going, would soon become so circumscribed. Instead, it was the microelectronics revolution that took off geometrically, with Moore’s law accurately describing its enormous growth and progress. That’s what Clarke and others thought would happen with human spaceflight. What happened?

Clarke’s innate technological optimism may have gone out of style in these more cynical and economically challenged times (I hope that optimism someday will return in a more sustainable form), and his full life of ninety years has now concluded. But he will live on in our memories forever. His work will certainly endure, continually being rediscovered by new generations of inquirers, and in that way he will continue to influence and shape the future.