My (ex) academic friends were young, but prestigiously endowed with special scholarships (Miller Fellowships) at top universites (UCB for ex). However, that’s typical of the pigeon hole nature of modern scholarship. And the aggressivity is due to the fact that the pigeons don’t like transversal minds to poke in their nests… Science is pretty much a social process, with a pecking order, and territories… Truly a chimp world, but with really arrogant chimps.

Thanks for the wiki link, I will look at it, and at your post too (if i find time; I have to look at today’s banking considerations on LfD too…)
PA

I am astonished that your academic friends disputed your assertion; behaviour more akin to ideological opponents of civil nuclear power generation… I notice that J. Marvin Herndon suggested something similar in 1992…?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Marvin_Herndon

I hope you will enjoy my forthcoming post (at midnight UTC) entitled <a “Entropy – an unauthorised biography” – I would be flattered by any comments you care to make.

Even more amazing, the core is roughly as hot, as bright as the sun… I made tremendous enemies in academia, with some top notch geophysicists, more than a decade ago, by telling them haughtily that the Earth’s core was a nuclear reactor. Just from the heat flow numbers. They were positively enraged, although they could not say exactly why, except that it was well known I was wrong.

One of them even accused me to have caused his divorce, as I humiliated him in front of his spouse, with my big ideas approach, so he claimed later.

And yet, now, indeed, the Earth-as-the-Universe-largest-known-fission-nuclear-reactor is getting ever closer to becoming the official knowledge. I have an essay on this, ready to post:‘Iron Weather’. This could have some consequences, once the freaking pseudo ecologists realize that we owe our existence to nuclear fission, not just in supernovas, but below our feet… That would mean their fanatical opposition to nuclear power is somewhat hypocritical and ungrateful.
PA

Chris Snuggs says: I don’t trust any European government to use any kind of tax to do anything useful but merely to continue their bloated bureaucracies. quangoes, lunatic welfare states and aid to developing countries that have nuclear weapons and of course …increase their contributions to the surreally-monstrous EU which currently costs the British taxpayer TWENTY MILLION GB NET PER DAY, for which you get insane centralised bureaucracy and a daily lecture from ex-Maoist Boringissimo plus if you are German the chance to pour your hard-earned money down a black hole to bail out feckless, idle, arrogant political elites in southern Europe – and France of course, which has NOT SET A BALANCED BUDGET IN FORTY YEARS- Well done chaps – always stronger at literature than economics. Brilliant. NO WONDER you need the Germans to bail you out.

Environment? The European pleb now has to pay a vast amount for EU imposed so-called long-lasting light bulbs with mercury in them which pollutes the enviroment for EVER. THANKS FOR THAT. I don’t suppose van Clowno is worried about the cost of light bulbs on his 300,000€ per annum + VAST expenses + ALMOST NO TAX. BTY. Is Van Clowno’s THREE HUNDRED MILLION EURO palace in Brussels finished yet? I say 300,000,000€, but of course that excludes furniture, fittings and the inevitable posh art collection.