Science Policy

Okay, bad attempt at a literary allusion.

But it's a question that we've been talking about around here, and to a lesser extent with some of the folks we know: where are the scientific programmers?

Jamie and I had the pleasure of going out for dim sum with Greg Wilson the other day. You might remember Greg from such classics as Science 2.0 and Stack Overflow Dev Days Toronto. He was talking to us about his Software Carpentry course that he's been running out of the University of Toronto and University of Alberta.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN turned on last week to much fanfare. It managed to make Google's front page image. Fortunately, they avoided this. It's quite a technical achievement, decades in the making, and the LHC is the "undiscovered country" of experimental particle physics. However, I have mixed feelings about it.