reading
The article in this month's Wired about Gordon Rugg, his "verifier approach," the debunking of the Voynich manuscript, and the dangers and remedies of overspecialization in science is probably my favorite article of the month. A somewhat represntave paragraph:
... while having lunch with colleague Joanne Hyde, it occurred to Rugg that he could pull together all the tools psychologists use - elicitation techniques, the vast literature on human error, decisionmaking models, formal logic and reasoning - to create a novel form of problem-solving: a scientific method to verify the methods of science. [wired]It may turn out to be one of those Wired articles that's really exciting, but never comes true. For today though, I was fascinated.
I was just about ready to write off my PhD, and now I'm back getting excited about it. Hmm, maybe I'm not really all that happy you posted this, because it just makes things complicated again!