Truth Craving.

The first issue in my new subscription to SEED came today. This is all good because the magazine is all science-y and stuff.

The theme for the March 2007 issue is Truth. Seems like a reasonable subject for a publication subtitled Science is Culture.

Lets look at what SEED's editor, Adam Bly, has to say about dissecting the intersection between science and culture in the search for truth:

The pursuit of truth is variously infuriating, exhilarating, amusing, foolish, humbling, noble, emboldening, silly heroic, even superhuman. Its very existence is debated, and we can safely assume always will be.

We are living in a moment where our traditional sources of truth... have diminished in standing. Our collective cynicism, mirrored in our media through satire and irony, has helped expose an assault on reason and the often corrupt machinations of politics. And we're left having shifted the power equation but desperately lacking new ideas to fill the void that we have revealed. So now what? We are urgently in need of rational thought. We crave truth.

Where does science fit in this pursuit? On one hand, its generally perceived distance from culture affords it an uncompromised sterility that engenders trust. . . On the other hand, this conception causes us to see science as a tool of reduction, practiced by an elite few in a foreign language, incapable of reaching the elusive, romantic notions of truth we crave. This is an area where science can learn from the arts. Science is our way to move forward as a society, but only by addressing this relationship with truth will we actually do so.

Bly goes on to set the tone for the flavors of Truth that the SEED staff elucidate on in this issue.

Despite my goal to read, at most, the final 80 pages in the Cronkite memoir -- I left the book at work -- and in the least finish the Wired article I started at work a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Editor's Letter is all I did read, that wasn't online, tonight.

I could, and really would, like to elaborate more on my own personal perspectives about the necessary intersection of art, science, and truth -- but that is the type of conversation that I really do enjoy having over a quantity of beer, so next time you are in DC, or I in your neighborhood, lets make it a conversation.