Science and Society

Guest Post by Alessandra Buonanno: Nobel Laureates Call for Release of Iranian Student Omid Kokabee

buonannoUsually I start guest posts by remarking on what a pleasure it is to host an article on the topic being discussed. Unfortunately this is a sadder occasion: protesting the unfair detention of Omid Kokabee, a physics graduate student at the University of Texas, who is being imprisoned by the government of Iran. Alessandra Buonanno, who wrote the post, is a distinguished gravitational theorist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the University of Maryland, as well as a member of the Committee on International Freedom of Scientists of the American Physical Society. This case should be important to everyone, but it’s especially important for physicists to work to protect the rights of students who travel from abroad to study our subject.


Omid Kokabee was arrested at the airport of Teheran in January 2011, just before taking a flight back to the University of Texas at Austin, after spending the winter break with his family. He was accused of communicating with a hostile government and after a trial, in which he was denied contact with a lawyer, he was sentenced to 10 years in Teheran’s Evin prison.

According to a letter written by Omid Kokabee, he was asked to work on classified research, and his arrest and detention was a consequence of his refusal. Since his detention, Kokabee has continued to assert his innocence, claiming that several human rights violations affected his interrogation and trial.

Since 2011, we, the Committee on International Freedom of Scientists (CIFS) of the American Physical Society, have protested the imprisonment of Omid Kokabee. Although this case has received continuous support from several scientific and international human rights organizations, the government of Iran has refused to release Kokabee.

Omid Kokabee

Omid Kokabee has received two prestigious awards:

  • The American Physical Society awarded him Andrei Sakharov Prize “For his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity, in the face of extreme physical and psychological pressure.”
  • The American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded Kokabee the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Prize.

Amnesty International (AI) considers Kokabee a prisoner of conscience and has requested his immediate release.

Recently, the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS), AI and CIFS, have prepared a letter addressed to the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei asking that Omid Kokabee be released immediately. The letter was signed by 31 Nobel-prize laureates. (An additional 13 Nobel Laureates have signed this letter since the Nature blog post. See also this update from APS.)

Unfortunately, earlier last month, Kokabee’s health conditions have deteriorated and he has been denied proper medical care. In response, the President of APS, Malcolm Beasley, has written a letter to the Iranian President Rouhani calling for a medical furlough for Omid Kokabee so that he can receive proper medical treatment. AI has also made further steps and has requested urgent medical care for Kokabee.

Very recently, the Iran’s supreme court has nullified the original conviction of Omid Kokabee and has agreed to reconsider the case. Although this is positive news, it is not clear when the new trial will start. Considering Kokabee’s health conditions, it is very important that he is granted a medical furlough as soon as possible.

More public engagement and awareness is needed to solve this unacceptable case of violation of human rights and freedom of scientific research. You can help by tweeting/blogging about it and responding to this Urgent Action that AI has issued. Please note that the date on the Urgent Action is there to create an avalanche effect; it is not a deadline nor it is the end of action.

Alessandra Buonanno for the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Freedom of Scientists (CIFS).

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The Science of Interstellar

The intersection — maybe the union! — of science and sci-fi geekdom is overcome with excitement about the upcoming movie Interstellar, which opens November 7. It’s a collaboration between director Christopher Nolan and physicist Kip Thorne, both heroes within their respective communities. I haven’t seen it yet myself, nor do I know any secret scoop, but there’s good reason to believe that this film will have some of the most realistic physics of any recent blockbuster we’ve seen. If it’s a success, perhaps other filmmakers will take the hint?

Kip, who is my colleague at Caltech (and a former guest-blogger), got into the science-fiction game quite a while back. He helped Carl Sagan with some science advice for his book Contact, later turned into a movie starring Jodie Foster. In particular, Sagan wanted to have some way for his characters to traverse great distances at speeds faster than light, by taking a shortcut through spacetime. Kip recognized that a wormhole was what was called for, but also realized that any form of faster-than-light travel had the possibility of leading to travel backwards in time. Thus was the entire field of wormhole time travel born.

As good as the movie version of Contact was, it still strayed from Sagan’s original vision, as his own complaints show. (“Ellie disgracefully waffles in the face of lightweight theological objections to rationalism…”) Making a big-budget Hollywood film is necessarily a highly collaborative endeavor, and generally turns into a long series of forced compromises. Kip has long been friends with Lynda Obst, an executive producer on Contact, and for years they batted around ideas for a movie that would really get the science right.

Long story short, Lynda and Kip teamed with screenwriter Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher), who wrote a draft of a screenplay, and Christopher eventually agreed to direct. I know that Kip has been very closely involved with the script as the film has developed, and he’s done his darnedest to make sure the science is right, or at least plausible. (We don’t actually whether wormholes are allowed by the laws of physics, but we don’t know that they’re not allowed.) But it’s a long journey, and making the best movie possible is the primary goal. Meanwhile, Adam Rogers at Wired has an in-depth look at the science behind the movie, including the (unsurprising, in retrospect) discovery that the super-accurate visualization software available to the Hollywood special-effects team enable the physicists to see things they hadn’t anticipated. Kip predicts that at least a couple of technical papers will come out of their work.

And that’s not all! Kip has a book coming out on the science behind the movie, which I’m sure will be fantastic. And there is also a documentary on “The Science of Interstellar” that will be shown on TV, in which I play a tiny part. Here is the broadcast schedule for that, as I understand it:

SCIENCE
Wednesday, October 29, at 10pm PDT/9c

AHC (American Heroes Channel)
Sunday, November, 2 at 4pm PST/3c (with a repeat on Monday, November 3 at 4am PST/3c)

DISCOVERY
Thursday, November 6, at 11pm PST/10c

Of course, all the accurate science in the world doesn’t help if you’re not telling an interesting story. But with such talented people working together, I think some optimism is justified. Let’s show the world that science and cinema are partners, not antagonists.

Interstellar Movie - Official Trailer 3

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Particle Fever: Catch It!

A brief search of the archives reveals that I truly have not done my job in plugging Particle Fever, the new documentary about particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. I guess it would have been a bit premature, as the movie hasn’t technically been released yet. But here it comes! And the trailer captures a bit of the excitement:

PARTICLE FEVER Official HD Trailer Premiere

Particle Fever is the brainchild of David Kaplan, a young (younger than me, anyway) particle theorist at Johns Hopkins who was crazy enough to think he could make a feature film in his spare time. (Actually David told me that his first idea was to write a book, but the act of writing was just too painful, so obviously he decided to take an easier route.) Readers of The Particle at the End of the Universe will be familiar with David’s story, which I told as part of exploring how physics proceeds in our ever-more-complicated media landscape.

Some people will doubtless feel that a movie about particle physics is self-indulgent and unnecessary. The polite term for such people is “poopyheads.” (You can imagine some of the impolite terms.) The experimentalists and technicians who built the LHC, and the theorists who built the theories that the machine tests, are human beings who have devoted their lives to a rather esoteric pursuit — but one that is truly universal, uncovering the basic rules of the cosmos in which we all live. This is an important story to tell.

Long a labor of love on the part of David and his intrepid crew of filmmakers, Particle Fever was picked up for distribution the same day the Nobel Prize was announced for Englert and Higgs, and will be officially released on March 5. Early reviews have been glowing. Depending on where you live, you might be able to catch a theatrical release, but before too long I’m sure you will be able to see the film using one of those gizmos that beams media content straight to your living room. What a world we live in.

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Don’t Start None, Won’t Be None

[Final update: DNLee’s blog post has been reinstated at Scientific American. I’m therefore removing it from here; traffic should go to her.]

[Update: The original offender, “Ofek” at Biology Online, has now been fired, and the organization has apologized. Scientific American editor Mariette DiChristina has also offered a fuller explanation.]

Something that happens every day, to me and many other people who write things: you get asked to do something for free. There’s an idea that mere “writing” isn’t actually “work,” and besides which “exposure” should be more than enough recompense. (Can I eat exposure? Can I smoke it?)

You know, that’s okay. I’m constantly asking people to do things for less recompense than their time is worth; it’s worth a shot. For a young writer who is trying to build a career, exposure might actually be valuable. But most of the time the writer will politely say no and everyone will move on.

For example, just recently an editor named “Ofek” at Biology-Online.org asked DNLee to provide some free content for him. She responded with:

Thank you very much for your reply.
But I will have to decline your offer.
Have a great day.

Here’s what happens less often: the person asking for free content, rather than moving on, responds by saying

Because we don’t pay for blog entries?
Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?

Where I grew up, when people politely turn down your request for free stuff, it’s impolite to call them a “whore.” It’s especially bad when you take into account the fact that we live in a world where women are being pushed away from science, one where how often your papers get cited correlates strongly with your gender, and so on.

DNLee was a bit taken aback, with good reason. So she took to her blog to respond. It was a colorful, fun, finely-crafted retort — and also very important, because this is the kind of stuff that shouldn’t happen in this day and age. Especially because the offender isn’t just some kid with a website; Biology Online is a purportedly respectable site, part of the Scientific American “Partners Network.” One would hope that SciAm would demand an apology from Ofek, or consider cutting their ties with the organization.

Sadly that’s not what happened. If you click on the link in the previous paragraph, you’ll get an error. That’s because Scientific American, where DNLee’s blog is hosted, decided it wasn’t appropriate and took it down.

It’s true that this particular post was not primarily concerned with conveying substantive scientific content. Like, you know, countless other posts on the SciAm network, or most other blogs. But it wasn’t about gossip or what someone had for lunch, either; interactions between actual human beings engaged in the communication of scientific results actually is a crucial part of the science/culture/community ecosystem. DNLee’s post was written in a jocular style, but it wasn’t only on-topic, it was extremely important. Taking it down was exactly the wrong decision.

I have enormous respect for Scientific American as an institution, so I’m going to hope that this is a temporary mistake, and after contemplating a bit they decide to do the right thing, restoring DNLee’s post and censuring the guy who called her a whore. But meanwhile, I’m joining others by copying the original post here. Ultimately it’s going to get way more publicity than it would have otherwise. Maybe someday people will learn how the internet works.

Here is DNLee. (Words cannot express how much I love the final picture.)

——————————————————–

(This is where I used to mirror the original blog post, which has now been restored.)

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Purpose and the Universe

On Sunday I was privileged to give the keynote address at the American Humanist Association annual conference. Even better, people actually showed up for the talk, which for a Sunday morning event is pretty sweet.

The talks were live-streamed, and naturally some enterprising young humanist (thanks Carl Wong!) captured them and put them on YouTube. So here is mine; don’t forget to check out the others (or directly from the AHA site).

Purpose and the Universe by Sean M. Carroll, Ph.D (with HD slides) at the 2013 AHA Conference

My talk was similar to ones I had given before at TAM and at Skepticon, but about half of it was new. The general idea is the relationship between everyday human concerns of meaning and morality and the underlying laws of physics. For this one, I used the framing device of “purpose” — what is it, and where does it come from? The universe itself doesn’t have a purpose, nor is there one inherent in the fundamental laws of physics. But teleology (movement toward a goal) can plausibly be a useful concept when we invent the best description of higher-level phenomena, and at the human level there are purposes we can create for ourselves. All part of the “poetic naturalism” bandwagon I hope to get launched, although I didn’t specifically use that term.

My actual slides aren’t always crystal clear from the above view, so I also put them on Slideshare. Enjoy!

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On Templeton

A few recent events, including the launch of Nautilus and this interesting thread on Brian Leiter’s blog, have brought the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) back into the spotlight. As probably everybody knows, the JTF is a philanthropic organization that supports research into the “Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” encourages “dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians,” and seeks to use science to acquire “new spiritual information.” They like to fund lots of things I find interesting — cosmology, physics, philosophy — but unfortunately they also like to promote the idea that science and religion are gradually reconciling. (As well as some projects that just seem silly.) They also have a huge amount of money, and they readily give it away.

I don’t think that science and religion are reconciling or can be reconciled in any meaningful sense, and I believe that it does a great disservice to the world to suggest otherwise. Therefore, way back in the day, I declined an opportunity to speak at a Templeton-sponsored conference. Ever since then, people have given me grief whenever my anti-Templeton fervor seems insufficiently fervent, even though my position — remarkably! — has been pretty consistent over the years. Honestly I find talking about things like this pretty tiresome; politics is important, but substance is infinitely more interesting. And this topic in particular has become even more tiresome as people on various sides have become increasingly emotional and less reflective. But I thought it would be useful to put my thoughts in one place, so I can just link here the next time the subject arises.

In brief: I don’t take money directly from the Templeton Foundation. You will never see me thanking them for support in the acknowledgments of one of my papers. But there are plenty of good organizations and causes who feel differently, and take the money without qualms, from the World Science Festival to the Foundational Questions Institute. As long as I think that those organizations are worthwhile in their own right, I am willing to work with them — attending their conferences, submitting articles, whatever. But I will try my best to convince them they should get money from somewhere else.

I’ve had various opportunities to get money from Templeton, and I certainly don’t come running to blog about it every time the possibility arises. Once I even got a call from a corporate head-hunter who wanted to inquire about my interest in a job with JTF. (Someone had clearly not done their homework.) But it’s not, as many people argue, because I am worried that Templeton works in nefarious ways to influence the people it funds. That is pretty unclear; there are some dark murmurings to that effect, with this piece by John Horgan being perhaps the most explicit example, but little hard evidence. It wouldn’t be utterly shocking to find that a funding agency tried to nudge work that it supported in directions that it was favorable to; that’s the kind of thing that funding agencies do. But there are plenty of examples of people receiving money from JTF and swearing that they never felt any pressure to be religion-friendly. More importantly, I don’t see much evidence that the JTF is actively evil, in (say) the way the Discovery Institute is evil, deliberately lying in order to advance an anti-science agenda. The JTF is quite pro-science, in its own way; it’s just that I think their views on science are very wrong.

And that’s the real reason why I don’t want to be involved directly with Templeton. It’s not a matter of ethical compromise; it’s simply a matter of sending the wrong message. Any time respectable scientists take money from Templeton, they lend their respectability — even if only implicitly — to the idea that science and religion are just different paths to the same ultimate truth. That’s not something I want to do. If other people feel differently, that’s for them and their consciences, not something that is going to cause me to shun them.

But I will try to explain to them why it’s important. Think of it this way. The kinds of questions I think about — origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing — for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last five hundred years. And it matters to people … a lot.

Or at least, it would matter, if we made it more widely known. It’s the one piece of scientific/philosophical knowledge that could really change people’s lives. So in my view, we have a responsibility to get the word out — to not be wishy-washy on the question of religion as a way of knowing, but to be clear and direct and loud about how reality really works. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, or seem to contribute to their blurring or even just not minding very much when other people blur them, we do the world a grave disservice. Religious belief exerts a significant influence over how the world is currently run — not just through extremists, but through the well-meaning liberal believers who very naturally think of religion as a source of wisdom and moral guidance, and who define the middle ground for sociopolitical discourse in our society. Understanding the fundamental nature of reality is a necessary starting point for productive conversations about morality, justice, and meaning. If we think we know something about that fundamental nature — something that disagrees profoundly with the conventional wisdom — we need to share it as widely and unambiguously as possible. And collaborating with organizations like Templeton inevitably dilutes that message.

There’s no question that Templeton has been actively preventing the above message from getting across. By funding projects like the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, the JTF has done its best to spread the impression that science and religion get along just fine. This impression is false. And it has consequences.

So I won’t directly work with or take money from the JTF, although I will work with people who do take money from them — money that is appropriately laundered, if you will — if I think those people themselves are worth supporting or collaborating with in their own right. This means that approximately nobody agrees with me; the Templeton-friendly folks think I’m too uptight and priggish, while the anti-Templeton faction finds me sadly lacking in conviction. So be it. These are issues without easy answers, and I don’t mind taking a judicious middle ground. It’s even possible that I’ll change my mind one way or another down the road, in response to new arguments or actions on the part of the parties involved.

And if anyone is tempted to award me the Templeton Prize, I will totally accept it! And use the funds to loudly evangelize for naturalism and atheism. (After I pay off the mortgage.)

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Upgrading the Public Lecture Experience

Apologies for the extended radio silence here at the blog. (Originally typed “radio science,” which I suppose is an encouraging sign from my subconscious.) My time and attention has been taken up by an interesting phenomenon known as “real work.” I have four papers in almost-submittable rough draft form, another three projects bubbling along nicely, and one project in the “this result can’t be right because if it is right it would be really interesting and important and that never happens but hey you never know” stage. Feels good to be concentrating on research after a year with too much book writing, traveling, workshop organizing, etc.

Speaking of traveling, I spent last week in Australia, partly in Sydney and partly in Canberra. This trip owed its existence to two fortunate facts. First, back in graduate school my officemate was Brian Schmidt, who has since become an influential astronomer living in Australia (oh, and won the Nobel Prize for a little thing called the acceleration of the universe). Second, Brian and I like to make bets with each other, which I always win. (At least as of the current moment, with n=2.)

Our first bet, made back in grad school, was whether we would someday have a reliable measurement of Omega, the cosmological density parameter. We purchased a small bottle of vintage port and agreed that Brian would collect it if we didn’t have an agreed-upon value within 20 years, while I would collect it if we did. You have to remember that back in early 90’s, astronomers kept measuring numbers that implied the universe was open, while theorists kept insisting that it must be spatially flat on naturalness grounds. The controversy was largely ended by the discovery of cosmic acceleration, showing that both camps were right: astronomers had correctly measured the density of matter, but universe is essentially flat, the remainder being taken up by dark energy. Brian graciously conceded, but I’m sure King Carl Gustav consoled him on his defeat.

vineyard In 2009 Brian foolishly challenged me again, this time on whether physicists would eventually discover the Higgs boson at the LHC. His job is to play the curmudgeonly experimentalist, while I am the ever-optimistic theorist — so in July 2012, when CERN announced a new particle, Brian found himself once again in the role of gracious conceder. We’re all grown up by now, so the stakes were a bit larger: Brian donated some of his impressive store of frequent flyer miles to fly Jennifer and me to Australia, where I would give some talks. We had a great time, needless to say, including a visit to the vineyard where Brian makes his celebrated Maipenrai Pinot Noir. (Yes you read that correctly. He’s an energetic guy.)

But the real lesson I learned from the whole trip is: with a tiny amount of effort, it’s possible to turn the ordinary public lecture experience into something much more fun for the audience. …

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Higgs Boson Blues

Almost enough to make me believe in a benevolent force guiding the universe: Nick Cave, on his new album Push the Sky Away, has a song called “Higgs Boson Blues.” (Hat tip to Ian Sample.)

Okay, don’t expect to hear a lot about spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking or giving mass to chiral fermions. But still:

Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues
I’m goin’ down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you

Apparently Cave’s lyrics throughout the album came about from “Googling curiosities, being entranced by exotic Wikipedia entries ‘whether they’re true or not’.”

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Social Entropy

Noah Smith points us to “the derpiest thing ever posted on the internet” — a reflection on the history of empires and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, probably not the derpiest thing ever posted; the internet is old, and vast, and strewn with some truly derpy things. But even under a charitable reading: yeah, pretty derpy.

The Second Law — the entropy of isolated systems either remains constant or increases over time — offers an irresistible temptation to the kind of person who might want to take Grand Ideas of Science and apply them to complex social phenomena. (I’m totally that kind of person, so I know how they think.) Entropy is roughly “disorder,” and all we have to do is look out the window/internet to see disorder running rampant all around us. So people from Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler to Thomas Pynchon and Norbert Wiener have suggested (with different degrees of seriousness) that maybe the social chaos around us is merely the inevitable outcome of some grand dynamical principle.

The post in question, at a blog called finem respice that is fond of referring to itself in the third person, takes a slightly different angle than usual. The insight is not that things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, but that things are falling apart faster and faster.

Sadly, long-term, the battle against entropy appears to be a losing one. In weaker moments the always philosophical finem respice reader might be reduced to despondency when realizing that while reading this piece the heat radiated by the brain creates more entropy than the reading creates order. In effect, and with apologies to Jim Morrison, “No one gets out of here cohesively.”

To finem respice‘s way of thinking, there is good reason to believe in “social entropy” as well. Not only this, but its rate of growth seems to be increasing. Of the 50-70 empires that dominate the study of history, it is suddenly striking to realize that, generally speaking, the more modern the empire, the shorter its lifespan.

Sweeping ideas from physics offer wonderful metaphorical inspiration, and even occasional precise insight, into the kinds of messy situations one typically cares about in the humanities and social sciences. Still, a little care is called for, and what we have here is kind of an absence of much care.

The biggest problem is the one that creationists always make: neither the biosphere nor our social environment is anything like a closed system. Yes, the entropy you are generating while reading this blog post is greater than the hoped-for order created by your comprehension of a new text. But that’s true of the universe, not of your brain all by itself. The Earth radiates lots of high-entropy radiation into space, but its own entropy can easily decrease. It’s not just allowed — it happens quite readily. Order is spontaneously generated in subsystems as the larger world increases in entropy. The plain evidence of history would seem to imply that this kind of tendency is especially prominent in the social context. The Roman/Persian/Chinese empires were not actually preceded by even earlier empires that lasted ten times as long. Even aside from the limitations of borrowing ideas from physics and applying them outside their circumscribed domains, this kind of idea would seem to be flatly contradicted by the evidence.

Which is a shame, because there might very well be something interesting to say about the changing cohesiveness of nation-sized institutions over time, and there may even be ideas from physics that could help. It does seem sensible to claim that the pace of all sorts of changes has picked up over the last few hundred years, even if “entropy” isn’t at all the right concept to reach for here. It’s the self-organization part, as well as ideas from complexity and network theory, that can be really helpful. This is the kind of thing that reformed physicist Geoffrey West has been studying with (seemingly) great success.

So it’s not at all derpy to take ideas from physics (or any other field) and let them prod you into new insights in other fields. It’s just doing it in a sloppy way that grates. Derpiness, like entropy, tends to increase, but that doesn’t mean we can’t resist.

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Electrical Resistance

A little while back, an anecdote was being passed around by liberal folks on Facebook that made Ann Romney look pretty bad. Apparently she said that a woman in the workforce “should be happy just to be out there in the working world and quit complaining that she’s not making as much as her male counterparts.” Even by the relatively relaxed standards that are rightfully applied to the families of political candidates rather than the candidates themselves, that sounded a little tone-deaf to me. So I checked on snopes.com and, indeed, found out that the story was completely false. It was made up by a humor site, and then picked up by people who don’t like Romney, who were willing to take it at face value. As ridiculous as any particular claim may be, confirmation bias nudges us toward greater credulity when we are faced with stories that we want to believe are true.

Which brings us to the Chevy Volt, the electric car from General Motors. One of the blogs I generally read is Outside the Beltway, which is a group of conservatives who are more than willing to decry the worst excesses of conservatives as well as liberals. I generally don’t agree with them (except for the decrying), but they say a lot of interesting things. Doug Mataconis, one of the bloggers there, fell quite a bit short of that standard in a recent post about the Volt.

Mataconis, relying on an equally silly Reuters article, tells us that GM loses $50,000 every time it sells a Volt. The attitude of the post is simple — “maybe I’m no fancy businessman, but even I know that it’s not a good strategy to keep building cars and selling them at a tremendous loss!”

Well, that would be a bad strategy. So bad, in fact, that it might be advisable to pull back a bit and ask if that’s what’s actually happening. …

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