Long ago, when I was an editor of books, one of my best moments was finding and publishing Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller. The book was profoundly insane and insanely funny and rightfully won a Hugo when it was published all the way back in 1986.
Tom Weller was, and I presume is, one of my oldest friends. We go all the way back to Encina High School in 1960. Later we would be roomates for a brief period at the University of California at Berkeley. My first, but not my last, experience with LSD took place with Tom and a couple of other friends and had something to do with a yellow Porsche. I'm not sure exactly what, but it was very important, man.
Later, Tom would become, with David Goines, a graphic designer in Berkeley for a number of groups such as Country Joe and the Fish. Always a strange duck, Tom was both of that era at Berkeley and outside it. He remains there and in much the same state today. I left Berkeley and went on to other things in New York and Europe for many years, but found myself suddenly in Boston at Houghton Mifflin Company. I was hired to bring "a fresh point of view" to that stodgy publisher and I did my best to accommodate them. One of the things I did was to reach out to my old friend Weller because I had confidence that his unique insanity would still be the same.
It was. The first little project we did was a book called MINIMS. It was, well, mininimal but it startled the publishing house with its sales. This gave us the ability to do something next that was even stranger for the times and the publisher, a project called Science Made Stupid . It was an easy project for me. I made the contract, sent the check, and Weller delivered the book -- text, drawings, the whole thing. It was a kind of demented children's book for adults who were still children. And it did for science what the maxim gun did for warfare.
Houghton Mifflin did its usual substandard "let's see if we can strangle this book in the cradle" publishing job, and the book entered the world with few advance sales and a publicity budget that consisted of twenty-five cents and two Wheaties boxtops. But the book refused to die, sold solidly, then garnered a Hugo, and a fond fan base that remembers it to this day. It has been out of print for almost twenty years now, but if you read the reviews on Amazon the yearning for the book is great. It is one of those titles that utterly befuddle people when they find out it is out of print. It was priced at around $5 when it was published but brings around $30 today if you can find a copy. It is, of course, not out of print because it cannot sell and continue to sell -- after all, there's a new freshman college class every September facing science classes. No, it is out of print because it was published by Houghton Mifflin Company, an organization that seldom fails to insist that victory become defeat.
But all is not lost. Because although this classic is long gone from the bookstores, it has come back to life as a web site. And just as Science Made Stupid was one of the funniest books of its time, Science Made Stupid Online is one of the funniest sites of this era. Think I'm kidding? I never kid about jokes. For example:
SCIENCE FOR EVERYONE
Sound simple? It is.
Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science.
Today, all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone. Popular science books, magazines and computer programs - with their simple, fatuous and misleading prose, their garish illustrations, their flimsy modern production values - have brought science within the reach of anyone who can afford their inflated prices or who can mooch off someone else.
Indeed, today a myriad of sources are available to explain science facts that science itself has never dreamed of. This web site is one of them.
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