I can honestly say I have not ever had to pay for nuclear supplied energy in New Zealand.

I'm not a PopSci subscriber, but your comment got me curious. The Editor-in-chief, Jacob Ward, has his resume posted online and the PDF version contains this:

Education
Bachelor of Arts, History, Wesleyan University, 1996
Culinary Degree, Cookery at the Grange, UK, 1996
Video training, Film Arts Foundation, San Francisco, 199
Video training, 911 Media Arts, Seattle, 2002-2003

He may know science but does not cite a formal education in it.

I suspect the editorial content is more a reflection of people who grew up on video games and science fiction movies, like "The Matrix," than any lack of education. I've felt for a long time that so many movies are just extended video games.

Since the readership of Popular Science doesn't expect a peer-reviewed journal, some speculation and fun is probably published as tongue-in-cheek stuff.

The guy he replaced didn't seem to have much of a science background either.

I used to enjoy Discover magazine, but they too, shifted to a political agenda rather than sticking to real science.

And the problem when science becomes political is that politicians are professional liars, who utter the lies they do to meet their own agendas. Once Science (so called) signs on to the liars agenda, the scientists who do so become liars themselves. And to the unwitting public, all scientists thus become suspect, and all science loses all credibility.

It's a slippery slope ....

Oh what a tangled web we weave ... (author unknown, to me, at least)

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/sir_walter_scott/

Thank you. I used to say it was Ogden Nash, just because he was the kind to have said it. But, Sir Walter Scott? One does not tend to identify him with the pithy, and humorous. Just goes to show, I guess, that a great writer has a broad talent, as well as deep. And I don't think too many would suggest that SWS was NOT a great writer.

I'm glad to be able, thanks to you, to give all credit, where credit is due.

Sure thing. I had to look it up.

Youth sure has changed over the years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott

The uneducated masses are the ones politicians love most because they're easily led down the garden path, like sheep, and don't recognise the slaughterhouse for what it is until it's too late.

Except that it's been too late for awhile now, but nobody wants to see that. Instead they want their iPads and their Sunday football games and that new truck they can't afford, whilst the country is now $16 trillion in debt and counting - at the rate of $100 million per day - and borrows three dollars out of every four from China, and prints the rest. We're living on borrowed time but nobody wants to hear it. "Just tell us the good news, please, and keep that which makes us uncomfortable to yourself. We're a Great Country, you see, and we can do this forever and never have to pay the piper."

No. The answer the editor at the time (Oldham, if I remember correctly, and an early, and well-celebrated auto racer, engineer, mechanic) was that "The reading public doesn't know the difference, and our editors like to write that way, because it makes better headlines and article titles, so I let them have their heads on this issue." No apology, no concern for the stated intent of many of us to leave the magazines followership. Of course, all of us who took the time to write were "old guys" who learned our science in a) the books, then b) the labs, then c) in real life, and applied it daily on the job.

No longer an important qualification for recognition of breathtakingly bad science, that string of methods of learning, I guess.

It wasn't "tongue in cheek", it was the editor's considered position. But probably not well considered, I think.

I'm with the poster who dropped all the "Populars" and Mother Earth News. I now read the Small Stock Journal, Countryside, and others of their ilk, and do a lot of my research and reading online at Instructibles.com, YouTube (some great instruction and education stuff there, if you choose carefully), Ask.com, E-How, and others, and then go out and Build, Make, and blow stuff up (just to keep my hand in, so to speak).

And I find I don't miss the purveyors of pseudo-science at all.

I was trying to give him/them the benefit of the doubt.