Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

on a lunch time lecture at the NSF:

These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. It would be like that in some departments at USD, perhaps even on most university campuses, despite the insane pace of life. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity; a fundamental hominid behaviour. The basic trait that got people into science, that made science in the first place, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes of its modern-day expression.

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