Well, it’s official, the War on Science is over with the departure of Bush The Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney. They can now get busy on stem cells, alternative energy and trying to figure out ways to grow enough food to feed a population scheduled to hit 9 billion by the middle of this century. So there you go, Joe Dimaggio, a planet turns its lonely eyes to you, Mr. and Ms. Scientist. You people up for it? Or will you continue to not come up with anything exciting, not cure any damned diseases and not stop worrying about little Billy’s attention span? Here’s a flash for you white-coated wonders: our attention spans will increase geometrically with an increase of interesting scientific developments. So get busy.

And if you want to be a scientist worth your salt, be a Mad Scientist! We love those kind, the deranged types with the crazy hair and their glasses on practically sideways, clothes all mismatched and rumpled and with that wild look in their eyes, all fired up about something that makes no sense at all to the average human being. How about looking to correct the flaws in solar power by coming up with cloud power or rain power? Or maybe having those electric cars recharge themselves by the act of driving, like the cars we have now do? Driving a car at 60 miles per hour produces a hell of a lot of unused energy that could be used to recharge the batteries, just like the alternator on a regular car does when we leave the lights on all night and need a boost to get them started. All you do after that is run the engine for a bit and Bingo!, the battery is recharged! So what’s with all this 200 to 300 mile limit to your proposed electric cars? And what’s with the $100,000 price tags when some guy in India is producing a $2,500 car that a ton of people will buy and burn a ton more gas driving? Can’t you compete with Indian technology, where most people still travel on foot and farm the same way they did 1,000 years ago?

But that’s a matter of practicality and not a concern to a true Mad Scientist. A Mad Scientist comes up with the whacky ideas and leaves it the bean-counters and the engineers to make them practical. Take that Hadron Super-Collider they just built in Europe, the one where scientists hope to create mini-black holes, and where other scientists warn that this kind of thing could suck the whole earth into it for a little blink-of-an-eye oblivion. These spoil sports say that even mini-black holes have a way of expanding into star-eating chasms in a nanosecond. But the Super Collider Mad Scientists insist they can control the time of the holes’ existence to just a hair under a nanosecond and manage to avoid total oblivion. Over and over and over again. Really? Lucky for us the thing doesn’t work. Maybe somebody should super collide these people’s heads together and knock some damned sense into them.

Why would they attempt something like this? Simple. Because they can! And if killing us all and our entire Solar System by creating a black hole that lasts longer than a nanosecond is what it takes to prove them right, well, so be it, that’s the price of science. The rest of us are sort of grateful that this stupid multi-billion dollar toy doesn’t work and hope they never get the kinks worked out. But that’s just us, the non-scientists, who display a maddening insistence on not getting sucked into a black hole if we can possibly avoid it. But don’t mind us, science guys and gals, we’re just rubes in the peanut gallery counting on James Bond to come in with an awesome babe and wreck the whole complex in the nick of time. Mad Scientists hate James Bond.

What else can science do these days? There’s always AIDS research, or that pesky cancer cure that seems to elude your scientific prowess. All you guys have come up with is toasting us from the inside out with radiation and poisoning the crap out of us with chemotherapy and cutting us into little pieces. Future generations of doctors and scientists will look back on this approach like we do to the Barber Surgeons of the MIddle Ages blithely bleeding and amputating their way through humanity trying to rid us of our Ill Vapors. And how about diabetes? Anybody on the ball with that, or is the research dough still pouring into the people inventing some bogus attention-related syndrome that can be cured by expensive placebos?

Anybody doing anything about global warming other than holding another conference about it? The conferencing part has been pretty well covered at this point, so just maybe a little lab work is in order here, maybe come up with something like the Super-Collider that cools the planet a drop instead of making black holes. Is it too late to convert that thing to something useful? We all realize that for 8 years the Mad Scientists have been shoved aside so maybe they’re out of practice at providing us with cool stuff like space ships, plastics, penicillin, fiber-optics and Double-Stuff Oreos. But now the War on Science is over and our expectations are high. Whether that’s fair or not, the challenges are there. It was your idea to become a scientist in the first place, so don’t complain when the rest of us ask you to actually put those expensive educations to some practical use. And if you can possibly manage to be a whacky Mad Scientist for added entertainment value, so much the better.