I received a nice letter from an editor at The Scientist asking for permission to reprint a comment I wrote regarding an article about the American Chemical Society titled "Unrest At The ACS" by Andrea Gawrylewski.

The most emails I ever received about an article was Social Science And Social News Sites because of a very small part of the article where we mentioned that we swapped out the Digg submission button with Slashdot.

My take was that our kind of serious science content is just not right for Digg, since the last hundred or so articles were buried by readers and thus not a good fit for their audience. Not so, said the people who wrote. They contended Digg has an internal bury list and that it was probably marketing related rather than being done by users.

Before political science existed as a discipline it was assumed all countries wanted the same thing; land and security. The Industrial Revolution brought a new focus on strategic resources.

In the late 1800s America was already producing more strategic resources than anyone and in World War 2 the USA asserted its industrial might geopolitically. In the post-World War Two era the American focus as a superpower was on ideology and trade.

Since that time, the recurring question has been 'who's next?' Rome fell from power, as did Mongolia and Great Britain. America would fall too, it was said. Some country would replace it.