Lee Lin Chin roasts plebeians for their apathy towards science

excellent!

I love it, it is so true.

I had a quick google on the earnings of rock stars, the top 40 earners in 2012 took $0.5 billion USD, which is a kind of handy number to keep in mind because this is about what the Australian public directly spend on their national research agency. So Madonna if you are after the holiday of a life time why not take the $30million you earned in 2012 and spend it on a trip around the southern ocean in the RV explorer – you could measure the change in salinity of the ocean, discover 40 or 50 new deep sea species or even have a look for a bit of oil. $30 million USD would buy you about 100 days of a fully crewed science vessel so really the only limit to what you could discover is your imagination.

If the ocean isn’t your thing maybe you could fund the grains people to develop a new carbohydrate to improve bowel heath, fund the good people at AAHL to develop a vaccine for Ebola, spend a little money with the folk in Energy to develop technologies to drastically reduce the carbon intensity of one of the dirtiest national grids in the world, invest in saving the great barrier reef, develop new methods of aqua culture to feed the world or perhaps send the minerals boys and girls into the desert to find you a nice little spot to start your very own opal mine…. to be honest you don’t need to spend any money, just turning up to one of our facilities and saying the research we do is mind blowing and important would help enormously, as would, rather ironically, liking us on face book or tweeting the occasional positive remark about what we do. Most Australians have no idea what CSIRO does which is incredibly dangerous for a publicly funded organization.