Porting the hacker ethic to the nonvirtual world, magazines like Make and blogs like Boing Boing are making it cool for geeks to get their hands dirty again...
But the hands-on revival is leaving home chemists behind.... “There are very few commercial supply houses willing to sell chemicals to amateurs anymore because of this fear that we’re all criminals and terrorists,” Carlson says. “Ordinary folks no longer have access to the things they need to make real discoveries in chemistry.”
To Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” says unreasonable fears about chemicals and home experimentation reflect a distrust of scientific expertise taking hold in society at large.
