COMPUTIST CRANKY

Computer scientist Tim Lambert employs crank spelling to condemn botanist David Bellamy:

Geargoe Monbiot has the latest on David Belllamy's descent into crankdom...

Bellamy is a crank because he rejects the peer review process. Well, Bellamy isn't alone:

The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability -- not the validity -- of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.

That's Lancet editor Richard Horton. Here's more from Wikipedia:

The interposition of editors and reviewers between authors and readers always raises the possibility that the intermediators may serve as gatekeepers. Some sociologists of science argue that peer review makes the ability to publish susceptible to control by elites and to personal jealousy. The peer review process may suppress dissent against "mainstream" theories.

Scientist Lambert has no such worries, having published nothing since 2005.