Travel defines my life at the moment—promoting my new Cro-Magnon book, doing radio and TV interviews, and lecturing. For the past four days, I’ve been in Anchorage, Alaska, both doing a book signing and lecture at the University of Alaska bookstore and giving two talks for the Alaska Anthropological Association. One, on ancient water, which I have been working on for the past two years, the other a talk about archaeology and the public to the Association’s banquet. I’m exhausted after all this talking, but it was wonderful to spend time with experts on Aleutian and Arctic archaeology and to interact with numerous generations of northern archaeologists. I love smaller meetings, for it is there that you really have a chance to network with colleagues, many of them working far from the comfortable world of academia. This annual function is especially important in Alaska, where so many archaeologists spend most of their year in complete isolation from one another. So the noise level is high, students cut their teeth on paper presentation and all kinds of new and unpublished data gets batted around. This is what science really is—a continual process of back and forth, or reassessing data and theories, of free-flowing discussion. And this is what the ideologues who condoned hacking into the University of West Anglia’s e-mail choose to forget. All good science depends on personal interaction and electronic dialogue, which is often frank and in your face—as it should be if our knowledge of anything, let alone archaeology or the past, is to advance. If we inhibit such dialogue by eavesdropping illegally, then we do neither science or ourselves any good. And I don’t blame some of my climatological colleagues for making cynical remarks about ideologues and the individuals who clutter their e-mail boxes with agendas, rants, and sometime abuse. I suffer from the same constant background noise. Such people can take refuge in please of freedom of speech if they wish—but they’ll get much more respect, and attention, if they realize that science relies on data and constantly reevaluates it. It is not a matter of making sweeping statements and stating that they are correct.