Visitors to the Googleplex are invariably stunned by these displays of Larry and Sergey’s nigh-prodigal largess. At most of their own offices, they’re lucky to score a free newspaper for the train ride home.

But there is one thing Google is less willing to provide, as I learned this week while covering the Chrome OS announcement. Next time you have a chance to visit the Google campus, just you try getting a drink of water.

I don’t own a car. So for me, schlepping down to Silicon Valley to cover a tech industry event means riding Caltrain. In Google’s case, the main campus is about two miles from the Mountain View station, or just a few minutes by bicycle.

On this particular Wednesday I forgot to bring a water bottle, so when I parked my bike at the Google Visitor Building at 1950 Charleston Way, I was feeling a little parched. Since there was still time before the press conference began, I asked the receptionist if he could point me to some water.

The receptionist’s brow furrowed slightly. “Well,” he began, “there’s a cooler with bottles of juice, if that’s OK.” He pointed to a little refrigerator on the other side of the room lined with shelves of Odwalla — free for the taking, of course.

Since it was the only option offered, I figured it would have to be OK. Anyway, juice sounded fine for the moment. And free Odwalla? Who was I to turn down the fabled Google generosity? I grabbed a SuperFood and chugged it down while I waited for the event to begin.

Once inside the conference room, however, my bewilderment increased. They had the usual concession table full of croissants, fruit, and little snacks. There was a decanter of coffee. There was a decanter of orange juice. There were supplies for making tea. But one thing that wasn’t there was anything resembling plain, cold water. Reluctantly, I poured myself a second glass of juice and sat down.

The event happened. I won’t go into it here, because it was about as exciting as such events ever are. But by the time it was over, I realized that I was actually what I would describe as thirsty. Moreover, the sun was high in the sky, and now I needed to ride my bike back to Caltrain.

Back out in the lobby, I approached the receptionist again. “So,” I said, pointing toward the little refrigerator. “Juice. But no water.”

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then suddenly a little light went on behind his eyes. “No,” he said. A look that can only be described as utter satisfaction spread across his face. “Google is going Green,” he said proudly. “We don’t do bottled water anymore.”

I said, “How is it ‘going Green’ to make me drink bottled juice instead of bottled water?”

He frowned.

“Do you have any of the other kind of water, maybe?” I asked. “The non-bottled kind?”

His look was now one of heartfelt sympathy. “If it was up to me, there would be a drinking fountain right here in the lobby.” He pointed, and my eyes followed his finger to a spot along the opposite wall where there was no drinking fountain.

“But there isn’t one,” I said.

“No.”

“So let me get this straight. Google is ‘going Green,’ which means nobody at Google is allowed to drink water anymore. Only juice. I mean, it’s water, you know? It’s 95 percent of what people drink,” I said, adding weakly, “It’s good for you.”

At this, the receptionist’s sympathy evaporated into contempt. This was Google, after all. How dare I imply that Larry and Sergey would fail to provide something for their beloved employees?

“Google has installed water delivery systems near employee workstations,” he intoned with measured patience, “that decant filtered water into glasses and other receptacles.”

A water delivery system — imagine that! And he emphasized the word “filtered” — as if to say that one day, I too could be lucky enough to have a job at Google, and then I wouldn’t have to scoop my water out of a rotting, pre-Roman aqueduct with an algae-covered gourd anymore.

(Google is changing the world, after all. Freeing suburban Californians from the twin scourges of cholera and amebic dysentery is just one small part of the plan.)

“But,” the receptionist continued, looking at a spot in the air just above my shoulder, “they’re all upstairs.”

I turned. Behind me was a steel staircase painted navy blue, the kind Google installs in its buildings to make everybody feel like they’re working in a vast Soho loft. Up above, I could just make out a few Googlers moving around, going to and fro in their Googley jobs — all well-hydrated, no doubt.

I turned back to the receptionist with a look that said, So that’s that?

“If you want,” the receptionist continued flatly, after a moment, “I could go upstairs and get you a glass of water.” He seemed to perform a mental calculation, then added, “If you want to wait.”

“Thanks anyway, man,” I said. “I think I’ll live.” And then I left.

Postscript the First: I’ve since come up with a plan for the next time I have to cover something at the Google campus. I won’t bother to ask about water. Instead, I’ll ask for the men’s room — because I’m pretty sure OSHA regulations require companies to provide those. Once inside, I’ll bend down and wave my hands at the sink’s motion sensors while I lap from the faucet like a dog — the Google Way.

Postscript the Second: Receptionist at Google Building 1950, if you’re reading this: You’re a total wanker.

OK, so let’s see … best read of the last 25 years?

1.) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
OK, well, 25 years makes for an awfully crowded field, but I did enjoy this book thoroughly. Off to a decent start. Let’s see what else they’ve got, shall we? Just a few picks, at random…

2.) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling
Ah yes, another literary triumph. Not quite as good as The Road, mind you, but almost. And clearly, someone’s thought carefully about this. Note that they didn’t just drone on and on, naming all the Harry Potter books one after the other. No, they chose to focus on the one book in the series that’s actually any good. Which happens to be the fourth one (the one in the middle).

16.) The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
17.) Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
Hmmm, these rankings aren’t that good. But what could they really expect? They were competing against Harry Potter. And The Watchmen, which has pictures. Bonus points for Handmaid, though; at least they made a movie out of that.

21.) On Writing, Stephen King
Shame on Stephen King. Since 1983 he’s written Christine, Pet Sematary, It, Misery, most of the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and countless others, but damn him, not one of those books can compare to a 288-page memoir he wrote about what it’s like to be a fiction writer. In fact, I’m surprised he even claims to know what it’s like. And even this book, in the end, lost out to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

40.) His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Because, let’s face it, Martin Amis is just too potty-mouthed to take the #40 spot. And The Kite Runner is about Afghanistan, and you know how we feel about those people.

71.) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman
A book about the American healthcare system and a culture clash between Western doctors and an ethnic minority that fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War? Interesting choice. Frankly I’m surprised that frivolous stuff like this even made the list. You can see why it rates 25 lower than Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

80.) Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney
Take that, Bret Easton Ellis! McInerney rates, but you get zip.

87.) The Ruins, Scott Smith
Now there’s real talent for you! Who else but Scott Smith could publish his second book ever — a short horror novel about bloodsucking plants — get it made into a B-movie, then still make the list above Annie Proulx (who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1994)? Way to go, Scott!

96.) The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
Boo, Dan Brown! See how we hate you? We’re so tired of hearing your name — and reading and re-reading all your books on airplane flights — that we only rated you #96 on the list of the greatest classics of our age. That, and Tom Hanks’s hair looked really weird in the movie.

For the sarcasm impaired: Get yourself a library card and go read some real books, already.

BTW, for the record, I’ve read 18 out of the 100. Looks like I’ve got some culturin’ to do.

In his 1984 essay, “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Gould wrote, “My greatest unhappiness with most popular presentations of science concerns their failure to separate fascinating claims from the methods that scientists use to establish the facts of nature. . . .If the growing corps of popular science writers would focus on how scientists develop and defend those fascinating claims, they would make their greatest possible contribution to public understanding.”

Some of today’s science writing lives up to Gould’s exacting standards; much of it falls short. Andy Coghlan’s article, “Dying for Some Peace and Quiet,” from the August 25, 2007 issue of New Scientist, fails so dismally that it merits special attention.

“Thousands of people around the world may be dying prematurely or succumbing to disease through the effects of noise exposure,” Coghlan writes. Upon examination, however, far more troubling than the noise at issue is just how badly Coghlan presents his claims. From his article’s lurid opening paragraph to its moralizing conclusion, Coghlan has crafted a truly contemptible example of the type of dishonest, exploitative popular science writing that so grieved Gould.

The germ of Coghlan’s story was innocent enough. Over the course of several years, a working group of the World Health Organization (WHO) has studied the widespread problem of noise pollution and its potential impact on human health. Its findings suggest that there are, indeed, links. Most serious of these is evidence that long-term exposure to traffic noise may correlate with an increased risk of ischemic heart disease, a condition that can lead to heart attacks and strokes. The WHO study suggests that as many as 3 percent of deaths due to ischemic heart disease may be attributable to noise exposure.

Coghlan admits that the WHO’s findings are “preliminary,” but that doesn’t stop him from leaping to some remarkable statistical conclusions of his own. Had he consulted the American College of Cardiology, he would have learned that ischemic heart disease is “the single biggest cause of death in the United States,” and that its usual cause is cholesterol deposits in the arteries, not noise pollution. Instead, Coghlan chooses to take the WHO’s statistics as gospel, and from them he extrapolates that exposure to noise is the culprit in 210,000 European deaths each year. Hence his article’s provocative title; and yet, an astute reader will observe that this single data point is the only evidence Coghlan ever offers to support a link between noise pollution and fatalities. Gould would not be impressed.

Helpfully, Coghlan has organized a table listing the WHO’s findings and the “potential years of healthy life lost” they represent. Heart disease tops the list, cited as being responsible for 211,000 years of life lost. (Presumably each of the 210,000 victims mentioned earlier had just slightly more than a year left to live.) Even more significant, however, are the 278,000 years lost due to “24-hour background noise,” the result of which is a worryingly deadly condition that Coghlan terms “annoyance.” Confronted with these twin threats, the other, relatively minor dangers Coghlan cites – 9,800 years lost to “ringing in the ears,” for example – pale in comparison.

Dubious statistics like these plague Coghlan’s article. Gould wrote, “The proper criterion [for judging science] lies in evidence and methodology; we must probe behind the fascination of particular claims.” But Coghlan probes too far, inferring new claims that are unsupported by scientific data and distorting empirical calculations with errors of his own making. Whether he intentionally blurs the distinction between “years of life lost” and “years of healthy life lost” or not, the confusion allows intriguing but otherwise harmless data points to become the foundation of a scare story.

We know that tinnitus is often caused by noise exposure; the insinuation that thousands of Europeans may be dropping dead of it is entirely new, however, and Gould would be dismayed to note that Coghlan never offers any methodology to support this conclusion.

Can noise pollution really lead to illness or death? No one knows for sure. According to experts, “field studies have produced contradictory findings.” Concerns about a link between chronic noise exposure and cardiovascular disease appear valid, but in this case the burden of proof lies with Coghlan – a responsibility that he mostly shirks.

Lethal or not, the effects of noise on a few hundred thousand people among the hundreds of millions that populate Europe don’t seem to make for enough of a story in Coghlan’s estimation. He next sets out to prove that the problem of noise exposure is ever worsening, by citing still further statistics.

According to Coghlan, noise complaints to UK government offices have “increased fivefold” in the last 20 years. In surveys conducted by the UK’s National Society for Clean Air, 45 percent of respondents indicated that noise had a “major impact” on their lives, up from 35 percent the year previous. And in New York City, Coghlan tells us, noise complaints reached “a record 354,378” in 2006, prompting Mayor Michael Bloomberg to introduce “strict new laws to combat noise pollution.” This last case is no surprise, we are told; Coghlan quotes anti-noise lobbyist Richard Tur, who grimly asserts that “America has become a culture of noise.”

Be that as it may, it strains credibility to conclude that America has become a culture of disease and death. And indeed, none of Coghlan’s statistics on noise pollution trends do anything to support his central premise that noise pollution is responsible for illness and loss of life. Absent hard evidence linking noise to disease, the trend numbers are essentially meaningless. Nor do survey results, which represent only subjective opinions, yield genuine “testable proposals,” considered by Gould to be the most essential feature of good science.

Worst of all, the veracity of Coghlan’s figures is questionable: The New York Times agrees with Coghlan’s noise complaint figures for 2006, but dates Mayor Bloomberg’s noise abatement efforts as far back as 2004, when city offices were already receiving “roughly 1,000 calls about noise each day.” The suggestion that noise complaints in New York City have since climbed to unprecedented levels seems more a figment of Coghlan’s need to demonstrate a crisis than the result of empirical study.

Coghlan tries once more to establish that noise pollution is a growing concern, this time by widening the net. In a sidebar entitled “How noise causes illness,” he cites Val Wheedon, a “veteran campaigner against noise pollution,” whom he credits with the belief that “stress might be triggered simply by knowing a [noisy] neighbor is in, even if they are not being noisy at that point.” What are we to conclude from this speculation? The threat of noise exposure would be dire indeed if we broadened our definition of noise to include silence. As Gould wrote, “The speculation may well be true; still, if it provides, in principle, no material for affirmation or rejection, we can make nothing of it.”

There is one way that Coghlan could demonstrate a causal link between noise and death. He could show us the bodies; and in fact he purports to do so. “Dying for Some Peace and Quiet” opens with the tale of the death of Frank Parduski Senior, whom Coghlan describes as “arguably. . .the world’s first anti-noise martyr.”

According to Coghlan, Parduski died “while attempting to slow down a 19-year-old motorcyclist” who had been aggravating him with the noise of his engine. Parduski succumbed to noise exposure far more violently than do most victims of ischemic heart disease: He was hit by the motorcycle, “and died at the scene of multiple injuries.” What possible relevance this anecdote has to a discussion of the cumulative effects of chronic noise pollution on human health Coghlan leaves as an academic exercise for the reader.

“Dying for Some Peace and Quiet” could have been a worthwhile article. Coghlan could have followed Gould’s example and presented the science behind the WHO study in an accurate and objective light. Buried among its melodramatic paragraphs we even find the real motivation for the study. “The objective,” Coghlan writes, “is to develop a standard rationale by which individual countries can decide how much money to spend on noise reduction to improve health.” The European Union, he explains, has begun calling upon its member nations to produce “noise maps” that show “where traffic noise and volume are greatest.” Similarly, Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign to reduce noise in New York City is ongoing.

Articles that explain the methodology and process by which scientists determine the impact of background noise on human health could help to educate the voting public about the issue, enabling them to make informed contributions to civic policy. What’s more, properly collated and presented, the WHO’s data could potentially contribute to further research on heart disease, urban planning, or cultural anthropology. As Gould wrote, “The best scientific hypothesis are also generous and expansive: They suggest extensions and implications that enlighten related, and even far distant, subjects.”

Instead, Andy Coghlan chose the low road. Presented with thin, admittedly preliminary scientific results, he spun a story rife with histrionics but short on facts. He fails completely to establish the definitive link between noise pollution and death that he claims in his headline. As Gould wrote of Ronald Siegel’s theory that the extinction of the dinosaurs may have been due to overdoses of psychoactive chemicals, “It is simply a gratuitous, attention-grabbing guess.”

Given the choice between delivering a banal story that accurately reports scientific findings of relevance to public policy and a sensational but specious story of death and disease, Coghlan chose the latter, even going so far as to kick off his article with an obvious non sequitur. He should be ashamed of himself for producing such work, and New Scientist should be ashamed for publishing it.

“Science, in its most fundamental definition, is a fruitful mode of inquiry, not a list of enticing conclusions,” Gould wrote. It’s too bad that, in the end, poorly-derived conclusions were all that Coghlan had to offer.

One part of the story that Harry didn’t get into in his blog post was revealed by fellow PC World editor Bud McLeod in the official write-up, posted Wednesday. Not only will Harry be retaining his position as editor in chief and vice president at PC World, but erstwhile CEO Colin Crawford — the one who caused this stink in the first place — was kicked to the curb, sent to slink back to an office in IDG corporate management. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

I hope they find a better candidate to fill the CEO slot at PC World and MacWorld. In the meantime, congratulations to the entire editorial staff over there for sticking to your principles and continuing to turn out high-quality editorial, even in these tough economic times for the publishing industry. I’m sure you’re all as proud of Harry as I am.

Sad to say, Harry’s case only demonstrates what seems to be a trend in trade publishing, driven from the top down. The suits will tell you that the publishing business isn’t about printing magazines, it’s about providing marketing channels for advertisers. A magazine isn’t a product, and a reader isn’t a customer. Rather, the reader is the product, and editorial is just a necessary evil (but one that they’re working to minimize).

This attitude is poison. It’s true that the media industry as a whole is struggling to maintain ad revenue in an increasingly competitive market, and print magazines have taken the biggest hit. But be that as it may, we as journalists simply cannot allow sales and marketing to dictate content, or we’re not worthy of the name. When every word we write becomes subject to the veto of a corporate sponsor — or worse, is excised out of fear of what the sponsor might do — there simply is no journalism left.

For Harry, the decision to leave probably wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. True, by walking out he threw away a job, and now he’s unemployed. But had he stayed on — in effect becoming complicit with the new status quo — he would have thrown away his principles, his dignity, and quite possibly his career.

I’ve certainly been there, Harry. I’ve certainly been there. In your shoes, I’d have done the same thing.