Azaran on 3/7/2012 at 22:05
Discovery aired that? I mean, you'd expect the History Channel to run something like that, but Discovery? Damn....
SubJeff on 3/7/2012 at 23:00
Quote Posted by Vivian
The situation is hopeless. Journos don't even use wikipedia.
It amazes me how journalists can be so, so hopeless. I remember much rolling of eyes when reading an article in a national newspaper where the title was something like "Surgeon invents new anaesthetic" and the very first line of the article revealed the method was "invented" by the anaesthetist, and wasn't a new anaesthetic at all but suspending a laptop so patients having surgery under spinal anaesthetic could watch videos.
Now I'm not being territorial about my speciality (I couldn't care less) but the whole thing was just such bollocks I could hardly believe it. It may seem harmless, and at first glance it is, but there are soooo many things wrong with reporting a story like that. To intelligent people it's not a problem, but to the impressionable masses...
Muzman on 4/7/2012 at 00:24
The ones they find never look like Daryl Hanna for some reason.
demagogue on 4/7/2012 at 01:14
Quote Posted by Vivian
blackholes are baby universes. That's how it got compressed enough. Google it, someone said it, sounds kinda sensible
That's Lee Smolin's pet theory. Multiverse Natural Selection. I used to really like reading his books & was a fan -- Loop Quantum Gravity, etc -- like he was this brave maverick, but then I started reading more blogs & articles and he's apparently considered just short of a crackpot in the actual physics community. I still don't know enough to say myself, but when you start reading so many people working in their profession say something often enough, you start to respect at least their opinion is hardened by real experience. (I still thought the theory itself was sort of cool to think about, though.)
Yakoob on 4/7/2012 at 03:41
Going back to the OP, I actually was thinking of making a similar thread after one of my friend dropped this line that made me really shake my head (and led to some heated Skype conversation):
"I hate that modernity has ruined values."
Now, said friend is Malaysian and things maaay be different there (shes been 3 years in the US at my Uni now, tho), but I think this is a load of bollocks, and it goes back to OPs complaints about modern culture getting dumber and entering a new dark age.
I think to objectively claim humanity is stepping back is completely misguided; yes we flip flop, yes we do some dumb shit, but
on the whole I honestly believe mankind HAS progressed, virtually on ever aspect. Technology, medicine, "power over nature" don't even need examples. Social is a bit more tricky, but I think we can't dismiss the overall higher standards of living and respect for fellow humans compared to, say, the middle-ages feudal lords, or even more recent slavery and women rights. We've got countries that already had their first female presidents in the past few decades, for instance.
Now this is not 100% equal distributions, and some parts of the world (coughafircacough) are lagging behind, but it's just a matter of catching up; as mankind, we made huge strides.
Now, we are closer than ever to achieving "specie supremacy," but there is one thing holding us back - ourselves.
Quote:
You'd think that with all the information available to us now (in the 1st World at least) that a lot of idiocy would dissolve. [snip] The kind of world where this happens: (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18692830)
What happened and when do we burn it all?
The problem is that, the mass media, ease of travel, tele-communication and internet dont so much generate idicioty, but merely enable and magnify it. It's already there, heck, it's ALWAYS been there, a part of human nature. But until the past few decades, we never had the tools to allow huge droves of neckbeards, pretend-a-scientists and armchair politicans to voice their opinions and, worse yet, influence others. We do now.
I've studied Comparative Ethnic Conflict for my Masters and in the year of looking at numerous cases like Isreal and Palestine, North Ireland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Africa, etc. there were maany reasons for conflict - religious, political, personal, territorial, ideological... only one thing stay constant - humanity.
This may be really pessimistic, but after my course I honestly grew to believe that the "reasons" for conflict are just excuses, or ploys by leaders to encite the public. Half the people don't even know why they hate the other side aside from 1-dimensional ingrained propaganda ("they're dirty, they're brutal, they attack our children" etc.) At the end of the day, the man just needs to stab a stick in each other's eyes every once in a while. It's who we are. And who we will still be for a very, very long time, if not forever.
Quote Posted by R Soul
The question that bugs me is where did all
this come from? Astronomers have used the current state of the universe to work backwards and suggest that things must have exploded out from some point, but then what? ...
snipR Soul I recommend you read hawking's "a brief history of the universe" that pretty much talks about that. It kind of arrives at your conclusion ("world is infinite but boundless, post-big-bang is a mirror of pre-big-bang, it keeps oscilating between the two" etc. etc.) but goes into more details you may find interesting.
Quote Posted by demagogue
Edit: To be even handed here -- Crit Theory & PoMo people on the other hand will give you a really snarky look and it'll be something like this exchange I heard. A: "I teach literature. And what do you do?" B: "I'm a cognitive psychologist" A: "Oh, we use a lot of psychology in literature to tear down Western hegemonies. I'm trying to get my daughter to learn Freud's theories so she understands human psychology. What's your advice?" B: "Freud has absolutely nothing to do with human psychology." A: "Well, that's your opinion." *snarky eyebrow-arch* B: "No, it's what the evidence says." A: "And isn't this bloodlust for always more 'evidence', more 'efficiency', more 'consumption' just our sick Western fetishes?" ... and they'll just go on forever about it, never budging; they try to make you feel uncomfortable so
you feel like leaving. Unfortunately, here too, I've seen this happen more than a few times.
How true, so many people forget the science part of "social sciences" :rolleyes:
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
The degree of respect I give people's religious or spiritual wackiness depends on how much of a tangible effect it has on me.
Aye, and from my
very limited and anecdotal experience it always seems to be the US Bible-Belt Christians that are the most annoying and pushy about their believes. Just sod off, I tried the church once and it wasn't for me.
Conversely, I studied at a school founded on the (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%8Dka_Gakkai) SGI Buddhist Principles, and so a good 90% of the people there are members. It's not a religion per-se, as there is no god, no churches and focuses on self-improvement, helping others, strong education and community building. Despite that, I've met many who were just as fanatical as the Christians, gloryfying the president with almost Jesus-like reverie.
And many of my close friends are the polar opposite, keeping their practice to themselves but also able to talk about it objectively. I've been in there room while they chanted, I've gone to a few meetings of theirs, and it's never been a bother, never felt like I was being "converted." And I did find it interesting from a sociological viewpoint as well.
Slasher on 4/7/2012 at 04:01
Quote Posted by Kolya
*pictures*
Jar Jar....mein Gott....what happened to you? :confused:
Azaran on 4/7/2012 at 06:42
Reminds me of a Kurshok
Kolya on 4/7/2012 at 08:04
As far as I could find, these pics are from said discovery channel piece, who did slap an editor's note on (
http://press.discovery.com/ekits/monster-week-mermaids/press-release.html) their respective page about it all being science fiction but otherwise are pushing the envelope (I think it's called) calling it "based on some real events and scientific theory" in the same breath and later on "compelling with evidence", trying hard to blur the line here.
Now to the point: There's this made up dichotomy that you if you're an atheist and firmly rooted in a scientific view, you also have to be a cold hearted cynic about the wonders of our world. Of course that doesn't work, because our need for wonder and magical thinking is built into ourselves and as old as the search for reliable facts.
Both sides are responsible for this. Believers would do good not to dispute scientific facts because they can only lose. And the scientific side would do good for their own sake to acknowledge the poetry that is for example a picture from Hubble or a garden and openly point at the things they don't know much about yet, leaving well contoured gaps where the mind can wander. After all without imagination there can be no leaps of theoretical understanding.
Vivian on 4/7/2012 at 13:57
One of the problems is the absolute necessity of objectivity to the scientific method. You cannot, as a scientist, call something 'beautiful'. You can as a person, and in many cases you would be an idiot not to (astronomers particularly), but such a subjective assessment cannot be part of your scientific analysis. So yeah, scientists when they are engaged in science have to be pretty fucking dull about the whole thing, straight-facedly describing the mechanics and kinematics of cavitation in alpheidae, whereas the scientist when he is engaged in drinking can talk in wonder about the fact that these tiny, gimpy-looking pistol shrimp mincing around in the sea are intentionally collapsing vacuum bubbles with enough force to turn water into fucking plasma. The problem is, which should you use for public engagement? Get too enthusiastic and you risk reaching discovery-channel levels of bro-durr. Keep it too precise and you sound boring. Brian Cox is pretty much on point with this, so was David Attenborough (I still count him as one of us, he's got a degree).
Tocky on 4/7/2012 at 15:11
Imagination does more than make science palitable. It does so with life as well. Beyond a bare minimum of thought required to survive there would seem no need for it and yet it has proven useful and been passed along in the culture. It has always been the spice added to the gruel which makes one want to eat. Nothing we do holds up under scrutiny, not even survival, when you understand all we build will at some point be floating cold and dead in expanding space. Imagination is a vital part of the celebration of now. The wink and smile at the end of a tale told round a campfire notwithstanding, it makes the marshmellow worth burning.
