Marigolds, and the measuring thereof

~looks at Teflon cookware on shelf~

Why does that sound suspiciously like what happened with asbestos? Also, I'm going to have to tell my Boy Scout troop that we need all new pans...

edited 6th Sep '11 2:00:50 PM by USAF713

you have to get it to like, 500 F for it to even be a problem. It's fairly heat stable at standard Operating temperatures. That's the reason it's still sold, it's not really that dangerous at all.

Additionally I wish people would stop flipping out over low level carcinogens, If you live long enough, like many of us will, thanks to science you will get cancer. Period. Telomeres only last so long people, and we don't have a way to restart telomerase.

edited 6th Sep '11 2:04:36 PM by Lanceleoghauni

Certain technologies that have been used in warfare (siege engines, nuclear power, the rifle, etc; but not steel, the aeroplane or the computer) are the only case that I can think of where the case could be reasonably made that science has done more harm than good.

Has electricity been used for warfare? Yes, obviously. But has it been used more for better things? Again, the answer is yes - obviously.

The same goes for medicine (even including the mistakes that were made in the field before the advent of germ theory,) optics, mathematics and pretty much every single field. Sure, the discoveries have been used for evil, but really - 50/50?

Even if you count the invention of safe ways to use fire as an achievement of science (which I would do, as such discoveries have almost certainly resulted from a systematic effort, sparked by curiosity, to learn things, and this effort probably consisted largely of experimentation) and would count all of the evils that have resulted from it, including gunpowder-based equipment of war and the use of fire as a weapon, pollution, the utility of fire in the making of military equipment, the use of fire as a tool for torture, etc - they would (probably, though I almost wrote "certainly") not add up to so much grief that the utility of fire for cooking wouldn't have caused mankind more benefit.

And I picked fire as a particularily harmful invention, instead of choosing one with overwhelming power for good, such as the germ theory and the advances in the treatment of almost all diseases that wouldn't have been possible without understanding what caused these conditions.

edited 6th Sep '11 2:08:40 PM by BestOf

Ah, yes, medical research. A brilliant thing, that. Makes people live longer, healthier lives.

We also have enough biological weaponry of mass destruction to kill the world quite a few more times than we have nukes to do. Nobody ever seems to consider them as threatening as nukes, when in reality they're worse.

Oh, and, you know, a lot of them are unaccounted for thanks to the Soviet Union's stupidity. North Korea could have biological weaponry that's a hundred times more deadly than any nuclear warhead they could come up with...

edited 6th Sep '11 5:59:07 PM by USAF713

oh yes, biological weapons. The kind that are completely and utterly illegal in most, if not all of the world if I remember, and the mere existence of which would cause worldwide backlash? There are scarier things in the drain of an ICU than what you might consider a biological weapon. we don't need to weaponize bacteria, they already exist in obscenely lethal forms. Resistant Staph infections, for example, HIV/AIDS would only be scarier if airborne for another. you don't need to pull out the germ scare card.

Still not convincing.

It's entirely possible that there would be no mankind left if it weren't for the very same medical discoveries that also resulted in the development of biological WMDs. Yes, vaccination, standards and education regarding hygiene and penicillin have really saved that many lives.

One must also consider how rare the use of biological WMDs is compared to the billions of lives that medicine has saved. Even if someone used them to destroy 90% of all mankind, it would probably take a couple of centuries at most to make that destruction not add up to the total number of lives saved by medicine.

edited 6th Sep '11 2:14:33 PM by BestOf

Re: fundamental science vs. science targeted at practical matters...

Of course we wouldn't get anywhere if all, say, biologists did was fundamental research and not work on practical medicine. Thing is, that goes in reverse as well - the folks working on medicine would get nowhere fast if they weren't able to draw on the fundamental research in biology, and a chemist working on a new polymer for a specific use needs to draw on fundamental research in chemistry. Cell phones, the internet as we know it, and GPS would not be in use if we didn't have the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics first. The one needs the other, and fundamental research is used down the line for practical endeavors. Not to mention we're really a very curious species and just want to know for knowledge's sake, it makes us (some of us, at least) happy and satisfied to know.

I'm with the vulcan.

I don't think the pursuit of knowledge is ever a waste of time. Just as the poet seeks to produce beauty from words and the artist seeks to produce it on canvas, there are those who derive wonder from discovery, from study of nature in all its complexities. Providing nobody is being hurt and caution is being exercised I don't see any reason to discourage that.

And we never know when a piece of information will come in handy. I think the best example is pure mathematics, which for much of history was disparaged and dismissed as lacking in any practical applications. Yet, time and time again, mathematical concepts previously considered useless games have found uses, in quantum physics, in space travel, in computer science, in economics. Negative numbers were at one point considered pointless; they're now regarded as fundamental.

Science and its findings are tools, and the problem with any tool is that it can be misused or used dangerously. Is it right to restrict the study of life-threatening diseases out of fear that the findings might be used for biological warfare? I don't think so.

And I mean, it's not like we aren't scarily efficient at killing even without access to any technology whatsoever, anyway.

Some people look to a Deity for understanding, some of us instead turn our wonder to the glory of the universe and it's complexities, and wish to study it and unveil each successive layer of Beauty. To Take it back to the title of the thread Measuring the Marigolds for those like us is almost a quest for truth, to have some decent grasp at the sublime interactions of the plane we live in.

edited 6th Sep '11 3:46:47 PM by BestOf

See, this is the point where I must, regrettably, profess that not only is measuring the marigolds a legitimate complaint, but it's one I can relate to. Sometimes simple things that just look pretty or do something amazing, with no technical aspects to them, are beautiful. It's subjective, of course it's subjective, but sometimes, for some people, they are.

Take rainbows. Rainbows are pretty. The intangible image generated by the grouping of fermions known as the human visual cortex as the product of photons hitting the grouping of fermions known as the human retina after being refracted and reflected by groupings of fermions known as drops of water, all of which may simply be the product of vibrating strings anyway... that's not pretty, not to me. It's not quite dull, but it's comparatively uninteresting. And it's not enough to just admire rainbows in ignorance, because even the knowledge that rainbows can be broken down like that dispells the illusion of rainbows as a tangible and beautiful (but mysterious) shape in the sky.

But for me, your description of a rainbow is such that it gives me something almost akin to a nerdgasm. On the other hand, I find most poetry to be puzzling and frivolous. So it really is a very subjective thing what one finds to be beautiful. I guess that only those who really find a certain field fascinating are capable of being a scientist in that field. Just as I could never be a poet because I lack the appreciation of that field.

edit (after racking my brain for the quoteblock syntax): god dam it, I hate the forum syntax used in tvtropes. It's just so completely different from any other forum.

edited 6th Sep '11 5:42:26 PM by nightwyrm_zero

Exactly. I too find that description... so much more awesome than just the sight of a rainbow in the sky. Yes, a rainbow is pretty - and it remains so when I know what causes it. But the harmony of the inner workings of the Universe and how it all fits together perfectly to make what we know, is even more elegant and awe-worthy.

By design.

And while Fermions is overused a little bit to the point of inelegance, it's still a nice reading.

edited 6th Sep '11 5:45:51 PM by Lanceleoghauni

[offtopic] but is there a page for describing the syntax that I can refer to here on tvtropes instead of trial-and-errorX5 every time I want to do something with a post that I rarely do.

edited 6th Sep '11 5:50:00 PM by nightwyrm_zero

~shrug~

Scientists and engineers will do their thing. Some will help people, others will do whatever makes the most money, and some just won't give a damn. I, in the modern age of "science will save us!" can't do a thing about the last two. I simply reserve my "I told you so"'s for whenever it goes wrong...

It wasn't supposed to be elegant.

If I wanted to prettify it I could have talked about quarks and leptons, and molecules and hydrogen and oxygen and neurons and electrical impulses and synapses and ion pumps and so on, but that would have just been too much science for this time of the evening.

(In any case, that wouldn't be any good because it would be a map, not the territory, and the territory is NOTHING BUT QUANTA! </yudkowsky>)

Truth be told, while rainbows are a popular example in the "measuring the marigolds" debate, I don't think they're really the best one, because it's kind of hard to uglify rainbows, even if one dislikes demystifying them. A better example would perhaps be the human consciousness, which hits pretty close to home for most people, I think.

I guess quite apart from the fact that I like the fantasy of actual tangible rainbows floating there in the sky, and of magical consciousnesses arising independent of neurons and such, what also gets me is when I see videos like this and I can see there is something kind of moving about it... but then, I realise that the sense of awe people like Dawkins are attempting to inspire and presumably experiencing themselves is not drastically different from that same emotion preachers shoot for. Then I notice the similarity between the above video and Insane Clown Posse's "Miracles" and it kind of kills my ability to take it seriously.

Of course, then I go and notice the similarity between my post #137 and the Homestuck character who is parody of the attitude expressed in said ICP video, and I can't take my own posts seriously either. Meanwhile, deprived of the aforementioned sense of awe, all that's left is science and poetry and similarly mediocre sources of amusement. This is fun, isn't it? Let's all play with this meaningless universe and deconstruct everything until our cerebral cortices drip out of our fibrocartilaginous outer auditory canals. It'll be a motherfucking miracle.

[offtopic] but is there a page for describing the syntax that I can refer to here on tvtropes instead of trial-and-errorX5 every time I want to do something with a post that I rarely do.

There's a "show markup help" button in the top left hand corner of the "add post" screen which has all the markup information you're likely to need.

Except for colours, which are a miracle, and kNoWiNg ShIt JuSt StEaLs Up AlL tHe FuCkIn MaGiC fRoM yOuR mIrAcLeS lIkE a MoThErFuCkIn ThIeF.

Well, OK, that was [[purple:text]] (also works for red, blue, cinnamon, gold, forestgreen, green, pink, gray, teal, white and evil).

Fixed.

Perfect Bobby.

If only I'd waited like a day or two to change my avatar. It would have been brilliant.

Edit: Next time I change avatars and forum sigs, that's totally it, Bobby.

edited 6th Sep '11 7:05:29 PM by USAF713

^^ Sweet, thanks. Never noticed it.

The common-sense view, like the classical view, is that artists are concerned with creating beauty and scientists are occupied with detecting reality. But there has been a reversal of roles between artists and scientists. It is now scientists rather than artists who praise the world for being “elegant” and “beautiful.” The new superstring physics is often praised for its mathematical loveliness no less than its possible truth, and when Crick and Watson found their model for the structure of DNA, they decided that it was “too beautiful not to exist.” But where are the avant garde artists these days in discussions of aesthetics? The search for beauty and elegance would strike many of them as laughably naïve. It is now the artists who give us the contact with brute reality, which used to be the domain of science. Real artists no longer focus on creating pretty objects: instead, they throw dissected cows into vats of chemicals, or spit from windows onto random pedestrians, or make films of clowns using the toilet.

edited 6th Sep '11 7:27:47 PM by Myrmidon

Just wanted to pop in and mention engineers are just scientists who either get off their ass and do something with it, or do something with it so they can spend more time on their ass. So saying "the engineers did it!" isn't really a vindication or anything.

edited 6th Sep '11 9:46:28 PM by Pykrete

I was just being more semantically correct :P

Engineers are the ones who exploit science for fun and profit. Much like pimps and prostitutes. Economics being the ugly hairy prostitute.