Tag Archives: Science

The WAR on SCIENCE

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan

Perhaps society has always been at war with science. Science challenges belief systems. Science threatens the status quo. Scientific thinking requires one to question everything. 

However scientific thought does not grant one the ability to throw out centuries of hard-won knowledge just because the doubter does not “believe” it. The Internet is chock full of blogs decrying the “lies” perpetuated by scientists, NASA, the media, the government. It is truly ironic that the science and technology that made computers, smart phones, tablets, and the Internet possible is the very science under attack on the Internet. So much of the “information” on the Internet is opinion and belief offered up as fact. The Internet gives everyone an equal voice.

Instead of making us smarter, the Internet is making us dumber. Our knowledge is based on “factoids” and “sound bites”. Few people bother to dig deeper. TL;DR

Sadly, I ran across this video on one of those “anti-science”, “we have been lied to” blogs. The author comments:

This is just such a great example of how sometimes the propaganda gets so heavy in it’s shaming tactics that it only serves to show how desperate and panicky the official side is seemingly becoming.

Science = propaganda 

Sigh

Whatever other titles I have held during my professional career …

I proudly claim the title of Scientist.

The Cost of Ignorance

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Carl Sagan

Continue reading The Cost of Ignorance

A Brief History of Everything

Continue reading A Brief History of Everything

Science and Technology

Carl Sagan said this over thirty years ago and sadly it is even more true today than it was then.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Credit: Brainy Quotes

SRL – Technical Discussion

Re: Seven Red Lines

Via #1 Son:

Thought you’d appreciated the discussion at my work about this:

TC Embarrassingly, I’ve done the opposite in meetings.
Requester: I want two perpendicular lines.
PM: Drawing two perpendicular lines is really hard. No resources for it.
Dev: Actually, I can do that in an hour.
PM: /facepalm
3 days, 19 hours ago

JH Increase the dimensionality and you can certainly get 7 lines all perpendicular to each other.
1 day, 5 hours ago

K Can you show me that on a whiteboard?
1 day, 5 hours ago

JC Sure. Get him a 7 dimensional whiteboard.
1 day, 4 hours ago

JH {{1,0,0,0,0,0,0},{0,1,0,0,0,0,0},{0,0,1,0,0,0,0},{0,0,0,1,0,0,0},{0,0,0,0,1,0,0},{0,0,0,0,0,1,0},{0,0,0,0,0,0,1}}
1 day, 3 hours ago

AH (Two vectors are perpendicular if their dot-product equals 0.)
1 day, 3 hours ago

JH As for the color part, I feel like there was an xkcd about this recently…http://xkcd.com/1351/
1 day, 3 hours ago

PA The internet has everything, even seven dimensional orthogonal vectors
1 day ago

JC Projecting seven dimensions down to two dimensions doesn’t seem to work very well. Also, the colors are wrong.
1 day ago

M If you don’t like the color, priests from AoE will fix it for you
1 day ago

SF It’s not too hard to plot 5 dimensional data on a 2 dimensional canvas:http://imgur.com/69Jc8Ch
1 day ago

GM but the question is, can you make them red and transparent?
25 minutes ago

SF color=”red”, alpha=0.5 🙂
19 minutes ago