Tag: Science

The single most important piece of scientific literature is, in my opinion, the periodic table.  Those who understand what it means, and what it actually implies, have mastered more science than most professors ever will.  This may sound like an exaggeration, but come with me and I think that I can prove it to you.

One thing that scientists like to do is to make order out of what seems to be a myriad of disjointed facts.  The table does just this.  The table did not just appear overnight; it is the product of contributions by hundreds of scientists over decades and finally took a form sort of like what we use today in 1869.  That was the year in which Dmitrii Mendeleev published his table, but he was not alone by far.

If you heard this on the TV, would you sit and think, interesting Opinions?

“The facts are simple,” says Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society. “The earth is flat.”

“Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world,” he contends. “The known, inhabited world is flat.

[…]

the stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston.”

As shown in a map published by Johnson, the known world is as circular and as flat as a phonograph record. The North Pole is at the center.

 

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/…

Or if you heard this loudly stated Opinion, would you think, “Well, They have a Right to their Opinions”

Mr. Johnson, who called himself the last iconoclast, regarded scientists as witch doctors pulling off a gigantic hoax so as to replace religion with science. He based his own ideas on the Old Testament references to a flat earth

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03…

Photo By VinceVarnas, Oregon FishOutofWater

Electric blue clouds, literally at the edge of space, have been recently seen glowing in the dark from Oregon to Colorado to Virginia, further south than they have ever been seen. Noctilucent clouds were first reported in the far north after the Krakatoa eruption. Until the last several decades they were always seen north of 50 N Latitude. No one is sure why the clouds are moving south but global warming is a suspected cause.

In orange

Back in the days when energy was not understood, but after the Aristotelian ideas of the elements were being shot down, folks became interested with why fire “works”.  That is not in the least odd, since fire has been simultaneously our best friend and our worst enemy.

Without fire, food would be rather indigestible, especially meats and starchy things.  With the heat from fire, those become much better sources of digestible nutrition.  With fire, our living structures become comfortable, and without it chillingly cold and very harsh.

But fire has its own way of doing things.  Uncontrolled, it is one of most destructive natural, or human created, forces.  But it is NOT an element.  Neither is Earth, Air, nor Water.

Forty years ago this week an event occurred that changed the history of mankind forever.

An event so monumental that the memory lingers on, even though the venue where the event took place has been, shall we say, “repurposed“.

But we’re not here to talk about the time that Minnesota Twins Manager Billy Martin appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Instead, let’s talk space.

NASA is forever trying to interest the world in space exploration…and forever struggling to come up with the money to get things done.

Well, I’m not a scientist, nor an engineer, and I don’t assemble rocket vehicles…but I am a fake consultant, and if NASA took my advice, I’d bet my fake paycheck that money would be a lot less of a problem.

Since yesterday was Independence Day and many of us saw a fireworks display, shot off our own fireworks, or both, I thought it would be timely to describe how fireworks actually work.  All fireworks have one thing in common:  they give off heat from some sort of chemical reaction.

Most fireworks also give off light, and most also emit some sort of sound.  Notable exceptions to this are sparklers which have little sound, smoke “bombs”, and the large set pieces that display shapes like an American flag or some such.  We shall focus on the ones that give off light and sound.

The psychedelic amphetamines (and I include mescaline here, although it is a methyl group away from being a true amphetamine) are many and widely encountered in what are almost always now illicit settings.  They (except for mescaline) are synthetic drugs, not found in nature.

These drugs are “true” psychedelics as opposed to the oddballs described here last week.  Many of the oddballs are dissociatives, and the true psychedelics work by a completely different mechanism.

I thank the members here for asking me to post my science essays here as a primary site. I hope to make many new friends here. The next one has to do with acetaminophen, a very dangerous drug. If I am not welcome to post it here as my new primary site, please let me know. Warmest regards, Doc

Religion and science are both practiced by humans, therefore they are not as unlike as many argue.  There is much overlap in the skills of emotions and of understanding required to practice either productively.  Both fall disappointingly short of realizing their ideals in practice.  Both are corrupted by the common human flaws.

Faith is one foundation of most religions.  All religions also involve practice.  It’s not so obvious how to master one’s anger and violent tendencies.  Selfishness is a persistent human trait.  And greed, and so on.  But practice tends toward perfection.  Not being a good person for some future reward, no.  I am talking about practicing behavior which will bring happiness to oneself and to others.  Christianity is in alignment with every major religion in placing the golden rule at it’s center.  Treat others as you yourself would be treated.  This simple guide defines a human technology which could actually prevent warfare and end torture.  It is a much more effective approach than simply being right-which is where science, or being reality-based, rears it arrogant head.

I stress arrogant, as opposed to confident in oneself as a result of disciplined practice of rationality.  For science entails practice as well.  No matter how deep one’s knowledge of the heuristic methods of science, acquiring the skills of a practicing scientist requires years of practice-as in religion, the acquired skills are never fully mastered.

Oops, did I call science arrogant?  And I was so wanting to be nice.  Sigh.  If it makes you rational ones feel better, pretending to have co-powers with god is rather breathtaking in its audacity, not to mention claiming to know the unknowable.  So let’s call it a tie.  Okay, go ahead, give religion the black mark on this one.  The over-riding point is that humans tend to be arrogant.  Add that one to the list of human afflictions.