SCIENCE!!!! and kittens

[mymatedave10]

Watch on YouTube

Also, in an update to my previous post, I have seen the kitty and it is cute. A tiny cute ball of sleek fur improbably called Teezl O'Brian.

Comments

[tassosss.livejournal.com]

AMEN!!!!

That video is brilliant and I'm going to pass it on.

One of the things that comes up over and over again when I talk to people is justifying why what I do isn't some academic, irrelevant thing but something actually worth the grant money. So many people just don't get it or refuse to and it's so frustrating.

Glad you finally saw the kitty!

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

Cool, glad you enjoyed the vid. Also, I hope you don't mind me asking about your RL, but what do you do for a living? I know it's something in the sciences but what exactly?

[tassosss.livejournal.com]

I work at a University as a lab manager/technician doing environmental research. I've done work in paleoceanography which is a hard one for people to understand the importance of - namely understanding climate and ocean systems and how they interact and what the consequences of abrupt change may be. Groundwater effects on coastal waters - what's in it, where it's coming from, what it's doing to reefs and public health. Aerosols, dust, and what it carries into the water. Phosphate cycling in lakes which can cause harmful algal blooms.

I'm in a more relevant area, I guess, now in the environmental side, but I'm trained in hard rock geology too and there you get people wondering why in the world we should care about rocks out in the middle of nowhere. They tell a story, though, and that story is not just about oil and mining. You can figure out what the world looked like and not just the landscape but the atmosphere, the biology and it comes back to understanding how the whole system works and interacts. That the rise of the Himalaya's was the major driving force behind the low CO2 world we live in now and the ice ages.

These connections often come slowly and the whole is not easily seen without the parts already in place and that comes form exploration and wondering and sometimes questions that are completely different. The other part of the answer to why we had ice ages came from astronomy and the Milenkovich cycles of how our planet moves through space.

[tassosss.livejournal.com]

What seems to hurt science the most though is the uncertainty inherent in it. Detractors latch onto the uncertainty that when managed well does not actually take away from the work and the conclusions drawn from it.

And then there's religion and the extremism that ultimately turned me into an atheist out of sheer frustration and anger. A class on Darwin actually was the final straw. People trying to deny that the world could be as awesome (in its original meaning) and powerful and amazingly ordered amongst chaos and heartless without a God to put it into motion. To me that feels like a man saying a woman can't be anything good or strong or beautiful or outside of his image of the delicate flower image he has for her unless she has a man propping her up, taking care of her, holding her hand.

But back to the science. In my field what is frustrating is that we get this data, we learn something about what is harming coastal habits, fish, the bird populations, the pollution in the beaches where people want to swim and then policy makers take what we have and either dismiss it because they have business interests or try to do something and then the state doesn't give them enough money to follow through. Or they try to do something that actually ends up doing no good or makes the problem worse but it looks good on paper. (I'm thinking here of the California law that requires us to have gasoline that pollutes less, but is in fact less efficient for the engine so per trip you end up using more than you would if it were the old gasoline so the positive effect is marginal at best and the whole thing is essentially a waste of money because we pay more for the less polluting gasoline.)

And wow this got long.

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

No problem, seems like fascinating stuff. I wasn't brought up believing in religion because my Dad grew up catholic during the 50's in rural ireland and had it stuffed down his throat from birth.

What you said about the earth being this awesome place that had these things occur naturally is so very true, but it needing to have a designer do these things purposely almost takes away from the majesty of nature. It lessens it.

My biggest failing when it came to science in school was that I never made the time to look at the details, to do the boring stuff, I was always interested in the big picture which is why I wasn't very good at it. That and being easily distracted.