Others' words

[shadesofmauve]

I found an excellent comment over at pharyngula on the benefits of exploring new fields, keeping your eyes open, and reading widely -

"My bias, admittedly, is that one learns more about oneself by looking at the rest of the world than by looking at one's navel. Perhaps I'm reinforced in this bias by how much more difficult the latter has become as I age."

comment 37

Also re Pharyngula, he seems to have stopped adding the horoscopes on the bottom. Perhaps it didn't pan out as a money-maker like it was supposed to. Pity, I was enjoying those. Example:

"Taurus: Great news! Soft drink executives are planning to market a new energy drink made from your urine, on the basis of vague, unfounded rumors of your vitality. This is not such happy news for the rest of us, however."

Comments

[spuuky.livejournal.com]

I read the article, and the comment you linked to, and some others near the start, but I couldn't handle any more. These people seem to think that this TA is some authority figure, magically trained in the art of paper-grading. It's probably just a student with no prior experience! Here's a hint to professors: if you don't want an untrained amateur reviewing the papers of your students, don't assign one to do so.

Also, I couldn't disagree more with the author of the article. Science is not a "fact," and the sooner that he stops thinking that evolution (or gravity, or even the roundness of the world) is something purely objective about which there can be no possible debate, the better. Historically speaking, scientists have always known various things to be fundamental, undeniable truths, and they have been corrected for nearly all of these things at one point or another. I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to see some ultra-complicated quantum physics paper which demonstrated that the world is actually somehow a mathematical flat plane.

Also, as I'm sure someone mentioned, he wants to correct content, and English labs presumably correct form.

[shadesofmauve]

Leaving aside that was I particularly enjoyed was the one commenter's turn of phrase, I think you'd find on a more thorough reading of the blog in general and the average comment that there is a total understanding that science is not a fact, but a process. It is a process of discovery, rediscovery, understanding, changes in understanding, etc.

However, even though our understanding of the world may grow and change, the world itself remains, and our debate won't change that. Take gravity, for instance. Feel free to debate it at your leisure - I'm fairly certain you'll find it a directly observable fact, though you might not be able to think about it after a big enough personal impact.

[spuuky.livejournal.com]

I wasn't criticizing your taste in turn of phrase, nor was I particularly disagreeing with that commenter in general. It is possible that reading other entries on the blog would give a different impression about his thoughts as a whole, but that doesn't alter the impression given by that entry, taken alone.

The observable fact in my experience is that things which are not touching other things end up touching them at a rate which is proportional to the distance away from things that they are, with many exceptions. What causes that is definitely not anything I can observe. All I really know is that the Einsteinian theory of gravity appears to a better representation of that than anything I can come up with.