Struan, watch the Christian Bök lecture. It's probably too out there to be "popular," but it's a hell of an antidote to what irks you.
Struan, watch the Christian Bök lecture. It's probably too out there to be "popular," but it's a hell of an antidote to what irks you.
Around this part of the world, whenever someone is too incompetent to otherwise support themselves in a given profession, they become an "expert witness" for
trial lawyers.
Thank goodness, I'm not the only one. I try watching our PBS science/discovery series like NOVA and find them hard to follow these days. Missing link jumps in presentational logic, it seems (FWIW, I am/was a research and operational scientist). I've been looking forward to reading Longitude for years now. Thanks for crushing another dream.Originally Posted by Struan Gray
Hey Paul,
I'm not getting the fascination with the Bök lecture--I'm into the Malware section so maybe I haven't seen enough.
It looks to me that he is just running a biological substitution code. There's no magic, no real art or poetry. The descriptions hype it up as if the response from the organism is somehow meaningful--but, of course, Bök has carefully chosen the substitution encoding and worked out the input poem so that the output poem--known perfectly in advance and indeed selected by Bök--appears to contain meaning. Neither the input poem or the output poem seem very interesting as poems and take advantage of poetry's "poetic" nature--Bök's poems seem to hide behind a wall of vagueness and forced meanings. With the same one hundred word vocabulary and a few rules of syntax you could create equivalent poems with a refrigerator magnet set. The biology part adds a great deal of pizzaz to the idea but I'm not seeing what it adds to the substance of the idea.
It's an impressive technological feat but I'm not sure what it means to poetry, let alone to art.
From what I can see this is another example of science/art projects where the science is really the key to why it is interesting and the art is just there, along for the ride, adding a veneer of the exotic to the enterprise if not simply playing the role of illustration.
I've had the opportunity to be in the same room with Nobel Prize winning scientists and their peers and watched their exclamations of amazement and amusement when watching elephants make paintings that resemble abstract art or when monkeys make paintings that look a whole lot like the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. No matter the superficial resemblance of the works--no matter in fact if they were identical, drip for drip--the elephants, the monkeys, the computer program has not made art. I could never really get the idea across.
Or should I keep watching the video?
--Darin
It's a short book. The pain won't last long :-)
There are pdfs of Gould's 'Marine Chronometer' floating around the web if you want the technical story. It's old enough that copyright issues don't apply, although you may end up in some sketchy parts of the web looking for the file. I wish the Longitude book had been a half-way house between what it is, and what Gould produced.
The history of science seems to be a little better served than current developments. I stumbled over, and then thoroughly enjoyed, Jim El Khalili's 'Pathfinders' book on early Arabic science. I'm sure there are others, but they don't achieve mass success in the way the dumbed down books seem to.
Last edited by Struan Gray; 26-Feb-2014 at 02:32.
I'll try to find a quiet hour and a half. Not easy right now.
In my personal realm, I find the division between art and science wholly inexplicable. I experience the same aesthetic thrills in looking at microscopy of adsorbate atoms on semiconductors as I do in galleries and museums of canonical painting. I enjoy intellectualising about art just as much as following the line of argument which constructs quantum mechanics or chaos theory. My personal aesthetic and emotional responses are the same - I feel the same thing.
So, although I understand the division in terms of analysis, or history, or categorisation, and I am used to the comfort blanket-like effect it has on some scientists and some artists, I dislike using the dichotomy as a way of explaining or describing the world, even when talking with those for whom it is concrete and self-evident. It's like racial classifications or social class: it has a reality, but it's a self-reinforcing, latching ratchet of a reality which does as much harm as good.
All right, that's enough...
Struan, to the blackboard, right now, and don't stop until you've chalked-up this sentence 1,000 times:
I will never again forget Pascal's distinction between the esprit géométrique [geometrical temperament], and the esprit de finesse [intuitive temperament], representing two different directions that the one human mind can take.
Does it count if I used an iPad?
Most non scientists would be surprised to learn how much real dirt-under-the-fingernails science proceeds by the indulgence of hunches and intuition. Often, the geometrical temperament comes in later when packaging your findings for publication. Even Newton didn't really puzzle out his optics or mechanics in terms of axioms and derived theorems - that was just the accepted way of presenting a mathematical argument.
The Romantics (and various ancien regimes threatened by technological nouveux riches) turned Pascal's distinction into a value judgement rather than a tool for thinking about thinking. I am always aware of Pascal's version, but see the two as complementary rather than antagonistic (or, worse, mutually exclusive). I am deeply resentful of the perverted version of the idea which thinks that only the artistic temperament employs intuition and feeling.
Darin, I seem to have taken over your thread. Something touched a nerve. I admire Alan Alda for his work to popularise science, and I agree with much of what he says in the article you linked, especially the need to feed curiosity in the young. I just think that current methods of satisfying that curiosity are counter-productive, particularly the tendency to hand down neatly packaged received wisdom as if everything worth knowing was already known. I'll take Mythbusters over a standard science documentary almost every time.
As a forensic chemist, I both agree and am ticked off at this assessment. Most expert witnesses do their job correctly - it's the liars-for-hire that make headlines and ruin it for the rest. I only worked in the criminal law area and for the Commonwealth of MA, so those in the civil law trials aren't as well known to me. I can definitely think of a few who called themselves scientists and who did not belong on the witness stand. Since it is an adversarial situation, there was opportunity to rebut their testimony with actual tested results. Several people who tried to put themselves up as outside experts in MA got their butts handed to them on the stand and never came back. While watching one trial on CourtTV, I sent info to the prosecutor to ask the defense expert because he was mixing up the definitions of natural and synthetic fibers - which was important to the case and hadn't been covered by the prosecutor; until I sent him a message.
Overall, though, I like what Alda is trying to do. I see a big part of the problem these days as being the media as well. They interview the scientist only with soundbites in mind and don't try (imo) to get the whole story, much less try to give the viewer the whole story. I don't think a lot of schools teach kids how to think and how to relate to the scientific approach either. They're fed bits of info in order to pass multiple choice standardized tests and they're not shown how to investigate and actually learn. Too many people have been sucked into science having opposite views of religion as well. Science is not a belief system, yet it gets portrayed that way.
Scientists, by and large, DO have problems explaining their work to laypeople because the average person in the country doesn't have the basic info to understand what they're trying to get across. Many have trouble explaining the basic levels of what they did because they barely remember the time when they didn't understand it. Similar things happen when totally fresh newbies come here or other film sites - there are a number of people who assume a level of knowledge that beginners do not have, yet, and practically berate the newbies for trying things they don't understand rather than explaining it from the start. I see this as being the part that Alda is trying to combat. Scientists need to make what they do sound more interesting and in terms the average person can understand.
I agree, especially with the bolded parts.
As the mom of a 4 year old, there has to be a way for schools to encourage curiosity and actual learning rather than feeding them soundbites. No, I don't really want to home school, but I do plan to add to his scientific education on my own. But I worry for the kids who don't have parents who love science. Nate has several generations of scientists before him (even his great great grandmother had a Masters in bacteriology and did some of the early work with using sodium hypochlorite to sanitize things). Scientists do have a responsibility to make their work accessible. The media needs to help, imo - maybe there's the science + art that needs to happen. A la Mythbusters?
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