There is only sadness in Steve's world where money is lord, no truth.

Servant to the humblest person in the universe,

Andrew

--
Dr. Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Board-Certified Cardiologist
http://www.heartmdphd.com/

**
Who is the humblest person in the universe?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?L26062048

What is all this about?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R20632B48

Is this spam?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N69721867

Such is Steve's world where money is lord.

May God bless you on this Lord's day, dear Zee whom I love, in Christ's
holy name.


Servant to the humblest person in the universe,

Andrew

--
Dr. Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Board-Certified Cardiologist
http://www.heartmdphd.com/

**
Who is the humblest person in the universe?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?L26062048

What is all this about?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R20632B48

Is this spam?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N69721867

COMMENT:

Well, as Bertrand Russell said, "Whoever first coined the phrase, 'The
Naked Truth' had perceived an important connection. Nakedness is
shocking to all right-minded people, and so is truth."

Not being politically correct is generally is the penalty for thinking
for yourself. If you don't want to offend anybody, don't think at all.
Or if you feel risqué, you can share in the small heresy of your local
heretical group, which may have some part of the truth, but otherwise,
try to blend in. Hey, we all do it. Nobody really wants to be Giordano
Bruno all the time.

I'm sure the idea that humans are deluxe-model chimpanzees, who spend
most of our time putting our big brains into the service of baboon
politics, is offensive to many. But it's a pretty good description of
the world. Our large brains were not developed for doing science.
Science is historically very, very recent, far too recent for it to
have any bearing on the evolution of humans. Instead, it seems likely
that our large brains are generally for the purpose of tracking game,
running, throwing stuff accurately, or working in teams. Or for
finding hidden feces, figuring out who's not getting fed, looking for
hidden food items and hidden poisons, and figuring out who's cheating
at sex or status games. For finding the mate with the best resources.
And especially, for finding somebody to blame for problems
(witch-finding, scapegoating). All else is add-on, sort of the way you
can use a computer designed to predict the weather, to play solitaire
or Doom.

If you go to the DVD store or the magazine racks, or turn on TV to see
what most people spend their time doing, you will see that (absent
hunger-drive and food finding) we still spend almost all of our time
doing things that our brains were evolved to do, and still do best.
Men want to look at naked women, or else watch "action," which means
other man going fast and shooting off missiles of various kinds, and
team-working to compete or hunt. That's sports. Women want to watch
social drama, which generally means detection of cheating at social
and status games. And everybody loves a good witch-hunt, preferably
followed by a good old fashioned public punishment. Crime shows, both
fictional, and "real" (cold case files, court TV) are especially
popular with all audiences of both sexes, since they combine both
types of return. As also weakest link and survival shows. Daytime soap
opera for women is not about physics, and it's not about today's
newest aircraft. Women generally don't give a damn about
black-and-white wars with planes and artillery. And Spike TV for men
doesn't show shows whose main motivating plot is the burning question
of who's the father of Veronica's baby.

Nature and science and Discovery Channel type stuff is a very, very
distant last to all the rest. And even there, if you want to sell
science to mass audiences you need to package it with the other stuff
our brains really want. So we have THE MOST poisonous animals!
Starting with #!0!  And going to #9, with reasons why it's worse than
#10, but not as bad as #8!  That's how to interest humans. Danger,
competition, poisons, ranking, finding out hidden nasty secrets.
Animal Cops for women. And for men, the baddest monster machines and
fastest planes.  If you start talking about the work of friction done
by a block weighing so many Newtons sliding on an inclined plane at 10
degrees at constant velocity or so and so, you're going to get hit
with the channel change button before you get to the first
calculation. Yet if you think anybody designs one of those monster
airplanes without knowing this stuff, think again.

The only main network TV show that is for a main audience and is even
marginally about science and its methods these days, is ---- CSI.
Think about that for a minute. CSI is causing mass changes in college
science because of all the people who want to be crime scene
investigators. Somebody has suggested that we need TV shows that will
do for other aspects of science (geology, astronomy, physics, etc)
what CSI has done for investigative sciences. But that's all to miss
the point. Our brains are built for CSI games—the science is just
dressing for the basic detective story, just as it was in Sherlock
Holmes' day. It's not gunna work for geology or astronomy or particle
physics. It might work for physiology if you fold it in with
detection, at the point where medicine meets social problems. But then
you'd have E.R.

It's amazing that we, as a species, have ever developed any science at
all! Even so, it hasn't been very fast, and a lot of it has been in
the service of warfare (teamwork, killing, missiles, poisons!), which
is what really interests us.  The Manhattan Project didn't get all
that money to find out about nature, and the race to the moon was more
cold war than it was exploration (there's a reason we haven't been
back). Even now, politicians spend most of our money on wars and
medical care and looking for hidden poisons in foods, drugs or
environment, despite the fact that the wars are sometimes not
necessary (how ever much the population enjoys them as circus), and
the medical care and environmentalism and drug development are all
made terrifically inefficient by the fact that we still hardly know
what we're doing. Never mind. We love war. We're obsessed with food
and with poisons and crimes and cheating.  We've got to have our fix
now, and if it means eating our seed-corn, then fine.

So progress in science continues to be relatively slow, because it's
all piggybacked on other interests and other brain systems. That a
brain developed for throwing rocks could instead manipulate symbols
and invent the calculus—it's amazing. That a brain developed for
finding hidden food or dirt might instead pick out the first dinosaur
tooth from a hole in the middle of nowhere, or find and classify the
first variable stars on routine photographs—that's fantastic. And none
of it, even so, would be preserved if we hadn't invented *writing* as
a proxy for human memory, so that this fragile and broadly
uninteresting culture of science could survive the deaths of the
comparatively few people who hold it dear.

The human race wants the fruits of science (medicine, technology, good
education, cheap food and housing and entertainment) even as it
continues to mostly be interested in the usual other stuff (wars and
soap opera), and to spend money and effort on them instead  But the
science, childish as it is compared to nature, is still the most
precious thing we have (thanks for that last thought, Dr. Einstein).
Because it's the route to everything else we want. If only most of us
humans knew it.

SBH