The Trouble with Science, at the Journal of American Hoodoo

petroglyph logoI promise not to cross-post everything I put up at the Journal of American Hoodoo, but my latest article, The Trouble with Science, might appeal to some of my old readers here, or back at Tales from the Third Lobe, or Letters from Heck.

Here’s a teaser excerpt:

R136 stellar nursery, Hubble Space Telescope, 2009We look up in the sky and see ten thousand points of light (give or take a few orders of magnitude depending on location and light pollution) and then, because knowing where the stars are in the sky helps us pinpoint where we are in the seasons despite the vagaries of the weather, we draw lines around them and connecting them and give the drawings names. And we make up stories about the drawings so that we can remember them, and remember that the positions of the stars are important, and, if we’re clever enough with the stories, why.

That’s “why the positions of the stars are important to us”, not any bigger sort of why, like “why are stars the things that are important”. Certainly not a “what”, like “what are stars”. Nor a “how”, as in “how do the positions of the stars drive the planting and harvest cycles”.

Well, that’s not true. The stories can actually address such things. It’s just that when they do, the risk of bullshit is dangerously high.

If that strikes your fancy, go check it out.

 

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PS:

Also it uses the phrase “nice singularities don’t explode”.

 

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August 13, 2012 · by xalieri · Posted in Everything Else  
    

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