Thursday, January 14, 2010

Cosmos and Culture

Yesterday I stumbled across Fuck You, Penguin, a blog with a familiar CSS theme and a different approach to cute baby animals. It covers up for sentimentality with mock rage. I appreciate that. I may have soaked up a little bit of his style today, albeit genuine rage, and now I'm stuck speaking directly to the source of my ire.

However I am not being ironic when I say the NPR 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog is on my last nerve. Who do these people think they are? Adam Frank writes:

"Now I am a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester. My group uses supercomputers to study processes at work in the birth and death of stars. In my spare time I write on science, its' results and its' meaning for magazine like Discover and in books like The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs Religion Debate..... Our ability to discern patterns in the world and then seek causal links that explain those patterns seems like an evolutionary gift, the equilivent of having sharp claws or broad wings."

OK, seriously? Is misapostrophication a job requirement at the University of Rochester? WTF is its'? There is no such thing. I like how you tried to make it sound like more than one magazine then chickened out and left off the plural s. And how do you misspell equivalent? You must say "equivalent" as often as a 9 year old girl says "like"! NPR really ought to copy edit blogs from people that are presented as smarty-pants. It makes us people on Macs feel superior because our system software underlines misspelled words in everything we type.

And dude, WTF evolutionary gift? There are no evolutionary gifts! There is just evolution! What would be the opposite? A dog's instinct to roll in otter shit is an evolutionary curse? That's just too spiritual for me, man. I think I see where you're going with this and I don't like it.

Today's entry popped up in a newsfeed today and got me so riled up I went back to the beginning to catch up. Each entry I read makes me what the FUCK? louder than the last. In today's post Marcelo Gleiser proposes that science should be contained so that evil companies and governments don't shoot people with guns loaded with science. "There are heavy clouds gathering; complex decisions on where scientific research could -- or should -- go will stay at the forefront of the political debate for years to come." I think the problem is not that science needs to be controlled, everything else does. Science took a complete dump in the last ten years and it was not the scientists fault. It was the fault of Wall Street putting all the investments into mortgages instead of R&D. It was because scientists and engineers were treated worse than a Detroit auto worker. We do not need to be held back, we are already held back PLENTY!

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