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It's just the normal noises in here
by anna at 05:51 PM on September 24, 2003
I've said it before. I don't like being pegged as some brain. For the most part, I don't even like other brainy people. They're generally awkward socially, obsessed with something or other and unattractive. There are exceptions, of course. I read about a gorgeous Penthouse Pet who was not only a classically trained pianist but a member of Mensa the brainiac club. I thought, she must be some bitch.
Academic types suck. They simply can't leave well enough alone in their relentlesss quest to know it all. Consider Oppenheimer and his A-bomb. He could have told FDR it couldn't be done and who woulda been the wiser? Wouldn't the world now be a better place? And what about these geneticists and their human genome project? What good has come of that, aside from satisfying idle intellectual curiosity?
Two items caught my eye. One pertains to dinosaurs. As a kid I collected these plastic dino figures. I had 'em all: brontosaurus, pteredactyl, raptors and of course the most fierce of them all, T. Rex. Except it turns out it wasn't such a mighty hunter after all. Scientists have examined its teeth and determined that it was more of a scavenger. Yes, T. Rex was more akin to a lowly hyena than a majestic lion.
I find this news most disheartening. Didn't we all grow up knowing he was the King of the Dinos? Now who is? Damned if I know.
I'm just as glum about astronomers' ongoing bid to kick Pluto out of the solar system. Who didn't build those Styrofoam planet deals for science fairs? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Your Anus, Neptune and Pluto, all strung together with fishing line. Ah but now they're saying Pluto doesn't meet all the criteria to be a full-fledged planet. It's too small and more damning still, has an erratic orbit. Sometimes it's closer to us than Neptune. Scientists hate erratic, so it's curtains for Pluto.
Textbooks will have to updated to reflect these watered-down new realities. Future generations will know nothing of the marrauding T. Rex or the little icy planet that could. Eggheads have spoken and we're bound by their findings.
I view these and other time-honored notions tossed by the wayside like comfort food. It made me feel good to cling to the familiar. Now we're being offered what amounts to desultory wheat germ and tofu in place of fattening cake and ice cream.
Much the same could be said of this bag-your-own-damn-groceries millennium as a whole. For all its hype, Mill 3's been marked by dashed hopes and scaled-back expectations. Bah!
comments (17)
now that's the anna i grew up reading. heavy on the bitter, hold the sweet.
i always find it interesting to see how much effort and money gets put into researching these things into the past. can they save us from our future? maybe, and perhaps that's the point. but if it's just curiousity, then hell i'd be curious to see them spend some of that research dough to find out about kicking some of these nasty modern diseases to the curb. or why my milk never makes it to the sell-by date.
by lajoie at September 24, 2003 6:43 PM
Yeah I'm bitter alright. And now that you've mentioned milk, all we use it for is in our coffee. Our kid doesn't drink it at all. So it always goes bad long before its time. That's why we steal the creamers from 7-11.
And wine never goes bad, but you can't put it in your coffee.
by ANNA at September 24, 2003 8:16 PM
I've said it before. I don't like being pegged as the shortstop of the New York Yankees.
by Eviltom at September 24, 2003 8:20 PM
Really? So that isn't you bunny-hopping in some trendy Manhattan bar with George Steinbrenner?
by anna at September 25, 2003 6:39 AM
That just sucks Anna. I was very into dinos as a kid also. I knew how to spell palaeontologist and all of the more interesting dinosaurs before I could spell cat. I think that research for the sake of something relevant is a good thing but what does it really matter now whether T Rex was a predator or scavenger? How is that knowledge going to benefit mankind? I'l tell you what it's going to benefit. The guy that is stating his case, if everyone agrees. He'll be the big dog, in his profession, and that is about it. It's still just a hypothesis though. Unless you can observe these animals, in their natural habitat, and their feeding behaviors you don't really know.
by Ezy at September 25, 2003 9:21 AM
Don't worry Anna, I never pegged you as some brain.
by Linz at September 25, 2003 12:01 PM
What? The world ISNT flat? The sun and the planets DONT revolve around the Earth? That's crazy talk.
All in all, I'd have to say that advances in science and medicine are a good thing.
by Eviltom at September 25, 2003 3:28 PM
What's weird about the round world and planets orbiting the sun and not Earth is that it's so counter-intuitive. Nobody wanted to believe it cuz it didn't look that way.
And no Linz, I don't imagine you did.
by anna at September 25, 2003 5:22 PM
The reason milk doesn't make it to the sell-by date has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics. In other countries you can buy milk that will make it long past the date at which many people, if diagnosed with cancer today, would have died if the human genome project did not exist. In other words, milk needn't spoil in the carton, and the human genome project has allowed discoveries that give many people options instead of just dying. It has accelerated the pace of science such that we have far more understanding of several disease processes, and far more drug targets than we would without it. Even just the fall out from the technologies developed to achieve the human genome project have allowed us to do things from identifying the SARS virus within days rather than months, and come up with tests to identify and track the virus - saving many lives, to diagnosing a stuck wine fermentation. I would say that if you have cancer, and you can distinguish between a drug that will kill you, versus one that will make you better, that is at least one good thing beyond the satisfaction of curiosity, which was not idle in the first place.
by chris at September 25, 2003 6:41 PM
The Chris has spoken!...
Before people finally admitted that the Solar System orbited the Sun, astronomers were bending over backwards trying to explain the motions of the planets. If one were assuming that they were orbiting the earth, then their orbits were eccentric, difficult to determine with accuracy, and regularly appeared to loop back on themselves. But they kept plugging away because the Catholic Church told them to, literally on pain of death. Explanation of planetary motion is easier and more straightforward under heliocentric theory.
by jean at September 25, 2003 8:37 PM
I kind of had a feeling we'd hear from Chris on this one. And it's always great. But didn't it take quite a while for them to figure out the deal with SARS? And how how come the news is continually saying they've developed this drug or that with tremendous POTENTIAL to save live but it's going to be years down the road before it is available?
by anna at September 26, 2003 6:50 AM
I guess it's going to break you to find out that lions scavenge from hyena more often than not.
Love the post though, great stuff :)
by Fuzzy at September 26, 2003 7:52 AM
This article is what I thought about when I read the T-Rex news (you have to scroll down to where it says "Jurassic Bawk"). I agree with you Anna, these findings seem to mess with the natural order of things. I don't care what anyone says, I'll always think of the T-Rex as the head honcho of the Dinosaur Kingdom (with the Pterodactyle as its second in command, of course)
by Lucy at September 26, 2003 10:42 AM
The Allosaurous... was king... is and always...
by LOCKHEED at September 26, 2003 4:04 PM
Well, scientific research moves slowly. Experiments confirm small things and these things get added up into a new cancer or AIDS drug over the course of decades. Newscasters just exaggerate each finding's impact so everyone will keep watching their station. In related science news, astronomers are up in arms that every time they rate an asteroid or comet as having Earth-impact potential, the media blows it up into an Armageddon story. They've actually adjusted their rating scale so it will be more obvious that the magnitude of these threats is very small.
I guess you can also think of it this way: the news may say something about a scientific study, but what are scientists saying about it? The two aren't the same thing.
by jean at September 26, 2003 8:30 PM
Well, that explains that. Now if we could just figure out how to ensure that there will always be nine planets. Hey Lockheed, thought we'd lost you to the engaged bliss scene, dude.
by anna at September 26, 2003 10:31 PM
Hey, just think of all the abominations-unto-the-lord us geneticists could've cooked up if it hadn't been for that pesky genome project. If you had ever had to deal with a cross between a velociraptor and a kitten you too would think it was money well spent.
by flibble at September 30, 2003 4:19 AM