Posted on 01/03/2013 7:37:50 PM PST by neverdem
There’s also 6 more elements on the periodic table since 1994.
Everyone is constantly reminded of President Eisenhower's warning about the "Military-Industrial Complex" in his farewell address, a good warning, but few remember his equally stark warning about the Scientific Research-Government Complex he emphasized in the same address.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.Ike was a very wise man. I doubt he would be happy looking at our condition today.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Don’t worry. 2 + 2 will ALWAYS be 5!!! And don’t you forget it! :)
Knowledge and facts actually shrink for the individual. When I was younger I knew much more than I do now and was much more certain of it than I am now.
However I like to think experience has somewhat offset this retreat in knowledge. And like collecting valuables I now concentrate on quality of knowledge rather than quantity.
I’m worried the only things I’ll remember are the things that are no-longer true.
LOL! Thanks for the link.
Ike was a very wise man. I doubt he would be happy looking at our condition today.
Ike died primarily because he conscientiously followed the misguided nutritional advice of the "experts".
He had a heart attack. The "experts" decided his cholesterol was too high, so they put him on a low-calorie, low-fat diet. His cholesterol went up. So they put him on a lower-calorie, lower-fat diet. And his cholesterol went up more. And so it went. Ike had discipline. He followed the advice he was given to the letter. And that advice killed him.
Since then, our public health functionaries have been working overtime to convince people that the same low-calorie, low-fat approach that killed Eisenhower is what everyone should be doing. And that if a diet that demonstrably increases the risk of heart disease should happen to raise your cholesterol to normal levels, you should start taking statins for the rest of your life, despite their severe side-effects, and the complete lack of evidence that they reduce the risk of a heart in anyone who has never had one.
And this advice advice has killed millions, and constrained millions of others to lives of obesity, chronic illness, and diabetes.
In terms of human cost, the cholesterol hypothesis is by far the greatest mistake in all of human history.
And it has been clear that it was a mistake for decades, now. But there are billion dollar industries that depend on that mistake. And it's very hard to convince a man that he's wrong when his livelihood depends on him being wrong.
Unless those elements are down under the actinide/lanthanide series, they’re more of a novelty than anything else. Now, if we start finding new two-digit-numbered elements, then I’ll be impressed.
Second, and one disturbing to me (as one who was called 'baby killer" on my way home from overseas in the San Francisco airport in 1966) , is that returning veterans from the Vietnam weren't actually treated so badly after all. Last night on C-Span the current CEO of Slate was reviewing his new book about the glory and wonder of San Francisco, and told of how all the returning vets he knew there in the '60's and 70's (who by the way were all drug users and probably shared the SF values) were treated very well by his friends - it was a pack of conservative lies that they had been disrespected and even spit on. Then remarkably tonight on the C-Span history channel, there was coverage of a class session by a Meredith Lair of the history department at George Mason University, of all places, who seemed intent on proving essentially the same point, in particular that returning vets were never spat on - meticulously she questioned all possible proof that such incidents ever took place, her primary evidence seeming to be that because this class of twenty year olds, two generations removed from Vietnam, knew no one who first-hand had been treated with disrespec as a returning vet from that war, it never happened. She pointed out that there seemed to be no actual photos of soldiers being spit on, although there were she claimed pictures of anti-war protesters being spit on and she later produced a picture which she maintained had been photoshopped to show Code Pink protesters in 2005 urging the murder of US troops - so you see, it turns out by her implication that our returning soldiers have always been treated kindly, while it's the anti-war types who have been disrespected and lied about - facts are indeed ephemeral things......
a good reason to never give absolute trust over anything of your to any “expert”. lok’at all the stuff docs used to tell people and require god-like obedience to their superior intellect. hell i still have the ads of doctors pushing smoking. doctors saying the appendix or tailbones have no useful purpose.
one thing they didn’t factor in is the quality of education keeps going down, at least in the gubmint skooolz. your education quality and your ability to learn make up for a lot.
If it didn’t exist in 1986 , I don’t need to know it.
Teacher said I passed. No take backs . :)
If it didn’t exist in 1986 , I don’t need to know it.
Teacher said I passed. No take backs . :)
Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date.
Well some "facts" change not because of increased knowledge but because the "facts" have changed...such as the population of a city. While those "facts" which are shown to be wrong by increase in human knowledge were wrong before the knowledge increased (or perhaps they are still right, and further increases in knowledge will favor them). For myself, I think in terms of "working models" when it comes to describing nature, rather than facts. No such model being complete. All being less than entirely accurate or entirely precise, and except for those things noted by Pascal (ie the existence of one's own soul) the truth or falsehood of all things being less than absolutely certain no matter what the date.
“Shoes for industry’’.
>>I dont remember posting here. Where am I? Am I logged in?
Maybe it’s my twisted sense of humor, this was one of the funniest posts I’ve read here. Thanks for the laugh!
That they decay means they weren’t truths in the first place. There’s a big terminology problem with this article, with facts being changed, remade, unmade etc. But then why call them facts? Because people think they’re factual? If it turns out they were wrong it means they were wrong, is all. Not that facts have changed.
Cutesy postmodernism bores me. Poetry is something else, and I’ll allow Robert Frost in “Black Cottage” what I won’t the author of this article observe:
“For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor”
Quantum gas goes below absolute zero - Ultracold atoms pave way for negative-Kelvin materials
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