Scientific method

      This July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This last happened 823 years ago. By forwarding this fact you can get good luck with money by the Chinese ideas of Feng shui.
      Except this is utter rubbish. The last time this happened was in 2005. Feng shui is unrelated to any of this. And the Chinese don't even use the Gregorian calender, so what do they care about July? Despite these glaring inaccuracies a lot of people have been taken in by e-mails about this. But this is hardly surprising, given our culture's acceptance of facts presented. Most people will not do anything to check the validity of a claim and this has much greater consequences than spreading rubbish about the months. An inability to check facts and understand the mean of proof leads to racism, intolerance, unbalanced drug laws, war and the majority of other problems the world faces. The problem is not only a lack of drive to find proof, but an inability to identify what is and isn't proof. I often hear people saying about how different drinks have different effects, but they can't understand why this is only anecdotal and has no meaning from a scientific point of view. Anecdotal evidence is a major factor in the persistence of old wives tales and alternative medicine.
      It is my belief that if everyone was well versed in the basic principles of scientific reasoning, as well as some understanding of statistics, the world would be a much better place for everyone. So why not start questioning everything?

Time travel

      Before I start I should probably make it clear that I don't really know what I'm about to write, my sister suggested Doctor Who and I'm listening to a Back to the Future playlist, so time travel made sense. The fact I have nothing interesting to say about it is where the plan kind of breaks down. I could talk about how time travel could have issues with quantum physics where waveform collapse might be a problem, but I doubt that would fall under the category of interesting.
      So, time travel. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Travelling in time. Not to be confused with time to travel, which is much more mundane. Of course time is all relative and stuff, so if you were to fly at nearly the speed of light for  thirty or forty years when you returned it would be thousands of years later, apparently. So that's kind of like time travel. As the earth is going around the sun at about 66,660 miles per hour and the solar system is rotating the centre of the galaxy at about 568,000 miles per hour, that might make a small amount of time dilation, but nothing significant or interesting. Which is also a description of this blog post.
      So, this was a rather bad post, sorry. Hopefully future posts will be less rubbish, but I wouldn't count on it.

Why we learn

      I often have conversations with people where I get told my facts are useless and that no one would ever need to know them. People always ask when they will ever use what they learn at school. This bugs me. You see, there are two types of people (actually there are 6,903,900,000 types of people right now, but let's not be pedantic): the applied and the pure. Someone who is more interested in the applied side of information thinks "How can I use what I learn in my day to day life?" Someone with a pure take on the world, which is what I tend to be, thinks "What can I learn from my day to day life?" This difference in objectives is most prominent in subjects such as maths. Trying to convince an applied scientist that it is important to solve Fermat's Last Theorem or Goldbach's Conjecture is typically an exercise in futility as they try and work out why we would ever need them.
      I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this to be honest, it's just been on my mind for a while as I've been trying to work out how to use the second derivative of a cubic function to find the roots. Which is the kind of thing applied scientists tend to not get, as it is somewhat pointless. Especially as I could just find out by googling it. That is, if it's possible. Otherwise I'm going to be wasting quite a bit of time on nothing for the next couple of weeks.
      Anyway, hopefully next weeks post will be better, bye.

The draw of the sciences

You might remember a few weeks ago I wrote a post about why I enjoy the arts. This week I'm going to contrast this and explore my interest in the sciences.
It's worth noting that I have an annoyingly mathematical mind and find logic to be rather intuitive. This is useful when I'm doing maths, but tends to be of limited help in other pursuits, such as art (not that maths isn't in art, but I'll get to that later. If I remember) or holding a conversation. I would prefer a creative mind over a logical one, but as it is I just have to make creative use of logic.
My logical mind was a bit annoying to me for a while as I thought that beauty existed mostly in art, not science. Then I watched The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman. Feynman was a Nobel laureate in physics and is one of my favourite people. You should watch The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. In it he describes how the beauty of a flower is not just in how it looks, but also in the complexity of the processes going on inside it. A few days ago I applied this thinking to the world and visualised the processes going on everywhere. The movement of nutrients in plants, the heat transfer that creates huge weather systems, the beautiful chaos that determines the flight of a flock of birds and many other processes. Science is infinitely complex and ridiculously simple at the same time.
Science has the potential to be just as beautiful as art if it is seen in the right way. Likewise, science can be used to inspire beautiful art. And that is its draw.