The art of science

@izzythepush,

I have absolutely no idea what this means, but I like it!

Rap

@raprap,

Brian May of Queen quit his PhD in astrophysics when "We Will Rock You" started rising. I think he went back and finished his diss in like 2007. So whattya wanna be when you grow up?

Same thing wit Art Garfunkel except when he and Paul Simon started hitting it big, he gave up his PhD work in math and never picked it up again.

Each science has a "special artform" that calls. One of my geophysics profs many a year ago was a well known blue grass banjo player,and an anatomy prof was a really great illustrator.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Brian May of Queen quit his PhD in astrophysics when "We Will Rock You" started rising. I think he went back and finished his diss in like 2007. So whattya wanna be when you grow up?

Same thing wit Art Garfunkel except when he and Paul Simon started hitting it big, he gave up his PhD work in math and never picked it up again.

Each science has a "special artform" that calls. One of my geophysics profs many a year ago was a well known blue grass banjo player,and an anatomy prof was a really great illustrator.

Thanks farmer, you reminded me of a video from Richard Feynman. He was talking about a friend of his who is an artist and they were having a discussion one day about the beauty of a flower and the artist kept telling Richard that scientists always ruin beauty by trying to break things up and analyze them too much but Richard objected to that and said for him he sees the same beauty but at the same time can see and underline hidden beauty by understanding the atoms that make up the flower. I probably didn't do it any justice but that is the basic premise. I'll post the link if anyone is interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

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@raprap,

Sorry Rap, I had a drink last night, and not only did I not correct Krumple's mistake I repeated it. What I meant to write was. 8 Out Of 10 Cats is better than 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown.

Hope this clears things up.

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@izzythepush,

Better cover than Homer Simpson. It as said May got the underbeat from an occulting pair of binary stars in the core pf the Crab Nebula

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@farmerman,

8 Out Of 10 Cats is a comedy game show series based of the advertising phrase '8 out of ten owners said their cats preferred it.' There are two regular team captains and a host. The game is all about numbers/percentages, and the first half of the show the panel have to guess what the most popular talking points have been over the last week. The second half is how the studio audience responded to a question like, "Do you give good advice?" They then have to guess if most people think they do or not.

Countdown is another Channel 4 programme, actually Channel 4's longest running show. It's shown in the afternoon and is very popular with pensioners. Two contestants have to make words out of numbers randomly pulled from a hat, the only choice they have is whether it's a vowel or a consonant. Whoever makes the longest word gets the points. There's also a numbers round where they have to make a certain amount of small numbers by multiplying, dividing, subtracting and multiplying into a large randomly generated number.

For its 30th anniversary Channel 4 did a 'mash up' night where the regulars from one show took over another. 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown was one such mash up, and was popular enough to spawn its own series.

Now I hope that really clears things up.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

I'm not sure about it having a place in science, but it certainly has a place in the education of a scientist.

You phrased that much better than I did. Thank you! That's exactly what I meant, but didn't say.

Maybe the real question is -- Do we understand what science is?

I happened to catch a piece of a show talking about how North Carolina voted in a bill that makes measuring the rising sea level, according to scientific projections, illegal. They have to keep measuring it the old way, despite the danger it might put people in. Weird.

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@Thomas,

That was a great article. I don't recall whether it was you or Setanta that first introduced me to the cargo cult idea a few years ago but it had slipped my mind until now.

Reading that reminds me of the pharmaceutical companies - how they bury data that doesn't support the results they want, and how they will exclude people from drug trials is their prognosis isn't good enough for them to pad the data.

I have some thinking to do...

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@izzythepush,

Thanks for the videos! I should get a chance to watch them today.

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@rosborne979,

Other states might be better than ours. My niece goes to school in Texas and she has always had art in school.

At Mo's elementary school there was a foundation that asked each family for $600 a year. This money was used to hire a music teacher, a PE teacher and a part time librarian. Without the foundation his school wouldn't have had any of those things.

We've managed to pick up the missing pieces but a lot of families simply can't afford to so those kids just get shafted.

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@Krumple,

Hmmm....

Maybe I just like too much stuff. I love modern art, and modern music (much to the dismay of my teenager who finds it difficult to annoy me with it), and science. I see them all as an exploration. Even if it's something I don't particularly like, or personally agree with, it can all make me think about things in a different way. It challenges me.

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@farmerman,

Hey farmer man! You're A2K's resident scientist/artist! Do you think one informs the other?

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@boomerang,

Id love to think so. Ive found that sketching in dimensional and perspective has aided my thinking in unscrewing up layers of rock that I may see. Ill go find an example so you can see how we have to see folds in 3 dimensions and then in 4 when we take into consideration the erosion factors.
When I was teaching I always hd a few students who were good draftsmen or musicians who more quickly caught on the dimensional aspects of structural geology (and the calculus involved also cause they saw the calculus not as a series of equations to memorize but as a numerical process that underlies these structures.

Course, there was the old thing that I learned at catholic school
"If youre real good at one thing, youll probably be real good at others''

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@farmerman,

Heres a real complex series of nifty folds with a fault within and it needed to be "Stretched out" an brought back to original dimension so the team knew where to drill t close in on a deposit

http://pages.uoregon.edu/millerm/ptygfolds.jpeg

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Maybe the real question is -- Do we understand what science is?

I think we understand what it is --- repeatable experiments, refutable theories, peer review, and all that. The problem isn't the "what is" of it, but the "how to" of it. We don't know enough about the teaching it takes to shape minds and personalities that end up practicing science well. That said, I do think that the creative and imaginative aspects of practicing it are generally undertaught in school science curricula, and that music and arts classes are good settings to teach some of them. (Other good settings are low-brow stuff such as disassembling a broken TV set, trying to figure out what's wrong, and putting it back together. It's not going to happen in school because some student is bound to suffer a cut or an electric shock. And then who is going to handle the parent's attack lawyers?)

boomerang wrote:

I happened to catch a piece of a show talking about how North Carolina voted in a bill that makes measuring the rising sea level, according to scientific projections, illegal. They have to keep measuring it the old way, despite the danger it might put people in. Weird.

I don't know anything about this bill, so I cannot comment intelligently on it.

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@farmerman,

Is it pressure that makes the folds?

So you would have to determine what it looked like before it folded? And you would express with with an equation?

That reminds me of this:

Quote:

A team of biochemists and computer scientists from the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle now reports that they have successfully tapped into this human problem-solving potential. Their competitive online game "Foldit," released in 2008, enlists the help of online puzzle-solvers to help crack one of science's most intractable mysteries—how proteins fold into their complex three-dimensional forms. The "puzzles" gamers solve are 3-D representations of partially folded proteins, which players manipulate and reshape to achieve the greatest number of points. The scores are based on biochemical measures of how well the players' final structure matches the way the protein appears in nature.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gaming-the-system-video-gamers-help-researchers-untangle-protein-folding-problem/

I wonder how gamers would do an your type of unfolding....

I've heard a lot of complaints from parents about how math is being taught under the new common core standards, but one math teacher kind of explained it like

Quote:

they saw the [math] not as a series of equations to memorize but as a numerical process that underlies [everything].

so I'm holding my tongue on things I don't really understand.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

Other good settings are low-brow stuff such as disassembling a broken TV set, trying to figure out what's wrong, and putting it back together.

This kind of thing probably comes in very handy if you have to figure out say, how to get the Apollo 13 back to Earth safely.

I guess we just pretend we know how to shape a mind to practice science well. You know, PISA, blahblahblah.

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@boomerang,

foldit was actually a takeoff eom an earlier structural chemistry and geology gizmo that helpd create molecular structures and in geo, it helpd in reconstructing folds
The equations are used to solve planar structure fields where these folds had occurred. Also its a predictor of overshot folds that develop slip planes and stacked faults (like pushing an entire deck of cards )

The art part of it is that I often see these things in colored arrays like the 1940's paintings of Roberto Matta

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Other states might be better than ours.

What state are you in?

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@rosborne979,

Oregon.

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