#on science

[quill-of-thoth]

So Gregor Mendel (yes, the guy with the pea plants) wrote down that he wanted to be given a thorough autopsy after he died. The year he died was 1884. Autopsies were increasingly common at the time, but Mendel was an Augustinian friar and the arguments preventing donating your body to science for teaching autopsies, research, etc. were theological. The “ethical” source of teaching cadavers for doctors to autopsy was (in many places) the bodies of executed criminals, as a sort of post-mortem punishment.  Mendel became a monk specifically because he couldn’t afford to study otherwise, even after one of his sisters donated her dowry to the cause. He did too well as a monk to continue his work as long as he wanted: he got promoted to Abbott and the last sixteen years of his life were spent doing administrative work, and his experiments weren’t properly replicated, or examined as a viable alternative to then current theories on inheritance, until 1900. But he chose to donate his body to science (which he loved) and be of material benefit to the field of medicine, which he didn’t practice but two of his nephews did.  There’s just something beautiful about a guy who lived through the era where having your body dissected was the height of dishonor, in an institution that had advocated against the practice, deciding that anything that helps humanity as a whole was worth doing. There’s something just as beautiful about the fact that he was exhumed for genetic sequencing on his 200th birthday - usually we don’t just dig people up and grab their genes as a surprise party, because in addition to it being a lot of work we can’t assume they would have appreciated it, but Mendel? He would have been jazzed. 

[thatstudyblrontea]

it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Dracula, Bram Stocker

[morrak]

Opportunity, the little rover that could, is officially gone to us after her solar panels were blanketed by a worldwide dust storm. NASA’s last transmission to her was ‘I’ll be Seeing You’. Rest well, friend champion.

[brachyurans]

If you're going to write a science communication book, maybe learn how the fuck taxonomic names work first so you don't lose credibility on the third page, goddamnit. "Nest of formicidae" and "the formicidae" are entirely grammatically incorrect. It's obvious you thought this was a really clever use of scientific nomenclature from the way you added a footnote clarifying merely "Ants.", but you really look like a fucking sloppy writer. It's "nest of formicids"/"nest of members of Formicidae" and "Formicidae", and you could have found this information in five minutes of googling, without even having to wade through the actual ICZN. I can't believe none of your editors caught this. git gud scrub

[physicsforbunnies]

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

[thequotablescollector]

"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own." – Bertrand Russell

[tethyanshore]

Andrea Hairston, 2006

In Mindscape you create a fascinatingly multicultural future world with a strong African presence. Why did you decide to do this? When I started Mindscape, so many people had been eulogizing Africa, proclaiming her demise, mourning the impossibility of any sort of African survival. Decolonizing the African (native) spirit was a hopeless futile fantasy. I wanted to imagine something else. The colonized enter science as refugees from their magical worlds—prisoners of superstition, hostages of the colonizer, slaves of the master narrative. Modernity and post-modernity, although products of colonialism, displace the colonized to the past, to history, to people who once were whole and have now been shattered by their backwardness, their poor competitive adaptation, their lack of science and democracy, their inept economics. The colonizers have consumed the colonized and define the future. So caught up in the past, still trying to survive history, how can the colonized imagine a future? How can a future be imagined that contains the remnants of their broken spirits? This is the kind of challenge I like as a writer.