i already regret making this post bc smart people keep messaging me trying to explain math and it’s making me nauseous
I don’t know, personally I think that’s an interesting debate. It’s not really explaining math anyway, it’s explaining whether it’s a natural concept or a human concept. Which is interesting because it’s not a clear line.
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
-advances in robotics
-advances in miniature robotics
-advances in flight technology
-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
-fucking robot bees, my friend
-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable. Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”
^has no one taken a look at the name of this project? it’s called “Plan B(ee)”. that’s not what you call your plan to allow you to stop caring about bees. that’s what you call the backup plan you make because if we, for whatever reason, failed to save the bees, we’d be absolutely and utterly fucked.
The creator of plan bee stated that she invented it to demonstrate the importance of bees, not to replace them.
“Pollination made her think about bees, and in researching, Haldewang was struck by honeybees’ struggles: “I had no idea about the danger to honeybee colonies and that bees were disappearing,” she said. It prompted her to create an educational product that both addressed her class assignment and would help to spread awareness about a bee’s role in the food system.“
there r really people out there who dont believe in evolution. ppl out there that dont believe that the earth is billions of years old. that dont believe in scientific processes. thats wild
i LOVE the people that say “its a theory” w/o knowing what a scientific theory is
The Mayans had mastered water pressure and had fountains and toilets as early as 750 AD.
Aztecs had running water and sewage.
The Victorians In the mid-1800s were dying of cholera because they just dumped their raw shit in the river Thames. They wouldn’t shower for months at a time because they were afraid of the polluted water.
Incans had created aquaducts in the slopes of the vast Andes mountains to reach the emperor, cities and farmers who used agricultural terraces.
Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans were far more advanced than the savage Europeans.
Depends on the metric you use honestly, the Americas hadn’t even entered the Bronze age yet IIRC and def not Iron age yet, but there’s give and take on both sides of this fight that’s a stupid fight anyhow so can we just get over it and admit people around the world developed different things at different times.
Let’s also forget the romans and their running water… Big think
It’s almost as if there was some giant conglomeration of events that set society back a bit.
War, famine, plagues, and the fall of a great empire causing hundreds of fiefdoms to pop up in their place tend to have a negative result on populations.
The Indians created…aquaducts…got some bad news for you about where that word comes from and how old it is.
No snark pls tell me i wanna know
From the latin Aqua (water) and ducere (to lead) which formed aquae ductus (conduit) , which exhausts the limits of my recollection of higher Latin :p
I think the first aquaduct in Rome was like 300 bc? So I guess the word is about that old.
Also French but I remember less French than Latin which is saying something.
Thanks!
Son of a bitch I just noticed my phone corrected incans to Indians, motherfucker!
Hahahaaa
The Greeks and Romans built a lot of cool shit that got totally forgotten for a long time, to the point where a lot of Europeans considered studying ancient Rome to be a better way to advance society than to actually invent anything new. That’s why like, actual medicine stalled out for so long; Greek philosophers talked about the four bodily humours so all the educated european physicians assumed that must be more accurate than anything they could come up with, and only ignorant dumbasses like naval surgeons actually got any better at saving lives.
However there was one field in which European innovation excelled, totally beating out anybody else in the world, and that is War. Other places had major military actions like, once a century and aside from that it was just about stomping on tiny inconsequential tribes or repelling barbarians or whatever. Europe was split up into a hundred different kingdoms that all had pretty much equivalent strength and hated each other so they were constantly scrambling for anything that would give them the slightest edge. All those thousand different kinds of polearm that you can never remember the name of? Each one evolved for a specific battlefield niche, perfectly optimized to exploit or counter whatever the enemy was equipped with that year and give your horde of shitty peasant levies that extra percent of force multiplier they needed to win you another few yards of territory on the maps. And as your need for better swords and armor advanced, your understanding of metallurgy did too. As control of the seas became more necessary to military dominance, ships became faster, more durable, and better armed. And when steel-clad men with muskets and swords met natives with spears and arrows, the results were inevitable regardless of the strength of their irrigation systems.
Big math news! It’s been thirty years since mathematicians last found a convex pentagon that could “tile the plane.” The latest discovery (by Jennifer McLoud-Mann, Casey Mann, and David Von Derau) was published earlier this month. Full story.
ifesbob 