Curiosity is Intoxicating
Irradiated by Stingray
But not that way, though when your sense of exploration peters out at how there are so many smurfs with just one smurfette* with a thick cloud of funny smoke around you and the tv in college, one can see where the confusion might stem from.
Look you mentally inadequate little shit, take your pick. We can a) freeze in the dark because OMG SCIENCE HARD, which I know is the default position given how easy it is to freak the shitballs out of people by bringing in any math harder than fucking 2+2, or b) we can try to figure shit out.
If, being only sometimes up to the task of balancing a checkbook, you would like those of us of stiffer mental discipline to figure said shit out for you, we will need to test things. In the course of this, there’s a couple options. We can either test things on non-humans and wind up with stuff that looks oddball and freaky, or we can just jump straight in to “Hey Cletus, wanna make a dollar?” and get villified for torturing people oh god the humanity, how could you that’s evil stop it you monster. As for what we’re figuring out, we can either stare with fixed monomania until a solution presents itself via fucking magic, or we can figure out every last goddamn thing we can and use the results from the latter to find the magic necessary for the former.
Guess which way works better.
And just to head off one popular line of stammering borderline-anencephalic attempt at pearl-clutching rebuttal, no, they have not yet cured cancer, aids, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, so yes there are “better” things they could be working on. But let’s just keep in mind that even the viagra in the jetlagged hamster study was not originally intended as a cock pill but instead for blood pressure and cardiac angina, and now we’ve got more ways for people to get boners than we have to treat diabetes, so if you want to stick with “Eureka!” instead of “Huh, that’s not what I was expecting” as your primary model of scientific discovery, congratulations you are now entitled to use technology roughly as advanced as a brick. Give or take.
Want to double down on this case-in-point? First Pfizer noticed that their blood pressure patients weren’t doing that much better but were getting a lot more stiffies, leading to unintentional ED treatment. After that, they found out that this little blue cash cow is good for severe altitude sickness and can prevent and treat pulmonary edema, which as an actual life-threatening condition, means “Why’s this guy hard all the time?” has gone on to have a second “Huh, that’s weird” which has actually saved human lives. The fact that any lives saved, given standard samples of humanity, are probably too stupid to appreciate it and will spend the rest of their extended stay making jokes about how their dick got so big it scared off all the tiny bad men making their heart splodey-splodey, while irritating, does not detract from the fact that the odds approach one that someone was looking at the study in early phases and saying “Lol, that’s stupid and you’re stupid for studying it.”
So yeah, I’ll take the team that’s actually curious and just wants to figure shit out over the pretentious skidmark who expects greatness from simply putting on a labcoat and stroking his or her beard dramatically.
Tracing back to its roots, the original Mesopotamian word for science translated literally becomes “Hey Ingkot, check this weird shit out!” So yes, science is frequently weird, and involves weird shit like jetlagging hamsters and giving them viagra. Granted, science can also be a bit impenetrable at times since there’s at least one of you nodding and thinking “That sounds right, I bet he even looked that up,” about the translation thing, but honestly, what were you expecting it to be? How the fuck do you expect to figure something new out if you just stick to being amazed at the bean-in-a-cup you did in Kindergarten? Actually, given the nontrivial percentage of the population for whom that damn near counts as magic, never mind. Don’t answer that.
So fuck off, go enjoy chanting “ha ha, that test is stupid you’re stupid” in your cold frozen fireless cave, and let the big boys who actually can nut up and do something drag you all kicking and screaming into a world with ipods and viagra that you’d shit your collective pants so hard we could achieve light speed if it was announced that such would no longer exist. Don’t say “thank you” for these things either, because fuck you that’s not what the goal is. We want to figure shit out because figuring shit out is fucking awesome. If you dense overgrown coathanger-targets get some benefit out of that, good for you but kindly get the fuck out of our way while you’re drooling in rapture over last month’s “Huh” moment.
(h/t Peter)
*And then you didn’t even run that ball far enough to argue whether or not the smurfs are mammals, you fucking philistine.
July 14th, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Smurfs don’t lay eggs! I won’t tell you this again! Papa Smurf has a fucking beard! They’re mammals!
July 14th, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Oh, well done sir. Very well done indeed.
“Overgrown coat-hanger target” is going into my lexicon.
July 14th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
My search fu is failing me today so I couldn’t find the email to send this. I present for your amusement this:
http://www.jimchines.com/2011/07/dumbass-law/
Even *I* know better than that, and I’ve never held a gun in my life!
July 14th, 2011 at 4:16 pm
Stingray, good post! And THIS is part of the reason we (us old farts) are still working, because the youngsters don’t WANT to go do the hard stuff… Last test I had a 71 year old at sea, because there was NO ONE else to actually do the work, and I know of one other guy that is over 80 and still going to sea.
July 14th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
Medical, intellectual and scientific curiosity aside, I still say it’s funny as hell to visualize hamsters flying around the skies with tiny, but long-term erections . . . all in the name of research!
(Thought of the day – is that why ‘erection’ sounds so much like ‘election’ – because both lead to polls?)
July 14th, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Peter: Oh I’ll happily grant that’s a funny image, and none of this was aimed at your comments. This is strictly for those of the “That experiment is stupid! Science is stuipd!” mindset what think we’re high all the time.
NFO: Fuck them for not being curious! I’ll go! I wanna play death metal at a whale and see if it turns murderous and hunts down Chinese submarines!
…you might have other tasks in mind. We can negotiate.
July 14th, 2011 at 5:43 pm
figuring shit out is fucking awesome.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2088#comic
July 14th, 2011 at 5:58 pm
I have been reading “Anathem” again. It takes place in a slightly different cosmos in which all of the nerds have been herded into cloistered communities, so that the Whuffos and Doodahs don’t have to associate with smart, curious people. Nonetheless, from time to time, the Ws and Ds get all exercised and excited, and sack the said communities, being resentful of people who are smarter than they are and know more than they do.
I confess that I don’t understand that attitude. I make a point of reading only blogs kept by people I think are smarter than I am or who know more stuff than I do, or are wittier than I am. I like smart people.
July 14th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
P.s. All you Lab guys keep yer powder dry, hear? That mesa is actually quite defensible, should the illiterati and innumerati get up a mob and try to sack the place.
July 14th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
I need a cigarette.
July 15th, 2011 at 6:21 am
Smurfs are most likely a unique member of the Fungi kingdom… reproducing via spores, like Orks in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
July 15th, 2011 at 8:24 am
“Thought of the day – is that why ‘erection’ sounds so much like ‘election’ – because both lead to polls?”
No, because both of them lead to somebody getting fucked.
July 15th, 2011 at 9:14 am
I’m with Peter. If folks are flying around carrying hamsters with unusually-prolonged erections…well, I don’t have a problem with that. Extracting useful data from the results that ends up saving lives is a nice bonus, but I’d think that the story about flying around carrying hamsters with erections would be a cool way to encourage teenagers to study science. “Look at the kinds of weird shit we get to do. Can you believe they actually PAY us for this???!!!”
Or maybe my sample of human behavior is just biased.
July 15th, 2011 at 9:49 am
“If folks are flying around carrying hamsters with unusually-prolonged erections…well, I don’t have a problem with that.”
I wonder if the TSA groped the hamsters?
July 15th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Not to quibble with a lovely rant, but I’m pretty sure a lack of scientific curiosity doesn’t even qualify you to enjoy the technology of bricks.
Considering that bricks probably came about with “Hey Thog, check out this dry sticky mud. I think we can build with this.”
“Good idea Og, but if we put some grass or straw in there, it holds together much better…”
July 15th, 2011 at 2:18 pm
1) Smurfs are plainly mammals. The females have visible body hair – and we can assume that there is minuscule body hair on all of them that would not be rendered in the resolutions available.
(Bipedal? Visible body hair, at least on one sex? Two sexes? I think we’re going to have to assume the mammalia.)
2) It’s also good to point out that we haven’t “cured cancer”, because cancer is not one single disease – and because it turns out that it’s pretty damned hard.
(We have, I believe, effectively cured some of them, one way or another. Which is good.)
It’s not like there isn’t an immense amount of effort and treasure being devoted to attempts to cure cancers, especially the most prevalent and dangerous ones.
July 20th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
Regardless of whether smurfs are mammals, they don’t apparently breed sexually: Smurfette was created by Gargamel; she’s not a natural creation.