I have not gone out for anything other that therapy or shopping in so long I forgot that I’m going out tonight and have to get this finished. Is there anything less me than the previous sentence? For the first time in 11 days I had a conversation with a friend yesterday. Dave called me as he wanted to help with my computer. This happens the latter half of every August. There’s just less going on. I’m making up for it starting today. Tomorrow I’m going to the Met game and on Tuesday to Rockwood Music Hall to see Cole Quest and the City Pickers and back there again on Wednesday for Emily Mure. I’m going there tonight to see Sophie Buskin. To make things even fuller I might be going to Coney Island on Wednesday with Gen. It’s either feast or famine.
The Prozac is making such a difference. I created the On Your Radar event, contacted WFUV about promoting it, and even talked to the Hudson West Festival. I had totally frozen on that. I’m coming back to functionality. I’m even cooking better. Last night I had leftover barbecue country style ribs and made roasted potatoes with parmesan cheese. I haven’t done that in months. I’m feeling almost human.
I’m going to finally write the blog I’ve been putting off for the last few days. Blame someone I knew before he was born. He kicked me then and he just kicked me now. His mother was my first friend to have a baby. I think he’s about 107 now. I lose track of time.
The genesis of this entry was binge-watching Gotham. Not the genesis, the straw that broke the camel’s back. One of the villains is Doctor Hugo Strange. He’s an example of stock character I hate, the evil/amoral scientist. In fiction, especially TV and movies, scientists are still portrayed as negative stereotypes. It would be as if Blacks were still portrayed as Stepin Fetchit. Every science fiction series feature scientists who either aim at world domination or more often, have noble goals, Dr. Strange wanted to conquer death, but have no ethics on how to achieve them. Even when there are not portrayed as evil they are portrayed as stupid, not taking basic precautions that are routine in real science.
Part of the reason this is done is because that’s how people perceive science. I love Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on the short list of greatest TV show ever, but he took a terrible anti-science turn in Firefly and Dollhouse. I complained about one thing in Firefly to a friend. The Reivers were violence-mad people. It was revealed they were created when a planet was deliberately exposed to a chemical that was supposed to make the population docile. Instead a significant portion went mad then killed, tortured, raped, and ate the others. Think what that means. The first test of the chemical was on a planet-wide basis. They never did basic testing. Even an authoritarian regime would test the chemical before exposing an entire planet to it. Look how long it takes before they make cures for diseases generally available. It’s how scientists work.
When I said that to a friend her response was, “It happened in the real world with GMOs.” GMOs have been tested. There were years of research before it was applied commercially. There was one classic case where something like that happened, thalidomide. It was tested but not enough in pregnant women. That’s why it wasn’t approved in the US. It was approved in Europe and people learned. People do make honest mistakes and don’t think of everything. But nothing on the scale of causing massive numbers of deaths. The closest approximation had nothing to do with scientists, it was the introduction of tobacco. That did kill millions. But the effects were slow so hard to perceive. Few people were living long enough to show the effects for centuries. Not until science introduced things like the germ theory of disease and antibiotics allowed people to live longer.
Why did my friend feel that way? Partially it’s because of a lifetime of seeing scientists acting totally irresponsibly in TV and Movies. But it goes both ways. Why did that become a trope in the first place? It goes back centuries, to Frankenstein. It’s because people fear what they don’t understand. It seems natural to most people to that cell phones could cause brain cancer. They emit radiation and everyone knows radiation causes cancer. What most people don’t know is that only ionizing radiation has been shown to be carcinogenic. That’s radiation where a photon has enough energy to dislodge an electron. That has nothing to do with the intensity of the radiation but only the wavelength, that has to be the same as ultraviolet or shorter. That’s why UV is what matters for sun burns.
To most people that’s just words. It might as well be magic, and that makes scientists sorcerers, a breed apart. Real scientists have the same sort of morals and ethics as other people Portraying scientists as willing to sacrifice others to advance science would be the equivalent as portraying artists as routinely killing people to create art. There have been a few pieces of fiction that have used that but they are few and far between; it’s not a trope.
A friend posted:
Still mind-boggling how so many people think that virtually everyone in the scientific and medical communities is lying, and the only people telling the truth are a bunch of activists using sources which are dubious at best. If they’re using sources at all.
As that is how scientists are popularly portrayed it doesn’t boggle my mind. It just sickens me. What amuses me is that the science deniers that believe in the conspiracies about vaccines and GMOs will scorn the science deniers that believe global warming is a scam perpetrated by scientists. If scientists are the other, and unlike the rest of us, it’s easy to accept these things. Some people might know a scientist, but few know the community. When you know just one it becomes, “some of my best friends are scientists;” and you consider them the exception. They aren’t.
One of my friends is a chemist. He’s been defending chemistry on Facebook. One thing he was pointing out is that you can never say that there is 0 of any substance in a sample. All you can ever say is that there is less than you can measure. That is usually less than can do harm. People were terrified because some traces of radioactive isotopes from Fukushima spread around the world. They don’t stop to think that the amount is overwhelmed by the amount of natural radioactive substances. Living in Manhattan is a cancer risk because three are traces of uranium in the granite the buildings are built out of. Living in Denver is a cancer risk because of its altitude, there’s less atmosphere to protect the residents from cosmic rays and ultraviolet. The great irony is that the rare earth elements needed to build solar cells is found in ores that also contain high concentrations of uranium. The reason China can produce them much cheaper than anyone is that they allow their workers to be exposed to higher levels of radiation than other nations.
That’s also an example of how things are not always intuitive, and people without training in the subject, are not comfortable with things that aren’t intuitive. This happens in economy too. Trump’s tariffs drive the price of the dollar up which hurts our balance of trade. It takes analysis to figure out the results, you can’t trust your gut. Most people will go with their gut. We’ve made more advances in the years since Isaac Newton than in all the millennia before then because we discovered that science is more reliable than gut feelings. But people’s guts tell them to not believe that.
I have to get down off my high horse now and take a shower. I usually make myself eat at home for my mental and physical health. As I have not been out for almost two weeks I’m going to go to Rosario’s Pizza tonight. I even asked someone to join me.
Wise Madness 