Stupidity I didn't need this morning.

Gaah.  Nothing is more brain-damaging than waking up in the morning to read Ridley Scott talking about his new movie,Prometheus

NASA and the Vatican agree that is almost mathematically impossible that we can be where we are today without there being a little help along the way," Scott said. "That’s what we’re looking at (in the film), at some of Eric van Daniken’s[sic] ideas of how did we humans come about

Let me say that NASA, at least, has been know to disagree. And Erich von Daniken? Really? The man was a quack a century ago. Poor Leonard Nimoy, to have to repeat von Daniken's blather on In Search Of... all those years.

What's especially saddening?  This is supposed to be an Alien prequel.  Be afraid.  Be very, well, whatever.

Today seems to be stupid day...

Daniel Akst's article in The American, Science and the Chattering Classes, falls into that commonplace journalistic sin, handwringing over the stupidity of the masses without offering anything but a pablum response to a given problem.

The problem is scientific illiteracy. Akst writes,

With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded the kind of homely technological skills Americans typically possessed a generation ago. Most of us no longer work on our own cars, for instance, and given electronic fuel injection and other newfangled features, we probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Heck, a lot of us can’t even cook our own food.

That last part is what made steam come out of my ears, as you can imagine. Most people can't cook their own food? Most people can't apply heat to meat and vegetables and see what happens?

Akst ends his piece with this:

The challenge for business, whose products will contain more and more technology as time goes on, is to increase the general level of comfort in science without making people feel they’re being taken for a ride. More and better science in the schools would be a great start.

This, too, is outrageous: it is not in the best interests of most businesses for the common people to understand the science behind their products. If the average man did, he might not be so worried, as Akst points out, about the surfactants is vaccines, or the use of gamma radiation to pasteurize food, but he also wouldn't be taken for a ride by the billion and one forms of woo out there, and wouldn't spend a billion and one dollars on cures for "subluxation" and "toxification," wouldn't spend money on Big Placebo, and would actually realize that the best cure for half of our population's medical issues is a half-hour walk every day in the park. Near trees and birds and water. (Yeah, I know, Weil's guilty of massive amounts of woo, but the whole "being out in nature daily reduces depression" thing is pretty well backed up.)

Schooling and business are at odds with each other. Businesses exist to propogate beliefs in the quality of their products. Education exists to replace belief with facts. To put the two hand-in-hand like that is, I guess, the educational equivalent of homeotherapy: the idea that tiny droplets of knowledge in an ocean of bullshit will somehow multiply, magically, turning indoctrinated children into self-willed Jeffersonian citizens.

But really, "Most people can't cook their own food?" How sad is that? It doesn't take science to learn how to cook your own food: it takes curiosity and a willingness to ocassionally burn a dish. You can order take-out only if you fail. This isn't a failure of science; it's a failure of culture.