I imagine everyone has been posting about this today. There’s a media frenzy about a scientific endeavour, how cool is that?

Except for the fact that the media has, by and large, given far too much room to uneducated and highly-opinioned idiots claiming the world will end. I don’t mind a bit of joking about it, that’s a healthy stand to take – mocking our fear of new things – it’s human nature… 

I think it’s also human nature, these days, to try and stop everything with a court case.

There have even been death threats aimed at the scientists. That’s appalling behaviour. Aside from there being no justification, or point, in threatening another human being in this way, it also suggests that these scientists would be reckless enough to risk their own existence and that of their family and friends on an experiment.

Poor show.

The big problem however is what happens now. Science is a marathon, punctuated by moments of revelation. It’s going to be months before we (obviously, not me, but my people) find anything interesting. The media really doesn’t work on that timescale anymore. Try minutes… try now.

I like to think of it like Christmas as a child… I’ll be waiting and hoping until it arrives… it’s going to seem like forever, and I might even lose a little sleep over it. And if the present turns out to be an Action Man instead of a Transformer, I’ll be happy anyway, because the LHC has brought science back into focus in a time where fear and ignorance are running the show.

…

On a less sciency note, I’ve made a mix tape – The lovely folks at Moue Magazine post a weekly compilation, and this week it’s one of mine. I tried to theme it – all of the songs remind me of Lancaster, in one way or another… and so that is my question today – which song reminds you of your home town?

OK then:

The worst thing to hear when slipping under the anesthetic

I don’t really want to jinx it, but when was the last time you read anything about GM foods? You remember, the Frankenstein variety of tomatoes that were going to to turn vegetables into animals and children into monsters.

It’s funny how fashions come and go so quickly.

Obviously, climate change is the science debate du jour, with occasional side dishes of politically charged abortion discussions and a dessert of selective embryos.

Humans, it appears, are unable to hold down multiple debates at once, especially as far as science and the media are concerned.

This could be an advantage… I think scientists should create a dummy issue. Something so terrifying and horrible that everyone will have to object to it.

Something along the lines of a study to see if it is possible to capture flesh eating monsters from another dimension to put in zoos where they are fed on kittens…

Something they have no intention of ever even looking in to, but that would at least take some of the flack away from research into life saving techniques.

Maybe a cure for religion – ‘Scientists find believer gene… plans to deactivate it’.

Something like that.

It strikes me that a great number of ‘laboratory incidents’ are just a failure of containment… and that most lab experiments are about keeping things that want to get away from you.

I was even involved in one such incident…

Way back in my undergraduate days I spent quite a lot of time coated up and messing around with petri dishes. All manner of nasties in an aseptic environment… except that wasn’t really the case. Whenever you see scientists represented on television, or in the films, they’ve always got a pristine lab coat, but the reality is that most scientists are way too busy to wash themselves, let alone their work-wear.

And so my lab coat played host to a small microcosm of bacteria and fungi, though nothing visible.

There is an unspoken rule about microbiology, which is this; you will probably make yourself ill at some point, probably though your own stupidity, but you will either get better at avoiding it or you’ll build a tolerance.

I was immune to my own lab coat… unlike, say, the rest of the campus.

But how did the horrible little germs on my lab coat get out there and infect so many people?

I can tell you how. At the time of the incident, a friend was staying with us whilst she was in town. She had managed to get a job working at a convenience store on campus. The sort that serves roast chicken to students that find toasting bread difficult.

She too had specific work-wear – a white coat.

Now, lab coats fasten up the side, rather than at the front, with a significant overlap. But that didn’t stop my friend from picking up my lab coat and wearing it to work. She apparently had people comment that her coat looked odd, but thought nothing of it…

I arrived in my lab later that day, noticed my lab coat wasn’t in my bag and just picked up a spare and thought nothing of it.

Within a week the ‘rivers of puke’ incident happened.

I have no hard evidence, I didn’t confess to my hunch, but I’m pretty sure I know what happened there.

No one died.

It was about this time that I also attended a lecture by one of the creators of one of the contraceptive pills. He told a story about containment too.

The process used to isolate the chemical they were after was a form of repeated purification, where they would remove one impurity each time… leading to two beakers, one with the chemical they wanted and one full of the thing they were removing.

Apparently, at first, this wasn’t a problem. Although they were dealing with colourless liquids the volumes of the liquid in each beaker were very different. They could always throw away the larger one. However, by the end of the experiment the two beakers had roughly the same amount in each.

That’s when his incident happened. He threw the wrong clear, colourless liquid down the sink.

He also realised what he had done. It turned out that it was both quicker and cheaper to shut down the entire plumbing system of the lab and re-purify the contents than it was to start all over again.

That one nearly got away… containment.

Science, when it can, prefers to run wild, and the scientists themselves are nothing but zoo-keepers in fancy lab coats.

To use an appropriated Americanism that I would never normally use, today is all about the cow.

First, may I draw your attention to Cow & Buffalo. I made a suggestion that there should be a strip about ‘smilk’ and I think you’d agree that the creator Mike Maihack did an excellent job.

The next bit of cow-related fun is the news that apparently we’ve created a human-animal hybrid embryo… and which species did we choose to share this amazing milestone? The cow.

It sounds really impressive – human-animal hybrid embryo – and I believe that saying it out loud repeatedly is a cure for hiccups, but really it’s not as impressive as a lot of people are going to make it out to be. For once I think scientists are going to play down their work, and it’s probably best that they do just that.

What they’ve created is a cell composed of the workings of a human, surrounded by a cow-cell membrane. There’s no real mixing of genes of any of that sort of thing, it’s closer to a human having a pigs heart but not nearly as high in meat content.

But you just know that the media could go all ‘Frankenstein’ on it… and yes I know that Frankenstein was the doctor not the monster*, but try telling the media that.

It’s a shame really. This sort of thing could, ultimately, really help people, like those with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Yet it seems that there’s a real fear of these advances in cellular manipulation, especially within the organisations that subscribe to the idea of ending human suffering.

And so you can understand why scientists might want to keep this quiet – so that they can get on with their job as the law defines it, rather than having to spend their time trying to convince people that will never be swayed by an argument, let alone a fairly cohesive and logical one.

Besides, I quiet like the idea of a human-cow hybrid, I think they’d bring a lot to the table. I could use an extra stomach and the ability to eat grass has been sorely missing from my life.

…

Go on then, if how the church perceives genetics is true, what animal do you think should be combined with the human genome?

He also had a curious love of pigeons too… Nikola Tesla was, like many scientists, a genius and a fruit-cake.

Take Henry Cavendish for example could not talk to women, at all… Oliver Heaviside liked to work in tiny rooms that were dark and rather warm… Jeremy Bentham preferred the company of rats… and the great mathematician, Paul Ersdos had trouble tying his shoe laces… I could go on.

Indeed, most of the things I have mentioned here are at the tamer end of the spectrum.

The stereotypical image of the mad scientist has its roots firmly planted in reality.

We recognise it as mental illness now, rather than eccentricity, forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and even schizophrenia.

But remember, the world we live in has been shaped by these men – the mad scientist is almost exclusively a male, for some reason the great female scientists* tend to preserve their sanity – they saw what the sane could not… the truth.

And so the following is self-evident – You don’t have to be mad to be a great scientist, but it helps.

So, as we’re preparing to celebrate the 150th anniversary of The Theory of Evolution, Florida steps up to the mark… perhaps accidentally mind, but still.

Give them a round of applause, they deserve it. Not only have they secured the theory of evolution in future education, they’ve also created a debate on a scientific mandate for education.

Texas is next in line, and maybe after seeing what happened in Florida, they’ll decide not to pursue the idea that creationism should be taught in science.

Or they may just react in an irrational and inappropriate manner.

I’m not opposed to teaching creationism, as it happens, but I do think the setting is very important. It cannot logically be taught in the setting of a science, it should not therefore ever appear in a scientific textbook – It should be kept to Sunday school and religious education classes, and taught alongside every other creation myth…

…some of which are fantastic.

Y’know, it’s not as if us science believers are asking to have the theory of evolution inserted into the Bible as an ‘alternative view’.

Maybe we should.

I imagine we’ve long suspected that it is possible to be smart and stupid simultaneously, but how would you go about proving it… It’s beyond my ken to design an experiment that will prove that doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing are not mutually exclusive.

In other news:

I’m currently compiling a Flowfield Time-line – a list of dates and events mentioned in my comics. I have no real idea of what I’m going to do with it, but I am considering turning it into a wall poster. To do this I decided to look through all the hard copies, the ink and paper, of all the strips I have made.

It almost killed two birds with one stone, because I have been meaning to order and bind them for some time.

Turns out I now have four volumes of The Flowfield Unity, over 175 strips and several long lists of incomprehensible ideas – It was the first time I have seen what I have made all together and, well,  it’s rather encouraging.

I don’t know why I mention this, but, y’know, I just thought I’d share the moment.

Actually, I do know why I mentioned it… it was the whole point of this post – It’s nearly the end of the year and I’m thinking back over the last twelve months (and since nearly all of that has been spent making comics…). So what I meant to ask is, ‘How’s your year been?’ and ‘when did you last take a step back to admire what you’ve done?’.

Actually, the more astute of you will know this to be a mis-quoting of Dr Sagan… what he actually said was:

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

I was a long way from home, and the internet, when I drew this and so had to rely on my rather shaky memory. Still, I think I got the gist across.

If you don’t know who Carl Sagan is, I suggest you look here, and at the Carl Sagan Portal.

He also happens to be another human that I classify as one of my heroes, for obvious reasons.

There are so many great quotes attributed to him too. The best list can be found here.

Carl Sagan – He’s not wrong.

Technorati Tags: science, quotes, comics, webcomic, technology

Or it might be something else, but it will happen one day, and I have a sneaky feeling that whatever it is that makes us extinct, we’ll be responsible for it somehow.

I’d also like to dedicate this comic in rememberance of one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut – He’s with Isaac now.

I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

Professor Frink, The Simpsons

My first computer was a Sinclair zx Spectrum. A massive 48k of memory. My current machine has a mere 512MB of memory. That’s about 11000 times more. Does this make me 11000 times happier or 11000 times more productive?

]]> http://theflowfieldunity.com/2006/10/11/mid-week-treat-it-dont-care/feed/ 3 http://theflowfieldunity.com/2006/09/03/tessas-law/ http://theflowfieldunity.com/2006/09/03/tessas-law/#comments Sun, 03 Sep 2006 11:49:01 +0000 Adam http://theflowfieldunity.com/?p=10

Yup, if you look hard enough, for long enough, everything falls apart.

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Most of the animals used in early space tests did not return to Earth. Some of them were left to die in space, floating around in elaborate metal coffins as they drifted off into the universe.

We must remember that when an alien crash lands on this planet… Just because it seems to be in a space craft, doesn’t mean that it built it.

Similarly, those animals we sent out may land on other planets. Can you imagine the fun they are going to have working out how cats and dogs managed to fashion a spacecraft without opposable thumbs?

tags: cats, space, comic, webcomic, cartoon

The Big Bang, or, as pessemists would have it, The Big Suck.

To those of you that have emailed me to say that the universe was actually created over a seven-day period, by some sort of deity, I have this to say…

Seven days? Even I could do that. How about ‘Instantly’, now that would be impressive. I mean, there is a coffee mug on my desk that is practically it’s own universe (complete with lifeforms) and that has only been there for four days.

tags: physics, space, comic, webcomic, cartoon