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AMAZING Speech
croxis
I am the walrus
in Zocalo v2.0
From Badastronomy.com
[quote]Science Fare
In April, I was asked to give a short speech to a group of local students who participated in a science fair. I wasn’t sure what to say to them, until I saw a newscast the night before the fair. The story was some typically inaccurate fluff piece giving antiscience boneheads “equal time” with science, as if any ridiculous theory should have equal time against the truth.
I sat down with a pad of paper and a pencil and scribbled down this speech. I gave it almost exactly as I wrote it.
[b]I know a place where the Sun never sets.
It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day—well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.
I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.
I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun.
I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar.
I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth.
I know these places because I’m a scientist.
Science is a way of finding things out. It’s a way of testing what’s real. It’s what Richard Feynman called “A way of not fooling ourselves.”
No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than 150 planets now known to orbit other suns.
But scientists did.
No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped the police solve a crime. But forensic scientists have, all the time.
It wasn’t someone who practices homeopathy who found a cure for smallpox, or polio. Scientists did, medical scientists.
No creationist ever cracked the genetic code. Chemists did. Molecular biologists did.
They used physics. They used math. They used chemistry, biology, astronomy, engineering.
They used science.
These are all the things you discovered doing your projects. All the things that brought you here today.
Computers? Cell phones? Rockets to Saturn, probes to the ocean floor, PSP, gamecubes, gameboys, X-boxes?
All by scientists.
Those places I talked about before—you can get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, seen things no one has seen before, know something no one else has ever known.
No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes. Just you, your brain, and your ability to think.
Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it here.[/b][/quote]
[quote]Science Fare
In April, I was asked to give a short speech to a group of local students who participated in a science fair. I wasn’t sure what to say to them, until I saw a newscast the night before the fair. The story was some typically inaccurate fluff piece giving antiscience boneheads “equal time” with science, as if any ridiculous theory should have equal time against the truth.
I sat down with a pad of paper and a pencil and scribbled down this speech. I gave it almost exactly as I wrote it.
[b]I know a place where the Sun never sets.
It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day—well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.
I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.
I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun.
I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar.
I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth.
I know these places because I’m a scientist.
Science is a way of finding things out. It’s a way of testing what’s real. It’s what Richard Feynman called “A way of not fooling ourselves.”
No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than 150 planets now known to orbit other suns.
But scientists did.
No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped the police solve a crime. But forensic scientists have, all the time.
It wasn’t someone who practices homeopathy who found a cure for smallpox, or polio. Scientists did, medical scientists.
No creationist ever cracked the genetic code. Chemists did. Molecular biologists did.
They used physics. They used math. They used chemistry, biology, astronomy, engineering.
They used science.
These are all the things you discovered doing your projects. All the things that brought you here today.
Computers? Cell phones? Rockets to Saturn, probes to the ocean floor, PSP, gamecubes, gameboys, X-boxes?
All by scientists.
Those places I talked about before—you can get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, seen things no one has seen before, know something no one else has ever known.
No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes. Just you, your brain, and your ability to think.
Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it here.[/b][/quote]
Comments
Good? Yea... It was good. But frankly, I've heard speeches delivered by first year students that were better. (One in particular)
It did however get the point across, and (hopefully) got the kids motivated.
A#, speeches don't have to be magnificent works of art only presentable by the most linguistically advanced to be great or amazing. Speechers are more than just their grammar and their use of metaphor.
Science has yet to prove evolution. Only micro evolution, which we've never argued about...but obviously, turning this towards a debate was not the authors intent, and I don't wish to begin one. (Seriously, I don't have time to post, let alone debate right now. :D )
[B]I think it works perfectly against people that denies the evolution theory... [/B][/QUOTE]
Maybe to those ones still having thinking capability...
EDIT: Oh yeah, that speach mentioned diseases and cures so for a comparison let's check religion's biggest achievement on that area.
Partial responsibility to death of major part of Europe's (&known world's) population... Checked:
Black Death was spread by rats and cats would have been effective way of limiting amount of rats, but in its great wisdom church/god had decided cats were in league with satan... well, when people where burned alive rest shouldn't be too hard to guess.
That might be good reminder to someone still having few working brain cells but starting to fall towards fanatism.
[url]http://forums.firstones.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8138[/url]
MUAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!!!!
And evolution has proved itself,sad enough I don't think you will be willing to accept that even if I give it with the SM criterion.
[B]The concept of cats being in league with evil beings was a common theme in superstition at the time, and often still is today. [/B][/QUOTE]Yeah... somehow just Egyptians kept cat as god and when Romans conquered Egypt they took cats to Italy and spreaded cats to other countries they (had) conquered. That devil part came only after reign of Catholic church had started... well, (and most of mankind is totally susceptible to all bad influences)
[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by CurZ [/i]
[B]...'t look like a satanic killing machine:[/B][/QUOTE]So what about [url=http://koti.mbnet.fi/~tuunaes/Images/pets/mouse2.jpg]that[/url]?
(especially when destructiveness of human surpasses all other species combined)
Or do you mean this:
What is a cats favourite colour ? Purrrple of course !!
[B]Science has yet to prove evolution. Only micro evolution, which we've never argued about...but obviously, turning this towards a debate was not the authors intent, and I don't wish to begin one.[/B][/QUOTE]
[url=http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=2]15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense[/url]
Excerpts: [quote] [b]3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.[/b]
This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.
[... ]
The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.
[b]11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.[/b]
Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species.
[...]
Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms.
[...]
... science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.
[b]12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.[/b]
Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries.
[...]
Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits--and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.
[/quote] Since I don't have time to debate that much either and John Rennie already did the work I post the excerpts related to macroevolution.
The whole text is a great one, as a scientists I see it as a good guide to how creationist think, I think the opposite might be true and creationists would do well to check it too.
BTW: the whole debate of creationism (faith) and evolution (science) seems to be provincial to the USA... seriously, I never even heard there was doubt about evolution before I went to the USA and I have yet to hear that it's even an issue in any other country.
But back to the original topic:
I do think that was a great speech to define and defend what science is about.
Long live the "Bad Astronomer"!!
[B]Yeah... somehow just Egyptians kept cat as god and when Romans conquered Egypt they took cats to Italy and spreaded cats to other countries they (had) conquered. That devil part came only after reign of Catholic church had started... well, (and most of mankind is totally susceptible to all bad influences)[/quote]Actually, the Devil is based upon the impression the Overlords made upon Humanity the first time they visited Earth.
(is reading Childhood's End :p)
[B]Cats are evil. If you don't believe it, just look at this second picture and tell me it doesn't look like a satanic killing machine:
[url]http://forums.firstones.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8138[/url] [/B][/QUOTE]
:D Cats are sweat. No discussion :)
[B]Black Death was spread by rats and cats would have been effective way of limiting amount of rats, but in its great wisdom church/god had decided cats were in league with satan... well, when people where burned alive rest shouldn't be too hard to guess. [/B][/QUOTE]
Actually, a professor in Norway recently proved that the black death was an airborn virus, it could not possibly have spread as fast as it did in isolated parts of Sweden and Norway, had rats been the carrier.
[B]And I am allergic to them [/B][/QUOTE]
And so is my sister, but that's no reason to love them any less :D
Cats! More Cats! Cats for all!
[B]Actually, a professor in Norway recently proved that the black death was an airborn virus, it could not possibly have spread as fast as it did in isolated parts of Sweden and Norway, had rats been the carrier. [/B][/QUOTE]
I suspect that *some* components of your statement must be wrong.
When the descriptions and victims of the "Black Death" series of epidemics have been studied, the cause of death has consistently been plague (which is not a virus, but bacterium).
(It remains possible that some locations experienced outbreaks of other devastating diseases, some perhaps viral, at similar time... but it seems very unlikely that those were of equal magnitude.)
However, plague *does* take two forms. One spreads via flea bites, another via droplets in exhaled air.
Both are caused by the same bacterium. A strain causing one set of symptoms can evolve into another fairly rapidly. To my understanding, most medieval instances of plague started from flea bites, but some proceeded by going airborne too.
[B]I suspect that *some* components of your statement must be wrong.
When the descriptions and victims of the "Black Death" series of epidemics have been studied, the cause of death has consistently been plague (which is not a virus, but bacterium).
(It remains possible that some locations experienced outbreaks of other devastating diseases, some perhaps viral, at similar time... but it seems very unlikely that those were of equal magnitude.)
However, plague *does* take two forms. One spreads via flea bites, another via droplets in exhaled air.
Both are caused by the same bacterium. A strain causing one set of symptoms can evolve into another fairly rapidly. To my understanding, most medieval instances of plague started from flea bites, but some proceeded by going airborne too. [/B][/QUOTE]
Yes, Im not that initiated, I heard it from one of his students. Airborne bacteria then? Ill check it up if you want..
[B]And I am allergic to them [/B][/QUOTE]
As am I...
re-affirming my suspicion that cats are good for one thing:
Target practice. :D
[Quote]
"...I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-Stephen F. Roberts
[/quote]
- PJH
Because Nihilism, is the only philosophy that stands after that.
And then I can kill torture and rape as I please, as long as I can get away with it.
Like it or not, if you do away with all forms of supernatural belief in the end you have done away with all basis for moraility that is not simply based on a consensus of self preservation.
IE things are only wrong in the end if you get caught. Our ideas of right and wrong are all artificial creations, gentelmens rules to try to allow us to thrive the best we can .
In theory you should always uphold the rules because if you violate them you could weaken them and thus weaken protections you enjoy, but if you truly are in a situation where violating a rule would never be known to anybody else. Do it, even if it poses great harm to another. Because in the end your best interestes rule.
Your analysis is flawed. Selfishness is an unavoidable property of life (with religion and without it). Everything which lives must exhibit selfishness -- if for nothing else, then to bother sustaining itself.
Religions only advocate a peculiar kind of selfishness -- which is often sadly disconnected from reality. Sometimes this rift from reality renders it harmless... sometimes makes it doubly dangerous (the demands of a religion gone awry... can be nonsensical, and impossible to compromize with).
The selfishness which religions cultivate... focuses on "reaping the bounty" which a supernatural entity offers -- and following all necessary rules to achive this, regardless which inconveniences, sacrifices or even crimes (it all depends on how one interprets a religion) this demands during life.
Atheists tend to consider a good life... the only possible reward. As such, they generally try makng life as good as possible -- regardless of how they try achiving this, and whether they serve only themselves (or consider a good life more secure, efficient or meaningful when shared with others).
[i](Regarding criteria: since atheism is not a standardized belief system... atheists have different takes on game theory. Ask different individuals: "what to approve?", "what to disapprove?", "when to cooperate?" and "when to fight?"... and you shall most likely hear different criteria, depending on the persons' experience.)[/i]
The key difference of atheists from religious people is frequently *not* which criteria they raise for particular actions -- both can have sets of values which permit productive cooperation... or sets of values which lead to inevitable conflict.
The difference is mainly... how final they consider a particular loss -- namely loss of life. For an atheist, loss of life is complete loss -- while for a religious person, loss of life *can* sometimes appear a temporary inconvenience.
Religion is ultimately... nothing else but an ideology to "devalue" death. From a practical viewpoint, sometimes devaluaing death is a good choice. For example, you mourn less when someone precious passes away. You may even entertain hope of meeting lost persons again ("we shall meet where no shadows fall").
At other times, to ignore the gravity of death... is a patently bad choice. Like everthing, religion is a compromise, and has a price.
Religious people face a greater risk of discarding their own lives (martyrdom), or lives of people whom they care about (sacrifice in hope of the individual getting to heaven) -- while atheists are likely to discard only lives which they don't care about (which for a sufficiently corrupt individual, can be everyone else, but for a more reasonable person, might include only deadly enemies).
[B]Ive decided to back the atheists.
Because Nihilism, is the only philosophy that stands after that.
And then I can kill torture and rape as I please, as long as I can get away with it.
Like it or not, if you do away with all forms of supernatural belief in the end you have done away with all basis for moraility that is not simply based on a consensus of self preservation.
IE things are only wrong in the end if you get caught. Our ideas of right and wrong are all artificial creations, gentelmens rules to try to allow us to thrive the best we can .
In theory you should always uphold the rules because if you violate them you could weaken them and thus weaken protections you enjoy, but if you truly are in a situation where violating a rule would never be known to anybody else. Do it, even if it poses great harm to another. Because in the end your best interestes rule. [/B][/QUOTE]
No, at that point, intelligence should take over and determine that the only way to survive as a species is to cooperate. Laws are still effective as well.
As far as morality and ethics go, they ARE artificial creations. Pretending they are not is simply ridiculous. What is moral for me is not the same as what is moral for someone on an island in the South Pacific. What is moral to me is not the same as what is moral for a Mormon. Morals, ethics, and laws are all inventions of society to allow people to live together without killing each other. Religion has been a source for this as well, but it has frequetnly been used as a means of control and greed satisfaction by its leaders.
True maturity as a species will only be attained when people realize that personal greed and desires do not enhance the survival of mankind as a whole.
One more:
[quote]
Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you.
-- George Carlin Politically Incorrect, May 29, 1997
[/quote]
I'm leaving this thread before I start getting riled up, have fun guys.
(Goes back to his lesson in tediocrity of a class)
He's long dead and buried. Those creationist (as well as any other religious zealot) would be all out of job if not for the stupidity of the common human (homo aries).
The flock! the flock! OH MY GOD! THE HERD IS RUNNING AWAY!