I lost a dear friend last night, and other observations

My Cat Jed died last night. No, that's not an excessive use of caps. It is how I have referred to him over the past 16 years. My Cat Jed was stolid until the very end. I will miss him dearly.

In My Cat Jed's honor I planted six balloonflower(Platycodon grandiflorus) today after burying him in the family's pet cemetery. *Heavy Sigh*

In crass consumerism the Internet is awash with rumors concerning the iPhone6. It is a phone, people. The phrase "imagined appetite" immediately leaps to mind. Full disclosure: I have owned one Apple product. It was an iPod that was given to me by client. Being in technology, shiny and new is only impressive when it does something either 10x less expensive and/or 10x better than that which it is replacing. Otherwise, it is simple evolution and that is hardly reason for excitement in any but the biological sense.

I know that I accuse most everyone(hey, that's only 50.1%!) of the populace as being functionally illiterate when it comes to science and technology when science and technology have never been more important in our lives, but at least Canadians are interested in science. Calling the Canadian populace 'scientifically literate' is stretching that thread too thin.

Ironically, in a sidebar on the webpage containing the glowing report on Canadians and their relative scientific literacy, there is this: Canada’s math, science lag bad for economy, report says.

So, Canadians seem greatly interested in science, but they largely cannot do the maths.(nod to my British audience)

At any rate, Canada is helluva lot better off than we here in the US.

Science denial is worlds simpler than developing the tools to proffer quantifiable commentary on scientific issues.

Unfortunately, those least able to deny the findings of science are the quickest to deny that which they have no toolkit to deny via quantification. This anti-intellectualism without validation is one of the scariest things confronting all of us. Okay, enough about that..now onto the follies of science.

There are scientists that are so wedded to either a pet theory and/or what amounts to scientific dogmatism that they are as bad for progress as the science deniers. Thankfully, the scientific method ultimately prevails and new paradigms and deeper understandings are arrived upon. In science, showing that your peers are wrong is lauded. It is unfortunate that this adulation may come too late for an individual scientist.

I could keep flooding the Internet with nonsense about this topic, but I will simply give an illustration.

How Oswald Avery: Discoverer of DNA as genetic information carrier was never awarded a Nobel. Almost everyone thought genetic information had to be carried by some protein structure. Avery discovered otherwise. But his discovery was not immediately heralded. Oswald T. Avery, died in 1955. No posthumous Nobels are awarded. That is a shitty thing.