[ExI] The mosque at Ground Zero.

Jebadiah Moore jebdm at jebdm.net
Tue Aug 17 17:34:55 UTC 2010


2010/8/17 darren shawn greer <dgreer_68 at hotmail.com>

>  > But people will fight over things which are rather non-ideological,
> such as why the sky is blue
>
> That question has always killed me. It's blue 'cause dust particles in the
> atmosphere scatter shorter visible light wavelengths and ta da: we see
> color!
>

Your belief that this is true is just evidence of your sciento-chauvinist
upbringing.  The sky is blue for the same reason that love exists and that I
prefer vanilla over chocolate.


> A friend and I were watching a particularly colorful sunset in Ottawa one
> summer. He turns to me and says, "Isn't it beautiful?"
>
> "If you're into viewing light as it glides diagonally through thicker
> atmospheric conditions along the earth's surface so that only the longer
> wave lengths get through, then yeah, I guess so."
>
> "Science sucks," he said.
>
> If nothing else, it's great to bug your friends with.
>

I love doing this.  But I never really saw the "science sucks" side.  It's
like the whole free-will vs determinism thing; people say that they don't
believe in determinism because it sucks (or at least that they wish it
wasn't true), but I'd rather the world be deterministic since that means we
can study it better.  And it doesn't make the world any less beautiful to
me, or make our choices any less meaningful (since we don't have perfect
information and meaning is created by us anyways).

-- 
Jebadiah Moore
http://blog.jebdm.net
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