Reality..

Workout note I ran a course in 32:30; in my youth this took me about 23-24 minutes.

Hey, it was still forward motion….sort of.

One nice article from the Dawkins website:

We take our young children to science museums, then as they get older we stop. In spite of threats like global warming and avian flu, most adults have very little understanding of how the world works. So, 50 years on from CP Snow’s famous ‘Two Cultures’ essay, is the old divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever?

Here we ask a celebrity panel to answer some basic scientific questions

It is an immutable law of nature that acute embarrassment can make a few short seconds last pretty much for ever. The longest two minutes of my life occurred in the company of James Watson, one half of the famous double act who discovered the double helix. I was interviewing Watson, then in his late seventies, at his lab in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. At one point, I referred blithely to the ‘perfect simplicity’ of his and Francis Crick’s findings about the code of life.

Watson is a mischievous, famously prickly man and that phrase seemed to get under his skin. He raised an eyebrow. He sat back. He thought he would have some fun. Seeing as it was all so perfectly simple, he suggested, maybe I could briefly run through my understanding of DNA base pairing, say, or chromosome mapping.

What followed – a tangled, stuttering stream of consciousness reflecting distant O-level biology and recent half-understanding of Watson’s brilliant books, punctuated with words like ‘replication’ and ‘mutation’ and meaning nothing much – gave new resonance to the notion of floundering.

Watson, resisting the temptation to laugh, correct or comment, simply moved on, having categorically established our respective levels of evolution. I can still cringe now at the brief pause that concluded my ill-judged aside on the significance of the genome.

Given that science informs so much of our culture, and so many of us have such patchy knowledge, it is surprising that such embarrassments are not routine. It’s half a century since CP Snow put forward the idea of the ‘Two Cultures’, the intractable divide between the sciences and the humanities, first in an article in the New Statesman, then in a lecture series at Cambridge and finally in a book. Back then, Snow, who was both a novelist and a physicist, used to employ a test at dinner parties to demonstrate his argument.

‘A good many times,’ he suggested, ‘I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: have you ever read a work of Shakespeare’s?’ [...]

He is making a different point than I am about to make, but here is my take: science is hard, and having anything other than the most superficial understanding requires a great deal of concentrated effort, and yes, talent.

I think of it this way: from time to time, I try to do simple “fix it” projects, almost always without success. My attempt to make a round hole for a lock lead to a large, oval shaped hole in the door, which a professional was able to work around. Carpentry takes skill and practice, and those of us who don’t use our hands regularly and have no aptitude for it will make a mess of it.