by B.J. on 1/13/2005 02:11:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

Being a Doctor in Western Society

Man (this isn't a letter to god or the Man, I'm just saying),

I wish I was studying to become a Medical Doctor.

But as with engineering, I don't have the technical skills in physics or chemistry.

And you know what ? I don't give 2 shits about technical skills (maybe 3, but definitely not 2) !

All I really wish is that I could first learn the practical skills of healing people/making cool shit, i.e. motors, and subsequently after having learned these practical skills, then learn the technical skills and manipulations with math. Those technical skills would be so much more useful then because I would know exactly what I'd be looking for in the math instead of learning what isn't useful and only finding out later. I don't really like learning what's abstract first because that which is abstract has no practical meaning to it.

From all the time I've been in a hospital (and I'm still taking a stab in the dark because I've never been to med school and don't work in a hospital), those mathematical/technical skills seem to be kind of useless for doctors in their day-to-day workings (correct me if I am wrong). Not that the technical skills wouldn't help, but all this energy they spend on learning technical skills in college seems to be a waste when most of their skills seem to rely on intuition, not mathematical skills. They have a know-how. These doctors work with their hands --- that's how surgeons operated prior to the organization of the Hotel Dieu. A work with hands, with the same kind of respect a plumber today would have in working with his hands. These surgeons knew more practical stuff than their physician counterparts, who learned Latin and the medical traditions of Hippocrates, but didn't learn to actually deal with patients. Lesson is that technical skills are useless until actually applied --- even my practicing Ph.D math professor in the summer said that.

Learning these abstractions/technical skills/math first without there being any relevance first is about learning the rules without even playing the game first. Those rules don't mean a thing if you don't know what's going on. I mean you learn some rules, but you just play the damn game, and then learn the rules as you go along. Same thing should be done with medicine/engineering: learn how to heal/do cool shit and then learning the technicalities.

If we did things my way, way more people would probably be doctors as well.

So why do we keep this system in place then ?

Well for one, I doubt most of the doctors today would go for my plan that since they basically had to be *functionally insane* (meaning they crazy but a crazy that is revered because it *appears* to contribute to society) for 12 more years after graduating high school. They obviously acclimated well and made it to be some of the top dogs of society. I doubt that most of them would want their knowledge to be known by everyone or else many people wouldn't waste money on their services. The worst of them, the most emotionally unintelligible of them, would dismiss me as a some kind of social science hack.

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The Sciences and the Arts and Religion and. . .

by B.J. on 11/18/2004 08:00:00 PM 1 comments Print this post

I get kind of annoyed when people in "hard" sciences and engineering think that they're better or going through tougher shit than those who do humanities and arts.

Ha, sorry anti-intellectual aZn boooI69669 and the add/subtract libertarian engineer !

The only reason it's "tougher" is because what you study is very unenjoyable. It's unpractical in the sense that it's very detached from what you do in real life but what you know it's practical in the sense that eventually you will get money.

Sciences (and I'm thinking UCLA sciences, not necessarily liberal arts school sciences which might be a bit different) right now just make you a machine, even though it may not have started that way. It was very practical in real life, as in experiments and so forth in science were very related to what you believed in and what you did on a regular basis in real life. For example: Michael Faraday, father of magnetoelectricity, modeled his theory of atoms being nothing more than force as to do away with the idea of a material world. Of course what isn't mentioned is that he held allegiance to an anti-materialistic sect of Christianity.

The subjects of sciences and arts came out of the same pressures: they were something to do for fun and to tinker exhaustibly with. Science and humanities subjects were just one and the same. Once science and art became very popular amongst people, people who did science and art found (and continue to find) out it became a form of power. And once science and arts became a form of power, folks start to really believe in things produced within them. They then begin to believe in those things very strongly, and develop their own principles around those things to both solidify and justify their beliefs, like it's a religion. They weeded out it's humanity bases and carved in their own importance into these sciences. For example, no one will think to question what motivated Ike Newton to think of the concept of gravity. Instead, they will just look at gravity and just assume it exists, blah, it's all forgotten !

Science has become today what religion was like during the medieval period.

Even though they came out of the same pressures, what separates the hard sciences from arts and social sciences is that the hard sciences offers the best guarantee of money. It offers the most certainty in a life, just like being part of the church offered a lot of certainty during the medieval period.

The human race has had a tendency to want to establish certainty and will go to great lengths to ensure it. We have a tendency to distrust everything we do and we feel the need to put the power in structures and deities or what have you. Those who have had great power and control towards establishing certainty in society has often made their subjects and followers mindless and do something stupid (unfortunately still present and displayed in War on Iraq).

Offering the most certainty is why hard sciences is considered "better" than its arts and social sciences. And whenever something offers the most certainty, it usually goes unquestioned by a lot of folks.

Absent from contemporary sciences in their observations/statements has been any sort of underlying philosophy or artificiality behind them. As a result these observations just become meaningless truths to accept in which the underlying philosophy that bred it is slowly forgotten by more generations of students. The intellectual curiosity gets lost because of this loss of philosophy. Helping to supplant this curiosity are these tests to make sure we know what's "important" (yeah, well according to you guessed it, hint: they're my favorite targets on this blog). This is why folks don't get much out of science other than a paycheck.

I need to remind you guys that science was actually done for actual intellectual curiosity.

People endeavored in science early on more out of intellectual curiosity and excessiveness and more fun as people would connect their philosophies with the way they thought things "naturally" worked. For example, Hermann Hulmholtz worked on his engineering theories based on the way the political economy was supposed to work for him. So basically his concoction of science was based on his own philosophies. And it just so happened to work. Philosophy was what drove him to innovate this engineering. And it wasn't even just him.

Innovations in science have usually had strong philosophical and religious bases. It started with Greek and Roman crap about Cosmos with two worlds, that of the celestial and the human. There was Newton proposing his theory of God. And of course there was Faraday. A lot of the scientists especially in astronomy such as John Stewart Mill, Whewell preceding Darwin were just trying to rationalize and prove in their theories of the future of the world the existence of god.

Though again all this artificiality of science seems to be all but forgotten (except for the better scientists). And we'll continue to grow into an anti-intellctual machinized society. Part of this anti-intellectual machine is to look down upon the arts and the humanities as ways to spend a college education.

The artificiality in arts and humanities subjects are always pointed out becausethey don't provide the certainty that the hard sciences do. They are looked down upon now because it seems like anyone can do these things and anything goes; it's just a matter of opinion because apparently everyone deserves an opinion in this democracy. Yeah, you should have one, but it doesn't mean it should be acted upon. It's artificiality is established from the beginning.

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by B.J. on 7/21/2004 02:36:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

Me, Me Again:  More Science/Math Kicking Me in the Ass

[begin vent]

What the fuck, I studied, I knew AND understood just about everything for LS 1.  I even got a near perfect score on the essays (well except for one part).  But then I get a D ?  Did I mess up on the scantron ?  WHAT THE FUCK WENT WRONG ?!

Let me delve into ultimate causes here cause fuck knows what happened to the proximate causes.

I think God (or some higher being) is trying to telling me something here (switch from B.S. to B.A.).  I'm fucking up PRECALC with brainy lil Palisades sissys and fucking up in what I already know.  Now, I'm beginning to feel like I can't (I could, just that I would be really really tired) put up a fight with even higher level math and science in another discipline other than Anthro. 

So B.A. here I go ?

[/end vent] 

P.S. At least I'm finding out the depth to which I have to know things here.

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by B.J. on 4/23/2004 07:16:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

Primate Ecology 106 and It Being "hard"

So where have I been (not that anyone really gives a shit) ?

My ass has been getting penetrated by the log grade-wise that is called Primate Ecology 106 with an apparently hard professor named Adrienne Zihlman, who looks like a grayer version of the Weakest Link woman ready to stare you down out of the room if you bring an ounce of stupidity or uselessness to the class (so that means no Cowell people who do things like run down the halls on Friday nights when I try and study or sluts who sit on the lawn at 3 PM working on their laptops with faces that wouldn't even look at me or respect me, waiting for their asses to be molested, crushed, banged, and mangled like a 17-year old Mandy Moore in a state prison singing "Hand in my Pocket" by some chumpass with clean-cut blonde hair and eyes that look like some took two hooks slid it underneath his eyelids and slid the hook to side to give his eyes this wild dumbass look). Key phrase: apparently hard, meaning she's not really that hard despite the fact that I laid an egg on my "quiz" that was 15% of my grade and am pretty sure that I didn't do well on the last "pop" quiz. It's pretty much know a lot of things she wants you to know rather than making any complex connections. In that way it's more quantitative than qualitative, but it's probably qualitative than most classes outside of math.

The reason she's considered "hard" IMHO is because the class is so damn vague and there's such a wide range for you as the student to cover on tests and papers, which all makes her "hard" as in hard to keep up with rather than hard to follow. Hard to keep up with is characterized by a lot of work. A lot seems like busy work like the coloring book, which effectively takes time away from actually delving on to the material. On top of that, readings piss all over the place like a drunk blind guy trying to cover a particular species. There's always work to do for that class. It takes TIME (which I probably don't have right now with the FSA performance) to organize this wide range of stuff.

If I had enough time, I'd be able to do it, but oh well, I'm re-learning how to learn. I like this one challenge of a class for now, but when it comes to grades, I can only hope there is a way to remedy it. I want to learn, but my grade might now show it.

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by B.J. on 8/27/2003 08:56:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

NASA Culture

According to a report compiled over the last few months, the "lax culture" of NASA is to blame for the Columbia explosion on January 16, 2003, which killed 7.

No.

Not to completely shake off what happened and be an insensitive bastard, but human nature is directly to blame. We are imperfect pieces of shit before the beholder. However, the most blame should be on the government. Too much pressure is put on these NASA scientists, and I would imagine that it would be tough to not slack for a second. These scientists felt the pressure even when the agencies cut down on its workforce:

"NASA isn't the only villain in the report. The board also blamed the White House and Congress for failing to ensure that NASA's budget keep pace with inflation over the past decade. To cope with the crunch, the agency slashed its work force and relied increasingly on outside contractors."

Disasters like the Challenger and Columbia are examples of why downsizing in general is just a bad idea. The less people you have, the more relaxed and less structured a task is. The less structured a task is, the more unreliable it is that the task will be completed successfully. To meet with high standards (that should be rules), NASA needs more structure and more workers especially since they hold people's safety in the balance. Even the best of the best fuck up.

I'm sure loved ones of those directly involved in the tragedy would agree.

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