„You seem to be neither a scientist or an engineer.“

“The whole narrative of beautiful minds thinking up the next big thing, unencumbered by TIG welding of stainless steel vacuum vessels, is more Hollywood than reality. Science goes from basic to applied - back to basic to dead end - to basic in another area and back again to applied in the same area as where it…

Neither philosopher nor poet (ugh). And of course (applied) science is tied to engineering. In today’s high tech, high science environment the lines are increasingly blurred. After all, one can’t just will Higgs bosons or neutrinos to come knocking at the door and show themselves. In order to find such things,…

Because without the thinkers, you‘d have not much to do.

Ditto, obviously. Missed my point exactly.

Scientists, rejoice! Go home and spare yourselves the tediousness of hypothesis building, experiments, data gathering, more experiments, requesting grants, and the critical eyes of your colleagues in peer review!

Sure. But even if I’d buy into the notion that they needed to kill that many snakes in order to protect themselves, that would still not justify torturing them before. And that’s what they do. Dragging them from their dens, throwing them into pits which is highly stressful for the animals, kicking them around, putting…

No. The rattlesnake skin picture is sad, not to mention infuriating. The hippo acted on instinct. Humans are simply cruel for cruelty’s sake.

No doubt. But the underpinnings of these ideologically driven massacres are important as well. What drives these people? In what climate are their attitudes allowed to thrive? Who are the enablers and instigators?

Yes, it has. I just think that without understanding the psychological underpinnings and the climate in which ideologies like the shooter’s thrive, we are missing the bigger picture. By solely focusing on the immediate motive (in this case the conviction that whites are superior) we let all the enablers and agitators…

Yes, you are right - in this case, the shooter’s conviction that white folk is better than everyone else. Mea culpa - should have written it less forcefully.

That has nothing to do with skin color, but everything with conviction. Once you assume righteousness in what you do and your own and your ideology´s superiority, you are able to commit the worst atrocities and walk away convinced you did the right thing for the greater good.

No, I’m not. I’m merely pointing out that, by today’s standards, the kind of development of certain technologies was not science. I only doubt that there were people who developed a hypothesis and then set out to test it rigorously by collecting data, doing experiments, and quite some time later presented it for peer…

Except the early Polynesians’ navigational skills are not science. They are a technique. Science is a clearly defined process of hypothesis building, data gathering, experimentation, and verification. You may want to argue that this is how they figured out the technique, which is fine (though I doubt that), but…

That’s true. But this is proof of concept-research, and it might lead to an approach where we don’t need non-human animals at all anymore, like being able to grow organs inside humans.

I don’t think it’s a diversion, just a different approach. I wish we could already print organs or simply grow them. But we’re not there yet.

I don’t know if you’ve ever needed medication or had surgery or any other type of medical intervention, but all of them have been extensively tested on non-human animals. I pretty much guarantee you will use them despite the tremendous suffering they caused in development.

Right until you need an organ and they provide.

Bottom line: Stay away.

You’ll have a hard time convincing people that TCM is horseshit when even seemingly respectable, science-minded organizations promote the nonsense.