Grammar Nazis

This is a topic very close to heart as I have dyslexia so I often have to deal with such people.

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo.

I found this via the bad astronomy blog it's one I often visit people should check it out!

Watch this and just think

This is a truly inspiring video!

The magic of science!

The other day I was chatting to a friend of mine, they said that because I do physics (think this would apply to science in general really), that I take the magic out of "the world" (think she meant universe) by knowing how stuff works.

I don't see it that way, for me it's knowing how something works that excites me. The magic is that something (sometimes very complex) can be explained so simply. Take the solar system for example thinking all of this formed some how by magic, then think this all formed because "stuff" attracts other "stuff", with that simple statement (with a little bit of quantifying such as the inverse squared law and starting materials) the solar system appears from just that. Huge gas giant and bits off rock hurtling around a big ball of hydrogen all because "stuff" attracts other "stuff", now that's magic.

Science abuse.

Today I found a BBC documentary on youtube. With in the first 2 minutes the voice over said "Everything you are about to hear is true" then it goes on to talk about a theory. Now lets think about that a theory is just a theory. Theories get proven wrong or incomplete all the time even even one of the very first theories we all learn (newtons theory of gravitation) which was VERY successful at predicting gravitation phenomena. Was proven incomplete by Einstein with the theory of general relativity. However the theory in question has now experiential evidence behind it. Before anyone says anything I know for a while that relativity was believed to be without any experiential evidence for it, even disagreeing with some experiments and many other successful theories started out disagreeing with experiment-the experiments where wrong.

Now I may be arguing semantics here but it's the wording of the phrase "Everything you are about to hear is true", NOT may well be true, is likely to be true, or more accurately is our best guess, but "is true" that just grates with me.

The theory is a very popular one in but despite how popular a believe is that doesn't make it true. The belief in a God is huge! Does that mean that god exists? I know that theories have to be mathematically rigorousness so its not quite the same thing but still. I'm not saying believing in an unproven theory is wrong either, I'm just saying if i ran around saying that a crime was committed some where along the line someone's is gonna want some proof! And in a show going out the public saying that a theory with no proof is true just seems wrong to me.

Let me know what you guys think.