science
kyla To be honest, I hope to live my life alone, and die young. 010726
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the pathology of birdmad if i could do it literally
i would dissect myself

instead i offer figurative glimpses like some kind of archaeology

examine the shards and the bits and pieces, the fossils and fragments.

can it be put together well enough to shape a good answer?
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bijou i consider myself a scientist. a scientist of light and chemistry and realativity. 030101
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epitome of incomprehensibility I like the game, but I watch it rather than play it. 140929
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flux playing science, on a fundamental level, really only requires that you believe that the world obeys rules that you can intuit from your senses, and using those intuitions to make predictions. almost everyone does it every single day. contributing new knowledge and models isn't required, and in fact testing known things repeatedly is of great use. buy a children's chemistry kit or electronics kit and just follow the instructions!

having faith in the schemata that is institutional science is a different issue, especially when the experiments and results go far beyond the means of an individual to replicate. despite my antiestablishmentarian tendencies, i tend to trust most scientific results, though this might be primarily because i've had the training to interpret and judge them, even if i don't have substantial direct knowledge in every field. also, despite fertilizing a paranoid mindset, i feel that the information theoretic requirements of vast conspiracies are generally untenable.

fields such as modern cognitive science and computational linguistics are weirder though in that the models constructed aren't intended for any human to be able to interpret, and aren't necessarily simpler than the phenomena they're trying to describe. as such, they're not really models but merely descriptions of phenomena (not to say that the results they create aren't tenable in some sense). climate science might not be reducible, but i'ven't the same intuition about the complexity of linguistics.
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e_o_i Yes. You make good points. I guess I should say that science (a broad but useful term) is something I use, though it isn't my field of work/study. I do have a chance to contribute to science, though, very soon! Tomorrow I'm signed up for a phonetics experiment (I get a mere $10; when I had to plunge my hand into ice-cold water for up to two minutes and have my discomfort captured on video I got $15)... I haven't been involved in any university studies since the spring, but this morning I ran across it in a classified section while I applied for more jobby-type jobs. It was sort of a whim. My main goal right now is to write, but I'm easily distracted. That isn't always bad. Anyway.

Quirks and Quarks, a Canadian radio show, is my weekly dose of casual science. Different scientists are interviewed for 10 or 15 minutes each on a particular topic or the result of research they've done. It's presented in a popular way, with the occasional denser talk on theoretical physics (though I guess to a particle physicist matter is hardly dense at all... and yes, the announcer's prone to making similar puns). The primary field seems to be biology, and there's a frequent focus on dinosaurs. Evidently everyone loves dinosaurs! There are some interesting reports, too, from fields in the science/social-science overlap, such as anthropology, archaeology, and psychology.
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epitome of incomprehensibility The story goes something like this:

Kirsten, 2003-4: "I'm doing well in science but not math. Is there a science without so much math?"

Linguistics, 2019: "Hello!"

Kirsten: "Where WERE you all this time?"

Semantics, 2022: "Not so fast."

But now it's 2023, and Phonetics 2 is being the most "sciencey" so far, if science means biology, without math (but of course that also depends on how you teach something - what you focus on, the physiological structures and their functions or the equations that structure them).
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