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Humanists vs. Naturalists...
Mar. 17th, 2005 03:23 pmMy brother is a naturalist. Always has been. I'm a humanist, also always have been. Quite often we get into discussions with each other about this. We both find the other one's field of study pointless. Him more than me. I mean, I can see what math and physics are useful for, but I still find it kinda boring and pointless.
Today we were talking about Asterix. We got into it and bro started wondering if anybody knows just how many townpeople there are. Since you only see around 10 regulars or so and the town certainly has more people than that. I said that there probably already are papers on that subject, you'd just have to look for it. He said "Who'd bother with this?" to which I replied "Well probably a literature or art scholar, or maybe a folklorist. But most likely you'd find papers about this in Belgium or France, since they treat graphic novels a lot more professionally like they do around here."
Okay, not gonna repeat the entire conversation in dialogue style. Basically, he asked how you'd go about doing this and I said you'd take the comics, look at every single picture, write down all the characters you see, note those who are new, try to find whether they show up again later, etc. and then draw conclusions from it. It impressed the hell out of him which I thought was odd since really, I'm doing stuff like this all day! Now that I've talked about it I really want to know whether there are papers about this already! *whines*
Anyway, we then got into talking about the pointlessness of it again. Bro insisted that this is a useless thing to do since the world doesn't benefit from knowing how many townspeople Asterix's village has. But I disagree. I think the world benefits from knowing things like that. Once you examined it and found out useful conclusions it becomes a fact. And facts like that become knowledge and knowledge preserves culture. How can that be useless? Seriously, if you wanted to argue like that I bet you'd come up with countless examples in math that'd be just as "useless".
Then he went on about how he can't imagine people in math and physics to still do active research since all the things you could research on already have been found out hundreds of years ago. That really baffled me. No wonder he flunked his studies -.-;. I mean, duh, of course you're not expected to find an all knew way of calculating Pi or whatever. Nobody expects you to reinvent the wheel from scratch. But you could look at well-knowns mathematic techniques and see how they apply in certain fields of everyday life, then try and find solutions for that or maybe ways to improve things with it. Something like that. I'm not a mathematician, thank God, so I'm lacking decent examples. But seriously, you need to look beyond your books to really find a thrilling and interesting way of making use of all your l33t math skills what you've acquired in years of studying it. How can you not see that? Baffles me, really...
Today we were talking about Asterix. We got into it and bro started wondering if anybody knows just how many townpeople there are. Since you only see around 10 regulars or so and the town certainly has more people than that. I said that there probably already are papers on that subject, you'd just have to look for it. He said "Who'd bother with this?" to which I replied "Well probably a literature or art scholar, or maybe a folklorist. But most likely you'd find papers about this in Belgium or France, since they treat graphic novels a lot more professionally like they do around here."
Okay, not gonna repeat the entire conversation in dialogue style. Basically, he asked how you'd go about doing this and I said you'd take the comics, look at every single picture, write down all the characters you see, note those who are new, try to find whether they show up again later, etc. and then draw conclusions from it. It impressed the hell out of him which I thought was odd since really, I'm doing stuff like this all day! Now that I've talked about it I really want to know whether there are papers about this already! *whines*
Anyway, we then got into talking about the pointlessness of it again. Bro insisted that this is a useless thing to do since the world doesn't benefit from knowing how many townspeople Asterix's village has. But I disagree. I think the world benefits from knowing things like that. Once you examined it and found out useful conclusions it becomes a fact. And facts like that become knowledge and knowledge preserves culture. How can that be useless? Seriously, if you wanted to argue like that I bet you'd come up with countless examples in math that'd be just as "useless".
Then he went on about how he can't imagine people in math and physics to still do active research since all the things you could research on already have been found out hundreds of years ago. That really baffled me. No wonder he flunked his studies -.-;. I mean, duh, of course you're not expected to find an all knew way of calculating Pi or whatever. Nobody expects you to reinvent the wheel from scratch. But you could look at well-knowns mathematic techniques and see how they apply in certain fields of everyday life, then try and find solutions for that or maybe ways to improve things with it. Something like that. I'm not a mathematician, thank God, so I'm lacking decent examples. But seriously, you need to look beyond your books to really find a thrilling and interesting way of making use of all your l33t math skills what you've acquired in years of studying it. How can you not see that? Baffles me, really...
