2006-04-22
Know.not
One of my favorite writers is Umberto Eco. His works are pieces of philosophy of science. He mixes fact with fiction and complete nonsense. He doesn’t forget to add some commentary on the nonsense. In his famous book, The Name of the Rose, a Franciscan friar (for the illiterate: Sean Connery in the film) researches some murders. He constructs hypothesis and finds the murder. At the end he admits that it was mere luck, because his whole theory was wrong. The book Foucault’s Pendulum is a satire on occult traditions and spiritual conspiracies. It’s older and much better than The Da Vinci Code, which uses the same themes. Foucault’s Pendulum starts with a kind of fantasy game by a few people at a publishing house. They deliberately mix occult texts and fiction for their story. At the end they can’t distinguish truth from fiction and are trapped in their own story.
I just read The Island of the Day Before. The story plays in the 17th century. The 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age, the time René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal and Isaac Newton lived. The age of the birth of science... In his book Eco mixes some science with quack science and superstition that were very common in that time. People still believed that a wound can be cured by treating the knife that caused the injury. A major issue was several different methods to determine the longitude when traveling around the world. Most of the methods are absolutely ridiculous for people living in the 21st century.
Today we are living in an age of scientific truth, isn’t it? Research has been done on so many things. We’ve got good libraries and internet is a great source of information... and nonsense (See vegetarians). The unreliability of internet is a big problem for high school students who are writing papers. Very often they copy something without any verification. A few Dutch have started a counterattack on the website weetnet.nl (know net). Maybe a better name would be weetniet.nl (know not), because they are not trying to correct all the nonsense on internet. No, they are deliberately writing plain scientific nonsense. As expected those stories pop up in high school papers. ‘Poor’ high school students... trapped by know.not.
I just read The Island of the Day Before. The story plays in the 17th century. The 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age, the time René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal and Isaac Newton lived. The age of the birth of science... In his book Eco mixes some science with quack science and superstition that were very common in that time. People still believed that a wound can be cured by treating the knife that caused the injury. A major issue was several different methods to determine the longitude when traveling around the world. Most of the methods are absolutely ridiculous for people living in the 21st century.
Today we are living in an age of scientific truth, isn’t it? Research has been done on so many things. We’ve got good libraries and internet is a great source of information... and nonsense (See vegetarians). The unreliability of internet is a big problem for high school students who are writing papers. Very often they copy something without any verification. A few Dutch have started a counterattack on the website weetnet.nl (know net). Maybe a better name would be weetniet.nl (know not), because they are not trying to correct all the nonsense on internet. No, they are deliberately writing plain scientific nonsense. As expected those stories pop up in high school papers. ‘Poor’ high school students... trapped by know.not.
# posted by Sander @ 21:18 
