Li’l Duce (whom I alternately call Caligu-lite these days) had a thought not long ago.
Folks on my side of the fence might snort derisively at the notion that the Once and Current King can actually think, but he does. I had a cat once, named Jack. He always wanted to jump up on the kitchen table and do cat things. I’d see him sitting near the table, intently calculating height, weight, mass, force, momentum, and all the other factors that go into the launching of his cat body onto the very surface where I was enjoying my cold pizza in the morning.
Jack’d work out the calculus and propel himself upward, landing inches from my plate. With a gruff Get outta here, I’d sweep him off the table and he’d land almost precisely at the spot where he’d launched. Once there, he turn his gaze again to the tabletop and, again, begin calculating height, weight, mass, force, momentum, et cetera. Again he’d leap; again I’d sweep.
This might go on three or four times before, finally, having had enough, I’d fetch the spray bottle of water and give Jack a swift spritz in the face. Water spritzed in the face is to a cat what lethal injection is to a cold blooded murderer. It’s a deterrent.
Then again, the spritzing actually works, whereas capital punishment…, well, y’know.
Anyway, as mindless and dense as Jack might appear, unable to grasp a simple taboo, he was, indeed, thinking. The impulse, Hmm, I wonder what’s on that table, simply popped into his little cerebrum again and again despite his repeatedly being given the prompt brush and landing unceremoniously on the floor, as if the previous iterations of the process had never occurred.
So Jack could think. And so, similarly, can Li’l Duce.
I mean, we’re not talking Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell thinking here. We’re talking random, impulse-y, fleeting thoughts. But thoughts nonetheless.
Among Caligu-lite‘s random, impulse-y, fleeting thoughts of late has been his claim that the pain reliever Tylenol™ is a dangerous drug. Of course, like any drug, Tylenol™ can pose danger if swallowed like M&Ms™ or any other similarly addictive substance. (Also, it must be added, when an anonymous psychotic opts to lace drugstore shelf packages of Tylenol™ with cyanide, killing seven people and inspiring reasonable package reforms and anti-tampering laws as well as irrational Halloween candy poisoning panic.) But that wasn’t what the Mad King was trying to get at. More than likely, he was simply greasing the skids for some robber baron crony who wants to peddle a snake-oil pain reliever.
Dangerous?
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The violence Li’l Duce has committed upon truth, science, inquiry, rational thought, learning, teaching, and anything else having to do with obtaining a reasonable picture of the world and universe in which we live can be countered but, at times, it seems as though the task is akin to slamming your head into a brick wall.
The gang at Bloomington’s Science Cafe is back this year, banging their heads against the wall, trying to educate the local rank and file about science-y things. Last month, for instance, my pal Alex Straiker — who professionally pokes his nose into the brain, neurons, and cannabinoids — hosted a Science Cafe on the Piltdown Man.
A celebrated hoax in 1912 and for a few years after, Piltdown Man was embraced by much of England’s scientific establishment even though the faux-fossil’s “discoverer” was a shady, sloppy, greedy, amateur archeologist. Charles Dawson’s purported Piltdown Man skull was a patchwork of bones artfully manipulated to resemble an ancient ape-man missing link’s coconut.
People bought his story because they wanted to believe it. The German anthropologist Otto Schoetensack (swear to god, that was his real name) had, four years prior to Dawson’s “finding,” discovered the remains of Homo heidelbergensis, at the time the oldest identified human fossil in Europe. Scientists around the world went gaga over Schoentensack’s discovery. Dawson, being a good, patriotic Brit, couldn’t bear that a hated Hun was reaping all this archeological ardor, so he cooked up Piltdown Man out of thin air.
The rest of the British scientific community, who might have challenged Dawson, instead jumped on the Piltdown bandwagon because, hell, they too were good and patriotic.
Straiker’s message was fraud is easy to perpetrate, especially when it’s done in a climate of high-pressure nationalism.
And that’s precisely the kind of climate we’re living in today.
Bloomington Science Cafe will convene next Tuesday, October 21st, 7:00pm at Friendly Beasts Cider Company tap room. Postdoc chemistry researcher Misha Dvorakova is scehduled to set the record straight about Tylenol™ that night. She’s a real thinker, trained to filter out all those random, impulse-y, fleeting ideas that the Most Powerful Human Being on Earth loves so dearly.