Interesting cannabis case in the UK

[txa1265]

I wonder if that bit of enlightenment was done on a government grant.

Well, if you look at the article it is from UMass Dartmouth, a small part of the UMass public university system, so you know there is at least state funding at work. Also, you'll see that it is a broader set of investigative research on contamination of paper money, which has interests with loads of agencies.

 

[dteowner]

There was mention of employee drug tests, which made me think perhaps this was being driven by a legal case somewhere. Either way, I'm sure glad to know that there's "a thousandth of a grain of sand" worth of coke in my wallet. If we added it *all* up in a room somewhere and sold it on the street, we might pay for some small portion of the cost of the study.

I suppose it's not another fish study in West Virginia.

 

[Prime Junta]

What's your take on academic freedom, btw, dte?

 

[dteowner]

Non sequitur much? You are perfectly free to research any utterly assinine topic you so desire. That doesn't mean it automatically merits public funding in any way.

 

[Prime Junta]

Academics rarely research anything with their own money, you know.

 

[dteowner]

Then I guess they've got to convince some private funding source that the research is somehow useful to somebody. I don't have a problem with that.

 

[txa1265]

Then I guess they've got to convince some private funding source that the research is somehow useful to somebody. I don't have a problem with that.

But since any 'private' funding source has likely gotten massive tax breaks / incentives to build stuff in some state, etc ... it is like a vicious circle of public / private anyway, isn't it? Is any company truly 'private' at this point?

 

[Prime Junta]

Then I guess they've got to convince some private funding source that the research is somehow useful to somebody. I don't have a problem with that.

I thought as much.

Thing is, you'd get very little good basic research done that way. The idea with academic freedom is that scientists are given lots of toys to play with, and then they're set free to play with them however they like. A lot of science is serendipitous: stuff that looks like it should get results quite often doesn't (fusion research much?) whereas research that looks completely pointless and entirely devoid of any practical applications suddenly turns out to be massively important (people doing wacky shit with prime numbers suddenly realizing that it has huge applications in cryptography).

The upshot is that most science will always be pointless, stupid, and will lead to dead ends -- but without it, you'll never get the small percentage that genuinely moves stuff forward and occasionally ends up handing us the electric motor, penicillin, or the Internet.

 

[dteowner]

Indeed, now that we know there's trace amounts of cocaine on our currency, I'm sure cold fusion is just around the corner. Is it unreasonable to ask for at least a hint of value?

Single example among many: 3M already supports exactly what you're asking for. Post-It's are a failed glue formula that's now their biggest revenue stream. Private research. Get some.

 

[Prime Junta]

Indeed, now that we know there's trace amounts of cocaine on our currency, I'm sure cold fusion is just around the corner. Is it unreasonable to ask for at least a hint of value?

Yes.

Single example among many: 3M already supports exactly what you're asking for. Post-It's are a failed glue formula that's now their biggest revenue stream. Private research. Get some.

Post-Its haven't quite had the societal effects of penicillin, microwaves, asymmetric cryptography, nuclear power, or lasers (to name a few), though. At least not on my planet; perhaps they represent the summit of scientific-technological achievement on yours...

 

[Rithrandil]

I'm of a middle ground on this. I understand not all science will have readily available applications (we've discovered many things by accident).

But this? I'm not sure what the point of this study is. I honestly cannot make up ANY sort of value knowing this fact will give us. For everything else we can at least ask a reasonable educated science fiction writer and I'm sure they could come up with something interesting.

 

[dteowner]

You do understand that Fleming wasn't researching penicillin on the government dime, right? You do understand that his lab was supplied and funded by the hospital where he worked, right? You do understand that labs and scientists in the private sector can use their equipment for tinkering while officially working on a privately funded job just as easily as it can be done with public funding, right?

Thanks for giving me another excellent example for my side, though. Penicillin is certainly a weightier example than Post-It's, even though both describe the mechanism equally well, which clearly was all that was required.

 

[Prime Junta]

Off the top of my head: it could be useful as a control variable for gauging levels of cocaine use in a given country, which would be valuable data for all kinds of reasons.

I remember reading that they discovered pretty humongous amounts of cocaine residue in the Po river in Italy, basically suggesting that everybody from Venice to Cremona is continuously wired. If there was a reliable way to correlate the amount of coke residue on cash with known levels of coke use, we could find out what that means.

 

[Prime Junta]

You do understand that Fleming wasn't researching penicillin on the government dime, right? You do understand that his lab was supplied and funded by the hospital where he worked, right? You do understand that labs and scientists in the private sector can use their equipment for tinkering while officially working on a privately funded job just as easily as it can be done with public funding, right?

Thanks for giving me another excellent example for my side, though. Penicillin is certainly a weightier example than Post-It's, even though both describe the mechanism equally well, which clearly was all that was required.

Thanks for setting me straight on penicillin; I thought he was an academic researcher. That still leaves me with lasers, nukes, asymmetric cryptography, and microwaves, though. D'you think privately funded research would've come up with all that as well?

 

[dteowner]

Here is where I checked my memory of Fleming.

Actually, military and NASA research accounted for several of those others. Granted, the military and NASA are public funding, but I'm assuming you'll agree that those are applications-based (research with a functional purpose), which was my actual requirement.

 

[Prime Junta]

Actually, the *FUNDAMENTAL* discoveries in them were not done by the military and NASA. The Manhattan Project would have been as science-fiction as space warps if Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and others hadn't sorted out the theory first. Same thing with lasers, microwaves, the maths underlying asymmetric cryptography, and so on. Einstein is famously (if possibly apocryphally) quoted as saying that "E=mc^2 is an equation that will never have any practical applications."

It's not an either-or, dte. We need both -- scientists who are free to explore whatever damn-fool things they want, and applied research striving for specific goals. Both may result in serendipitous discoveries, for sure, but the former more than the latter -- simply because unpromising lines of research get cut off sooner in the latter.

 

[dteowner]

So, were Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and the boys on the government dole while they pondered their navels? Or did they have a "day job" that was paying the bills while they gave thought to the inner workings of the atom?

And to bring this back around, are you actually comparing the value of knowing there's trace cocaine on currency to understanding physical science? If this is government funded, I'd sure like to see this guy's grant proposal. Either it's damn impressive, or the grant committee needs some fresh faces.

 

[Prime Junta]

So, were Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and the boys on the government dole while they pondered their navels? Or did they have a "day job" that was paying the bills while they gave thought to the inner workings of the atom?

Einstein did, for the first part of his work. Bohr, Fermi, and most of the others had academic careers.

And to bring this back around, are you actually comparing the value of knowing there's trace cocaine on currency to understanding physical science? If this is government funded, I'd sure like to see this guy's grant proposal. Either it's damn impressive, or the grant committee needs some fresh faces.

Geez, I really have to do something about my communication skills, because I'm clearly not getting my point across at all. Here it is again:

The upshot is that most science will always be pointless, stupid, and will lead to dead ends -- but without it, you'll never get the small percentage that genuinely moves stuff forward and occasionally ends up handing us the electric motor, penicillin, or the Internet.

 

[dteowner]

Does your retirement plan involve lottery tickets, by any chance? You're throwing a bunch of money down a hole on long hopes that some day you'll hit the jackpot. Wouldn't it make more sense to at least pick some holes that look vaguely promising (in this case, as defined by applicability or interest to the private sector) rather than blindly spreading your limited seeds across the entire field of holes, cuz a lot of those holes are filled with pigeons that eat your seed and give you nothing but pretty noises and poop.

 

[Prime Junta]

Does your retirement plan involve lottery tickets, by any chance? You're throwing a bunch of money down a hole on long hopes that some day you'll hit the jackpot. Wouldn't it make more sense to at least pick some holes that look vaguely promising (in this case, as defined by applicability or interest to the private sector) rather than blindly spreading your limited seeds across the entire field of holes, cuz a lot of those holes are filled with pigeons that eat your seed and give you nothing but pretty noises and poop.

What's scientific research got to do with retirement plans? Yeah, it *is* a lottery. The tickets don't cost all that much, very few of them end up winning, but when they do, zowie. And yeah, I do believe that our civilizational progress would... if not stop, at least be severely slowed down, if we stopped buying those tickets.

Of course, we need to target specific holes too -- I'm not saying that ALL research should be publicly funded and academically free. Hell, I'm not even saying that MOST research should be that. But yeah, damn straight I'm saying that SOME research should be -- and "some" should be enough to give us at least a handful of winning tickets a century.