We live in a world where the truth is often seen as what you construct it to be. Every day, I have somebody trying to lay something on me -- be it at work, or online, or on my television. I can't get away from somebody trying to tell me that X is Y, or Y is Z, or you name it. And often I feel inadequate to respond to these things, because sometimes the partisans will really be wrapped around the axle about it.
I think the fact I feel so ill-equipped in these circumstances is directly related to the comfort I have in dealing with more scientific and mechanical things. People can interpret something a hundred different ways, but there's a comfort I take in knowing that if I take apart one of my typewriters and do something, I know what it's going to do and how to fix it. I like that if I'm at my workbench working on a model, I know how the putty is going to react with the plastic, or how the paint's going to lay down.
I've never had much mathematical or scientific ability. To some extent, I regret that because there are so many things in those realms that fascinate me. (Were I a little more telegenic and a little more powerful in the scientific/analytical part of my brain, I'd love to be a science journalist, sort of a latter day Jules Bergman. But, when the scientific parts of brains were being handed out, I must have been out getting doughnuts instead.) I completely bombed everything past Pre-Algebra, but, man, I love how math works. I couldn't understand a lick of college Chemistry, but I loved working in the lab, finding out in experiments how Part A would react with Part B. The bookwork of physics makes my brain fold up like a cheap card table, but I love the experiments and the theories, that if this happens then that will follow.
There's a comforting predictability to it. It's certainty in a world full of uncertainty. It all reminds us that, no matter what we humans may think we can do, Mother Nature (whom, of course, it's not nice to fool) will have the last word.
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