Measure Me

There is something recursive about measuring the thing that we use to measure things that we then use to measure.

A gram used to be the weight of a cubic centimeter of water, and a (centi-)meter was the circumference of the Earth divided a million times, thus the Earth is 40 million meters.

But dematerialization has been a thing for much longer than the macro image series mania (called memes nowadays) that has by now thoroughly taken over our cultural ecosystem.

And now, the standard of weight all around the world no longer comes from an object you can hold in your hand, but from a measurement of electricity. A meter, by the way, is no longer determined by the Earth, but by a measurement of an electromagnetic wave, which is about as close as you can get to being immaterial.

Post Script:
In a slight twist of categorical confusion, the British Thermal Unit (BTU) is the amount of energy it takes to heat one pound of water by one degree F, whereas the metric version is a Calorie, or the amount of energy it takes to heat one gram of water by 1 degree C. Regardless, I second the suggestion that we quick change everything to metric while the government is on pause.

Notes:
Kilogram gets a new definition
Dec 2018, BBC

Radiolab episode about the meter

Empericism
In philosophy, empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. 

Metronomy is a London-based electro rock band, check them out.

Fake It til You Make It

Bordo - Chinese Graffiti

It sounds like what they're saying here is that people don't want science, they want bad science. I should rephrase - money doesn't want good science, but people do. Social science in particular, is in a bit of a pickle these days (see the replication crisis).

This also sounds a lot like the word of the year for 2016, post-truth, related to 'truthiness' and referencing a world where emotional reaction has more traction that cold hard facts. This is something we've always known, albeit at times in our cultural unconscious. We make things that fight this, I'm sure people like Bejamin Franklin, newspaper editor, had something to say about it. But our defenses have been lacking, and could use a rethink.

Here from The Guardian:

Smaldino cites an experiment by the American psychologist Daryl Bem, who purported to show that undergraduates could predict the future and published the result in a prestigious journal.

"What he found was the equivalent of flipping a bunch of pennies, nickels, and quarters, asking students to guess heads or tails each time, and then reporting that psychic abilities exist for pennies, but not nickels and quarters, because the students were right 53% of the time for the pennies, rather than the expected 50%. It’s insane,” said Smaldino. “Bem used exactly the same standards of evidence that all social psychologists were using to evaluate their findings. And if those standards allowed this ridiculous a hypothesis to make the cut, imagine what else was getting through.”

Cut-throat academia leads to 'natural selection of bad science', claims study
The Guardian, Sep 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/cut-throat-academia-leads-to-natural-selection-of-bad-science-claims-study