Fear of Flying

Season 4 of Game of Thrones has just ended. While we are awaiting for season 5 to begin months ahead, bootleg versions of the new episodes started to appear (see here ). Since original characters in the Game of Thrones are dropping like flies, this one introduces a whole slew of new ones.

Meeting in "Chicken and Frog"

Lady Abiraf is the eminence gris of the military complex of Seven Kingdoms.  She enters the pub for a secret meeting with Sir Werdna and Sir Sirhc, two senior Program Knights. They order pigs intestines with shots of cow's plasma, delicacies of Seven Kingdoms and the stuff that makes you come alive. "You've got to step up your game," begins Lady Abiraf referring to recent pursuits of Science for the Realm.  “Easier said than done,” answers Sir Sirhc obliquely. “There is so much to do,” he continues trying to  change the subject and looks to Sir Werdna for help. "The most fundamental scientific issue of Seven Kingdoms is a theory of flight. We have reports of three dragons of significant military utility, we use ravens for communications, and reportedly there are some rumors of the human flight,” Sir Werdna rushes in with his pitch. Lady Abiraf perks up, flight is her secret passion as she has little patience for sweaty muscle-man whacking each other with swords. “Thank God it is not number theory” she jokes. They talk for another hour chewing on the intestines and letting the plasma do its magic. “Perhaps we have to have a science agency of our own. Something devoted completely devoted to flying,” Lady Abiraf murmurs to herself.

Arya’s epiphany

After surviving for months in wilderness and killing several grownups Arya finds shelter in an abandoned cottage - not bad for a 12 year old! The villa is filled with manuscripts and soon enough Arya spends all her time on her studies. She is a voracious reader - math, physics, astronomy whatever she finds. She even reads “1010 Vision for the Science for the Realm,” and “Mathematical challenges for sustainability at the end of the first millennium.”
Within short time she develops a suspicion that her destiny is in the intellectual exploits rather than slaying people whose behavior she finds offensive. All her life she felt as if she lived in a universe conceived by an older guy  with a beer belly and finally science offers an escape. Even if her part of the world is strange, poorly crafted and inconsequential, science developed in it need not be. The reality consists of myriads of separate entities, most of them pretty dismal, and ideas seem to be the only thing that may represent a common layer.  "Particularly mathematics," she concludes following her no longer unbiased view and for the first time since the untimely deaths of the most of her family, a trace of smile appears on her face.

Site visit

The Wall is a colossal fortification which stretches for 300 miles along the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms, defending the realm from the wildlings who live beyond.  It is made of solid ice.

It is early morning and Sir Mij, the rotating Program Knight of the Science of the Realm is pacing at the base of the Wall. It is peaceful and bitterly cold. He walks towards the guard standing nearby.
“How are things?” he begins. “Oh, splendid Sir” answers the guard “Except for the channel digging,” he adds after a pause. “Channel digging?” inquires Sir Mij. “Yeah, ever since the Wall started to melt five years ago we dig channels to take the water away so everything looks neat and tidy. Nasty work really.” “The Wall is melting??” asks Sir Mij incredulously. “Oh yeah, it goes really fast” says the the guard with a peculiar sense of pride and points out at his knee-high galoshes. “Why is it melting?” asks Sir Mij getting really agitated. “I dunno,” says the guard, “It is made of ice so it melts I guess.”  Sir Mij is devastated “It has been here for 8000 years” he mumbles “what is going on?"

Transmutation woes

All-swords meeting at the Headquarters of Science for the Realm. Cersei paces back and forth in front of Program Knights. “I admit that we may have missed the boat on Black Powder” she says with visible irritation, “however, it is being developed in Cathay and it will be a while before  it becomes a problem for us.” “For now,” she continues “the main quest is transmutation.”  Program Knights shuffle nervously. As the Science for the Realm celebrates the second year, transmutation work became its only solicitation and in spite of great efforts there are no tangible results. “After the last round of PIs was impaled for the lack of progress, we do not have many new submissions” says Sir Ecurb trying to contain his short temper, “perhaps  we are being too harsh on the scientific workforce?” Cersei, whose staff consists mostly of lackeys, hates even a trace of disagreement. “Impaling is a correct response for failure,” she rules, “this is in line with procedures I developed for Sponsored Research Offices.”

An awkward pause ensues and Sir Mij fresh from his soujourn at the Wall picks this moment to bring the bad news - the Wall is melting. “Melting? Really?” sneers Cersei, “and what does it have to do with us?” Sir Mij is unfazed. “It would have helped to understand what does it mean to melt” he confronts Cersei “even if not much can be done about it." “I think we can answer this question with mathematics,” he adds hinting at a new solicitation. “Maaathematics??” Cersei is beyond herself, “these guys are one notch below dog catchers.”  This jostling continues for a while and nobody is happy. The seeds of discontent are firmly planted.

Missing dragon

Daenerys rides with Sir Sirhc to an urgent meeting with Lady Abiraf. Daenerys is despondent about her dragons. She locked two of them in the dungeon but the third one is missing.  “What kind of mother am I?” she asks indicating a peculiar interspecies bond. “I did not even name them!” she exclaims and starts sobbing uncontrollably. Her horse, a nasty and untrusting beast is spooked, and so is Sir Sirhc. He  is less direct than Jorah used to be but usually he sees many more moves ahead. “Maybe this meeting will help,” he ventures.

In short time they arrive at the military facility of some sort. Lady Abiraf greets them sitting on a camel and she waves for the show to begin. They are facing a large field littered with straw figures of knights, some holding black shields others white. “EMWF10!” yells one of the servants. There is a crushing noise and the third dragon emerges from the bushes.  His scales are bright green and he seems in top form. He flaps his wings excitedly seeing Daenerys and Lady Abiraf together.
“Crisping mode, white shields” screams the servant and the dragon takes off. Within minutes all knights holding white shields are burned to a crisp.
The dragon lands next to Daenerys and makes gurgling sounds while servants roll a barrel of broccoli mixed with kale. “He is fully vegetarian now” explains Lady Abiraf watching the dragon snacking.
Waves of pride and misery roll over Daenerys as she realizes that being a mother of dragons is a great deal more than she thought. “What does EMWF10 stand for?” “Emerging Military Workforce for 10th century, we had to name him somehow” answers Lady Abiraf. “Ooooh” moans Daenerys, jumps off her horse and runs to the nearest restroom to hide her misery.
“It is tough on her” says Sir Sirhc but Lady Abiraf’s thoughts are already elsewhere. “Do you think she would rent us the other two?” she probes “imagine them flying in formation…”

Friendly competition

Lady Abiraf funding agency gets off to a good start and it is a roaring success. Gone are two months of winter support. “All you can eat year round for three years” is the solicitation’s mouth watering promise. As if this is not enough they pledge that "No good idea is turned away” suddenly forgetting about their preoccupation with flying. In comparison Science for the Realm looks bureaucratic and narrow minded and the newcomers are exploiting this with ease.  Principal investigators from Science for the Realm are flocking to Lady Abiraf and healthy competition for the best ideas puts science and innovation forward. “All you can eat” funding mechanism is very advanced although soon enough some of the Lady Abiraf PIs are easily recognizable through their appearance and attitude.

Science and Tea

A delegation from Nippon comes for a visit and brings tea to the Seven Kingdoms. The ceremony is strange and exotic but it contains a potentially transformative idea. Tea drinking offers a pleasant alternative to scientific work and is more tailored to the upper class citizenry. Cersei seizes an opportunity to make a permanent mark on the society that science would never do. “Science is the best thing in the world, but perhaps not in this world,” she says somewhat cryptically and graciously agrees to leave the limping Science for the Realm in less able hands of her deputy, a nice and harmless fellow who remained completely invisible until now.

Cersei new task is to develop tea drinking habits for Seven Kingdoms.  It is a life changing goal and a tour de force of social engineering. She initiates procedures and rituals that shave off two afternoon hours a day from any class conscious citizen and provide a nice transition into nocturnal activities. Tea drinking, when taken seriously, is a clockwork operation where every detail matters and Cersei is just the person to make sure that it does. Burning on a stake, dismembering, and impaling await those who cannot accomplish excellence and become poor role models. In the end however, the leisure class is born and five o’clock tea time becomes an established custom in Seven Kingdoms for millennia to come.

Restorative Science

The 2016 US presidential election was a difficult business. Deep political divisions made a commitment to any particular issue a potential liability and consequently criticizing the past was an easiest choice for all candidates. Fraudulent and wasteful government spending was a safe drum to beat and it is no wonder that within days after the election the newly minted president created a committee, nicknamed Fraud Squad, that was charged with the task of digging up the truth behind the enormous financial footprint of the US government.

Science

The US academic community was clamoring about paucity of research funding and raising hell about inadequate support for discovery and innovation. Indeed, the expenditures represented a tiny blip in the entire budget. The Fraud Squad decided to take a look nonetheless. However, rather than to study the incremental data, the analysis was carried from the first principles.
For weeks Fraud Squad was inundated by torrent of data about publications, discoveries, institutes and other byproducts of academic pursuits. The data was vast and confusing and  committee members were scratching their heads trying to make sense of it.
In the end the conclusion stunned everybody - science is a pyramid scheme fabricated four centuries ago by a relatively small community who fancies the life of leisure. In a hindsight the truth was in plain view. Every scientific work is validated by other scientists, and for most part it is incomprehensible to the outsiders. The community manages itself regarding jobs, promotions, and governance and does not allow outsiders to meddle. There is constant demand for societal contribution fueled by enormous hutzpah of empty promises.   Most scientific discoveries are irrelevant while others create a horrendous burden, and  scientific community demands more and more resources to deal with the fallout. All of it was evidenced by a long parade of distinguished scientists admitting to not publishing enough, publishing too much, pursuing trite and irrelevant topics and generally having fun satisfying their curiosity at the society’s expense.

The reason why it took so much time to discover this fraud is that it is the only known case when such large community colluded to enrich themselves without creating obvious signs of abuse. However, for this scheme to work the scientists needed to peddle their incomprehensible  wares to the entire society and exact the contribution. And in the end this scientific proselytization brought the entire pyramid down.

Progress

Work of the Fraud Squad attracted a lot of attention and soon enough intellectuals started asking questions. After all, scientific advances are linked to societal progress and last several hundred years represent a giant leap forward. Isn’t it a contradiction with science being a pyramid scheme? Clearly there is a great deal of genuine scientific discoveries that are being made all the time.

At this point Fraud Squad was standing on rock solid conviction that their work is valid and it welcomed a new challenge. Yeah, progress through science - is there really such a thing? In  short few weeks the Fraud Squad discovered  the truth. In a nutshell, every human idea has its primary consequences, secondary consequences and so forth with no obvious bound. The primary consequences are easy to see and most prominent but the rest is rather opaque. As long as the spread of ideas is tightly contained everything works fine. But with unchecked proliferation, the secondary and tertiary consequences are multiplied million-fold by repeated applications and little understood phenomena emerge. Global warming, depletion of ozone layer, traffic congestion, pollution, nuclear contamination are just a few of the myriads of results of scientific discoveries applied on such unprecedented scale that their secondary consequences led  to the creation of a whole slew of new problems.
Working toilet, running water, electricity, internet, kitchen stove and a car in the garage - these signs of progress were never meant to be available to everybody. They represent a parasitic spread of scientific know-how propagated by the community that should have been watched more carefully.
"From one-percent to one-percent” was a slogan coined by the Fraud Squad to describe the  necessity of the containment of scientific output.

End of the Age of Enlightenment

After sounding death knell on science and progress, the concept of rational thought, the bulwark of Western Civilization came into plain view. Red-hot Fraud Squad was unstoppable at this point. In their own words “rational thought and scientific knowledge is a paper thin veneer of illusion laid on a solid core of chaos and randomness.”
"I know that I know nothing,” these words of Socrates challenged the generations of scientists who tried to prove them wrong. In the end of their findings the Fraud Squad confirmed Socrates’ primordial intuition and marked the end of science.

Indeed, the ability to abstract the universe in form of communicable ideas is uniquely human ability, and an evolutionary dead end as it seems. Nature does not need any thought at all, and even within human communities rational thought does not give an edge when confronted with irrational thought, a more prevalent modus operandi. With this conclusion the Fraud Squad closed the books on 400 years of Enlightenment and signaled the dawn of a new era of more modular society.

Reprieve

Hordes of marauding scientists were waiting for the executive orders that would complete the extinction of their disciplines. With the exception of mathematicians who were defunded years earlier and stopped paying much attention to political fads there was a lot of chest beating. Chemists took the blame for styrofoam cups, engineers for the coal-fired power plants and computer scientists finally admitted that if something has “science" in its name then it probably is not a science at all. The old custom of auto-da-fe came back and various scientific societies were marching on weekends self-flagellating and denouncing their leaders. In the end all this contrition paid back and the rescue came from an unlikely source.
In restorative yoga, props are used for support allowing you to open your body through passive stretching. The new Restorative Science aims at fixing the damage of old science and uses politicians, celebrities and practically anybody who is willing as props to keep the scientists from running ahead and loosing focus. The constraints of Restorative Science are significant and the emphasis is on broadening the horizons in a relaxed setting, something that was sorely missing in the academic environment.
Surprisingly, it turned out that unlike bankers and lawyers, the scientists are well liked and since they cost as much as what the country spends on potato chips nobody really minds if they do their nerdy stuff as long as they do not break anything. Unlike old science that not that many people cared about, Restorative Science is quite popular and “nerding out” became a fashion statement for people with more serious ambitions in life.