He has a master’s degree, IN SCIENCE
*goes to visit Goop site*
Gee that looks familiar. It looks like Ivanka. They should team up – Gwyneth and Ivanka, GI for short. Government Issue or GastroIntestinal, whatever.
There are photos of very thin very clean very blond very pale ladies all over, along with photos of the shoes and tops and bags they might like to buy purchase.
There’s a piece on the Illuminati, and another on Ancient Civilizations. There’s an ad for magical fruit juice.
Within that section, there’s a section for Detox Shops. Of course there is.
There’s also a very sciency page where a guy called Bruce Lourie answers all the questions about is detox really not bullshit at all are you sure?
Bruce holds a B.Sc. in Geology and a Master’s in Environmental Studies.
Close enough!
Which may mean nothing at all. I’ve discovered to my horror that, at least for some colleges, Environmental Studies is a program that has been created for people who want to study Environmental Science, but don’t want to take any science courses. So they are ejected into the world with a degree people assume means something, but it basically means “I’m going to get the job as a ‘sustainability coordinator’ without actually understanding how the world works, except for a handful of courses on environmental business practices, and a lot of cliches grabbed from Google”
Well, with a geology degree, at least Goop can be sure of sourcing only the *highest* *quality* jade eggs.
Reminds me of last Saturday evening when I was at a BBQ dinner party listening to a civil engineer (who runs a company that does environmental analysis and Superfund cleanup) deny AGW, on the basis that the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is so tiny that it can’t possibly make a difference, and claim that the CO2 concentration in 1200CE was higher than today. (And I silently gritted my teeth, because I was a guest at a social gathering at someone else’s house, and the AGW denier was an out-of-town visitor, and I am a polite Canadian.)
TheoBromine, don’t get me started on engineers – I’ve worked with many of them during my career as an environmental scientist, and they are not trained on the science, and the ones I worked with were almost routinely deniers. The bulk of the engineers employed in Clean Air Act permitting where I used to work were scornful of the Clean Air Act regulations, and felt their main job was finding a way for the corporations to be able to do what they felt was necessary. To them, the job was a great place because they could keep the “environmental lunatics” from actually enforcing the regulations. To my knowledge, there were only two Democrats in the entire office – myself, and my immediate supervisor. We were also the only ones with biology degrees. The office was filled with engineers and business majors.
When I was working on my Ph.D., the only engineer in the department felt that it was much more important to stop abortion than to stop global warming, because abortion was killing people and global warming was mostly a hoax (he seemed to accept the world was warming, but felt it was just a natural cycle and not very severe).
Engineers do not equal climate scientists, but most people don’t realize the difference. If it looks sciency and sounds sciency, it’s science.
I hope that’s just the bicycle seat I can see rather than a horrendous side-effect of forcing out all those jade eggs.
How to detox, by Dr. Andrew, College Dropout
Step 1) Just sit there and let your liver do its work
TB and Inknklast, I trained as a chemist with a sub major in geology. Since leaving research I have worked in a range of fields, but have interacted with many many engineers. You meet the odd great one, but they are depressingly ignorant of science and the fuzzy chaotic way the real world acts. I suspect it is part because the discipline works in quite a reductive way. It has to, or they would never get stuff done. I have had the exact same conversations with multiple engineers about AGW and CO2. Even when I pointed them at published rebuttals from organisations like the Royal Society, explaining exactly why trace levels of certain gases have effects way beyond their concentration, they still wouldn’t budge.
That said, I know four(!) who are liberal.
@Rob: Two more, if that wasn’t already including me and Theo. It seems to me that this is related to the Salem Hypothesis, according to which creationists and other pseudoscience devotees disproportionately turn out to be engineers. Both the reality and the causes of the phenomenon were perennial subjects of discussion on talk.origins, back when that was my favorite online haunt.
FWIW, when I was a graduate teaching assistant for introductory physics labs (primarily taken by engineering students), it was a running joke among my colleagues about the misplaced confidence engineering students seem to have on subjects they don’t really understand.
Expanding on @musubk’s comment:
One thing about engineering these days is that in many areas it is relatively straighforward to do fairly impressive-looking things as long as you stay within prescribed boundaries. Which makes it easy (and tempting) for engineers to become arrogant, and extend this to claiming expertise outside of their fields.
It’s an ancient problem:
— Apology
Steve and Theo, always happy to add to the small pool of great people I know who happen to be engineers!
HEY!!!!!
Actually, you’re probably right, carry on.
She does look very pretty riding her bike…without a helmet, but surely she has her spf 0 Goop lotion.
And what are helmets and sunscreen…engineering controls. As much as it pains me to say (as a physicist) that engineers are largely without any aesthetics, they provide most of what makes my life worthwhile.
She is pretty. As my mum used to say “All that blisters is not gold”.
Sunscreen an engineering control? Chemists might have something to say about that.
@Rob #15:
The mechanism by which sunscreens operate is in the domain of chemists. The mechanism by which bike helmets prevent head injuries (for those who wear them) is in the domain of physicists and biologists. But the design required to render the UV-blocking chemicals into a lotion is chemical engineering, and the design of a wearable helmet incorporating shock-absorbing materials is mechanical engineering.
Yes, the problem with engineers seems to come up a lot when talking about the fringe. Remember “Engineers for 9/11 Truth?” Conspiracy theories seem to be common, and politics are a train wreck; look at the number of Randroids running around Silicon Valley, or the percentage of jihadists in the Middle East who are engineers. It seems to be an extreme case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It isn’t what engineers know, but what they never have time to learn because engineering crowds it all out.
I’m fairly sure we’re not all quite that bad.
Of course you’re not all that bad.
Theo, the initial formulation of the sunscreen will be done by chemists and / or pharmacists with particular expertise in creating cosmetics. The chemical engineer doesn’t come into the picture until you need to figure out how to scale up production from a few litres to a few cubic metres. Sometimes bench techniques are not practical when scaled.
Meh, I’ll take it.
It’s not like we get much recognition for, you know, making everything ;)
Rob:
I’m an electrical engineer – in my area (mostly electronics), engineering does encompass both small scale benchwork and large scale production. I’ve also worked closely with some mechanical engineers who do small scale protoype work and some who do industrial processes (and some who do both). I did not realize that the chemical engineers would only be involved in industrial-scale projects. I still think that if the idea is to produce a technology that has practical use, it’s engineering, regardless of whether the people doing the work are chemists or pharmacists.