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[the trippy trip]
CNN
āPlan Beeā is a personal robotic bee designed to mimic how bees pollinate flowers and crops
cnn.it/2lQKbuY
[jakĆ¼b]
instead of saving the environment and helping actual bees letās spend billions on robots that do what bees would do for free
donāt you just love capitalismā¦
[pts-m-d]
Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die
[curlicuecal]
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing the the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it aināt 't glamorous, but if someone doesnāt do it, no one gets to know for sure whatās there.
Someoneās gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, Iām grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didnāt, I might have to, and I donāt wanna.
But letās talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And Iāll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
- -advances in robotics
- -advances in miniature robotics
- -advances in flight technology
- -advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
- -ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
- -ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
- -less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
- -ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
- -fucking robot bees, my friend
- -hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if itās also associated with something (gasp) āinappropriateā, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of womenās issues, lgbtq+ issues, minoritiesā issues, and vulnerable groups in generalās issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything thatās acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
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Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: āNice work, college boy.ā It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: āSo you proved that plants grow better when theyāre watered? Nice work, college boy.ā
But like, the thing is? Thereās always more details than that. And a lot of times itās important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
āgrats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesisā ā I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
[downtroddendeity]
@curlicuecal
Iād also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you canāt always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples wonāt come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them āDonāt go into the Gala field next doorā and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
[stirringwind]
Can I mention that reverse engineering shit from nature and in the process learning how it works is also a way weāve developed technologies that have far wider application too?
[teacupthesauceror-blog]
Also have we not learned from sociology that āwater is wetā studies are actually hugely important as both proof against water deniers and getting clear on what water and wetness are
Yes! I was getting ready to be annoyed by this post before I got to the main response because there are so many snarky edgelords online who have decided to make everything is shit and nothing less than a complete overhaul of global economics will placate me their personality. Just because shitting on things makes you feel good doesnāt mean itās helping.
I call it āthe glorification of defeatā and I genuinely think itās a serious issue online. We need hope, optimism and positivity to help with our fight against the effects of climate change, not rampant doomerism.
The contemporary term is ādoomerismā I believe. Iām still suspicious about robot bees except as a learning tool. Iāve spent too much time in tech, so they just sound like the result of some tech bro saying ābeesā¦ 2.0ā in a meeting, and all the investors going š¤
I know this particular one started out as a student project, but itās not the first
I mean, remain cautious sure, but letās not fall into the same trap detailed in the original post - i.e dismissing scientific improvement just because it doesnāt fit our own ideas of a āsolutionā.