Entries tagged with science

Today when I wanted to be excited about the successful Mars landing (!) I encountered the opinion "we shouldn't fund NASA/space programs because there are so many things on Earth where the money would be more useful," and (apart from how many scientific advances are thanks to space programs, and how many other things could be defunded first, like the military, etc.) it occurred to me that there are people who look up at the night sky and just don't care what's out there. Or at least not enough to spend resources on finding out. (The countries with space programs don't really have resource problems, they have resource allocation problems.) And part of me gets it - there are so many problems on Earth that look more immediate and pressing and so on - but on the other hand I also can't really imagine a reality in which humans don't reach for the stars. As a group, we're curious, that's what we do. It would be boring otherwise.

I had a class on doing research and how to properly cite sources in my first bachelor's program, for social science and business etc. So when I had to take the same class again for my degree in law I thought I would learn how to do research related to court cases etc, but that the citation norms would be pretty much the same.
Instead, they're completely different. For example, unlike social scientists, jurists (in Austria, idk how international the standards are) don't care about who published a book or where, and they don't usually use first names, only initials.

Also, "Festschrift" (apparently also the English term) are very popular. If jurists really like and admire someone, they get together and write articles that will then be published as a book for their anniversary/birthday etc. On the one hand, annoying, because articles in those are harder to find online than those published in journals; on the other hand, very understandable for people with an ego because you definitely remember someone's name if you keep having to cite the book named after them.

...I'm procrastinating on writing my paper for the research and citation class *sigh*

space&planets

no citation provided