Egg on their boffin faces

I don't understand science. And I don't just mean because I spent more time laughing at how my physics teacher, Mr. Dove, wore a polka dot bra under his Burton's short-sleeved shirt than I did listening to whatever it was he was saying through his beard about quantum mechanics and ticker tape machines.

No, I don't understand science because for a discipline that (unlike mine) relies so heavily on raw provable data, it is so obviously a specious load of horseshit. (Seriously, I checked, even going so far as to run a series of control experiments in bed this morning.)

Take eggs. For years we've been told that eggs are bad for us. Eggs are bad for us, we were told, because they raised our cholesterol levels. Sounds reasonable enough, right? I mean, when it comes right down to it, a raw egg even looks like a bunch of cholesterol in a shell-casing.

Well, no, actually, because now scientists are telling us they'd got it all wrong. Apparantly, eggs AREN'T bad for us, and they certainly do not raise our cholesterol levels.

Admittedly, this is just today's nutritional volte-face - tomorrow they'll be telling us wholegrain rice causes ingrowing toenails. But seriously, to ask the obvious question: HOW THE HELL COULD THEY HAVE ONLY JUST REALISED THIS? How is it that they (by which I mean, science morons in polka dot bras) could've come to the wrong (for now) conclusions about eggs for the past fifty sodding years? How bloody difficult is it to determine if eggs boost cholesterol?

I often wonder what exactly science has contributed to the past fifty years. Penicillin was discovered by accident, and yet that really was the last major achievement to come out of a laboratory - unless you count the 'genius' invention of the atom bomb ("Hey guys! I've invented a way to wipe out all of humanity! Let's celebrate in the pub!"). Since the penicillin mistake, we've pretty much invented nothing that will cure anything. Brilliant.

So this is why I've never really understood those who marvel at science. Computers are really not impressive, people (see here for an incisive investigation of this claim). And even if they were, Windows 2000 is hardly enough to justify all this unwavering faith in science and its big-breasted practitioners. I mean, come on! They've only just noticed that eggs aren't bad for you? To ask another obvious question: Given the eggs malarkey, how the hell are science boffs going to, say, predict global weather patterns over the next century, huh?

Just a thought.

[DISCLAIMER: For the record, I am not a denialist on the whole climate change thing. I have no doubt we are screwing up the environment left, right and centre. I just don't need a bunch of eggheads (in polka dot bras) to tell me that.]