Benefits of Fundamental Science.

At the Bolsheokhtinsk Cemetery in St. Petersburg there is a tomb with a butterfly wing. When you look at it, you can see that it is actually a tank. And the story will be about how an ordinary entomologist, all his life forging with insects, saved Moscow and Leningrad. The name of the scientist was Boris Švanvič. He spent his entire life studying butterflies, an absolute stupidity, according to the current people. And even then, from the point of view of the dictatorship of the proletariat, this was a real harm, an inadvertent spending of state money. Thank you for not being shot. And when the war began, it suddenly turned out that our cities and the army were completely defenseless against German bombers. The question arose, and how to actually disguise, so that the Germans could not see the same Kremlin or Smolny with the Winter Palace. Titled academics like Fersman could not say anything specific. It was then from hopelessness and pulled out this murky intellectual, washed, fed and ordered to work for the good of the Motherland. He once wrote books about the mimicry and masking of butterflies, let him describe how the masking grid for the Kremlin, the Great Theatre, the Winter Palace, etc. should look. What a guiding thought!! But it worked and literally a week later Boris Nikolaevich had already to Stalin on the layouts how to use the peeling of butterfly wings and the laws of stereomorphism to mask Moscow and Leningrad. In fact, it really saved our cultural values. And then it protected our tanks, our airfields. This is why, literally immediately after the liberation of Leningrad from the blockade in 1944!!! In Leningrad University was organized the department of entomology. And the touching arrival suddenly for everyone turned out to be a knight of the Order of Lenin - the highest order of the USSR.

What am I? Just learned recently that as a result of the optimization of science and education of this department, and others too, there are no more, as are the faculties. Indeed, why do we have the scaly wings of worms, when we need to squeeze oil and gas bubble, to squeeze mani mani mani mani...