WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on US infrastructure could crumble under cyberattack, ex-NSA advisor warns 1 hour ago:
The NSA knows just how many backdoors and security holes are in US infrastructure. After all, who do you think put them there?
- Comment on Southern Baptists to Vote on Effort to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage 1 day ago:
They’re devil worshipers. Anyone with that much hate in their religion worships Satan. The Republican party is run by devil worshipers.
- Comment on Pull to enter, you say? 6 days ago:
Truthfully it’s a design issue. If people keep coming up to a door and pulling on it, it’s because the design of the door is instructing them to do so. Design imparts information. A door in a home can have simple knobs - anyone living there can just learn which doors to push/pull. A door in a public space instead needs to be designed to tell people how to operate it, even without any labeling.
A door is a simple device. It shouldn’t require reading labels or a manual. It’s operation should be abundantly obvious. After all, even those who don’t speak the language or are illiterate need to be able to operate doors. A door that needs instructions is one that is poorly designed.
- Comment on Realistically 1 week ago:
Oh, hey, it’s Pseudotsuga menziesii.
- Comment on Considering the old model is made with shrink-wrapping this is viable option 1 week ago:
Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There’s fundamentally just a lot we don’t know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we’ve learned a lot more. We’ve become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I’m not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.
But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn’t have this “shrink wrapped” appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it’s plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn’t a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn’t a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn’t one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?
Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.
Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.
- Comment on I am not a builder… but that does not seem right 1 week ago:
I do that on my husband. He’s never too amused.
- Comment on I am not a builder… but that does not seem right 1 week ago:
This is some environmental storytelling right here. I see a story of an electrician, all out of appropriate lengths of wood, working past five on the night before the drywallers show up.
- Comment on No looky for you! 1 week ago:
Because people like watching the spinny go spin.
- Comment on No looky for you! 1 week ago:
There’s also just no point. What exactly would one hope to accomplish in having a window in their dishwasher? With a microwave, you can monitor food and make sure it’s not boiling over, smoking, exploding, etc. With an oven, you can monitor goods to see if they’re done or not. But a dishwasher? Unlike a cooking device, there’s no harm in leaving dishes in the dishwasher too long. You don’t need to pull them out at just the exact moment they’re fully clean.
Unless you’re one of those weirdos that cooks things in their dishwasher, I can’t see any reason why you would need a window in one.
- Comment on Canon requires an account to transfer images from your camera. Forces you to sign up using Chrome. 1 week ago:
It may not be a law, but when NVidia has numerous contracts with the federal government, and the feds ask NVidia to do them a favor…Well, NVidia does it. That assumes they didn’t secretly order NVidia to do so via some obscure provision in a national security law.
- Comment on what's the word for a leg elbow? 2 weeks ago:
You mean…your knee?
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
You shapeshift, including your mind. When you change into a person, you take on all of their memories as well. You become a complete copy, and the old you simply ceases to exist. If you turn yourself into Donal Trump, there’s just a random copy of the president sitting in your apartment, utterly confused about where he is or how he got there. And the ability to shapeshift was a power of your old body. The new one can’t shapeshift.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
The new rails are completely useless as they do not have the requisite slopes or curve radii to be usable by locomotives.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
You can captivate the attention of any child. You’re a comedian or magician that would absolutely kill it at any children’s birthday party. You would be a fantastic teacher as you can hold the wrapped attention of even the most tiktok-corrupted teen.
Except, there’s just one small problem…
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
You DM becomes your literal dungeon master. You’re literally chained naked in a basement, forced to play endless games of DND.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
Your memory is so bad that you need a binder full of photos just to find your way home from work each night. You can only remember things through photographs.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 2 weeks ago:
You become the character. The character becomes you in the real world.
- Comment on Anon isn't fooled by planes 2 weeks ago:
As long as the tanker weights less than the weight of all that water it displaced, it will float.
But that’s only because of the spell that the ancient Wizard Archimedes cast in the elder days. Archimedes didn’t discover his principle, he molded reality to follow his rule.
- Comment on Anon isn't fooled by planes 2 weeks ago:
Sorry. It’s real but gay. Nothing as phallic as an airliner can be straight.
- Comment on Spoon 3 weeks ago:
They should have actually engineered the spoons to be even better as drug spoons. Tell everyone they’re engineering them to work poorly with PCP. But in reality, they got a lab full of drug users offering pointers on how to improve the product and people using them and filling out little ratings cards as they go. They only stumbled into this by accident. But imagine what they could have accomplished if they deliberately engineered the perfect PCP spoon!
- Comment on sus 5 weeks ago:
Trust isn’t the issue. Probability is. Even without deception, there’s a chance someone can have an STD without knowing it. And there’s a chance that std won’t show up on testing due to incubation times, dormancy phases, and false negatives.
Imagine there is a 1% chance of your partner having an STD without knowing it. 1% doesn’t sound too bad an odds. But if you have 50 partners in an extended polycule, then the chance that at least one of them unknowingly has one is 1-(.99)^50, or 39%. Probabilities compound.
- Comment on Philosophy moment 1 month ago:
That’s the policy at most schools. Actually enforcing that in the face of a classroom of kids who don’t respect the rule? That’s a much bigger problem. They’re a lot more clever at sneaking them out than you would think. Moreover, if the phones are just feet from them, their presence is never out of mind. They’re a constant distraction even in a bag. Phone apps are literally designed to be addictive. Imagine if we had a rule that said “crack pipes are fine in your bag. As long as you don’t take them out and smoke in class, you’re fine.” Even if we lived in a world where crack somehow was legal for minors to have, how effective to you think that rule could be enforced?
- Comment on Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads 1 month ago:
“Also, may he be abducted by aliens, whisked away to a distant galaxy, and put on permanent display in an alien zoo as an example of the greed of homo sapiens.”
- Comment on This is so strange! Usually, they wait 15 days to elect a new Pope. We could be seeing history in the making. 1 month ago:
After all, nothing more saintly than shooting a man in the back!
- Comment on Should naming your children stupid names be illegal? 1 month ago:
I think we shouldn’t even have legal names anymore. Nor legal sex/gender. Why does the government even need to keep track of my name at all? Maybe we just have a number tied to our biometric data. Maybe our profile is just defined facial scans, iris scans, thumb scans, and, for ultimate proof, our DNA profile. The state has a profile number on you that ties you to your biometrics. That sounds scary, but the government already has a profile on you if you have any kind of state-issued ID. And states are already collecting biometric data on their citizens.
We could simply tie all state business to an ID number and biometric data profile. When doing a transaction with some other party, the same biometrics could be used to prove your ID. Buying beer at the store? You hand the cashier a card that has your photo and ID number on it. They can type that number in their computer, query a state database, and return your age. Opening a bank account? Prove your ID with ID card and at least two forms of biometric scan. Signing up for a mortgage? Prove your identity with a DNA test.
We don’t even need legal names. Or legal genders. Let’s just do everything with biometric data, photo IDs, and other methods devoid of all the cultural baggage. Let people call themselves whatever they want. Let others choose how to honor that choice.
You want to change your gender? Have at it, the state doesn’t care about your sex or gender at all. It doesn’t even keep track of it. Give your kid a stupid name? At any time, they can start telling their friends to call them by a different one And that new name will instantly have all the legal power as the one their parents gave them - none whatsoever. The state will no longer tell us what our names are. Our words and character will do that instead.
- Comment on Losing International Students Could Devastate Many Colleges 1 month ago:
No joke, this is going to be devastating for the international wood science community.
- Comment on Accurate 1 month ago:
Sure. But if civilization collapses in the meantime, then there won’t be anyone enforcing copyright laws. Or copyright could be abolished entirely. IDK what the future holds. Obviously things can radically change between now and then. The best predictions we can make of the future are just extrapolating the present forward.
- Comment on Accurate 1 month ago:
Bert and Ernie appeared in the pilot episode of Sesame Street in July of 1969. They will enter the public domain on January 1, 2065. In approximately 40 years, it will then be legal for anyone to create and publish hardcore gay pornos featuring the Bert and Ernie characters.
- Comment on Leaked White House Document Reveals Monster Budget Cut Proposal For Federal Health Agencies 1 month ago:
I’m sure that will get the birth rate back up real quick.
- Comment on Anon plays old games 1 month ago:
This man isn’t wise, he’s just Grandpa Simpson.
