squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on Reality vs Fantasy 2 days ago:
Tell that to British midlanders: “Can I have a glass of wo’a?”
- Comment on ⚡️👇👇👇⚡️ 2 days ago:
On the one hand you are right, on the other hand, especially paleontology is basing their facts on very, very shaky evidence and a massive amount of extrapolation.
So I assume that it’s wrong until undeniably proven otherwise by the scientific method.
So you assume everything is wrong? Because in fact, that’s not how the scientific method works at all.
Outside of the very few fields that are pure and untouched by reality, like e.g. maths, there are no proofs, and certainly no undeniable proofs in science. Everything is “just” a theory and is used until proven wrong or otherwise refined. Usually a theory with a decent amount of evidence, but nothing is proven beyond deniability in science. That’s religion you are thinking about.
- Comment on Plant Slurs 5 days ago:
And that’s the actual definition of a weed: If you don’t want it there, it’s a weed. If you do, it’s not.
- Comment on Plant Slurs 5 days ago:
Don’t smoke dandelions.
- Comment on Plant Slurs 5 days ago:
My definition: aggressive spread and resilience to removal.
That fits to a lot of useful plants too. Strawberries, Brambles, Mint, just to name a few.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I watched a let’s play and the beginning was incredibly cool and then the grind hit. It became even too boring to just watch next to work.
- Comment on All downhill from there 1 week ago:
That’s probably part of the reason why the evidence of persistence hunting being used as an actual hunting technique, compared to ambush hunting or trapping is incredibly slim. And that’s the reason why there’s really no scientific consensus that persistence hunting was a major thing at all.
- Comment on All downhill from there 1 week ago:
Contrary to modern-day physics, the “persistence hunting” thing is very much not a scientific consensus. It’s more of a fringe idea supported by hardly any science that somehow made it into popular science.
There’s about as much credible evidence to that theory as there is to the theory that eating chocolate helps with loosing weight.
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 1 week ago:
I’m not doubting you at all, but how dumb does one have to be to tailgate a bus? As if you can force a bus into anything.
If you tailgate a larger vehicle, all you do is put yourself into mortal danger.
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 1 week ago:
It’s not just petty, it’s safety.
You can’t influence the size of the safety margin between you and the car behind you. But you can influence the speed at which the person behind you slams into you in case of an accident, by reducing the speed that both of you drive.
- Comment on Anon describes experience 1 week ago:
At the written maths finals in my country there’s first a timebox where the teacher goes through all tasks to make sure that everyone understands what is asked. During that portion the headmaster is present and students are allowed to ask questions. After that the headmaster leaves and nobody is allowed to talk any more.
So the teacher shows us this one task, and it’s a 3D geometry task. I look through it and notice that there’s one angle missing. There’s an infinite number of correct solutions with the given requirements. So I raise my hand and ask about that.
My teacher looks straight past me at the back wall of the classroom, completely stone faced and says “I am sure that the requirements are complete. They cannot be incomplete.” I hold my tongue.
As soon as the headmaster leaves, my teacher all but runs up to my desk and asks me what he missed.
Turns out, I was right and he just put a random number on the chalkboard to be used as the missed requirement.
If he had admitted in front of the headmaster that the requirements were incomplete, then the whole maths finals would have to be postponed and redone.
- Comment on Let people enjoy things 🙄 1 week ago:
Thanks a lot for the summary! Hard to find information like that.
Is there a theme or something to the posts there?
- Comment on EVERYBODY IS DOING SOMETHING 1 week ago:
Harry Potter, especially in the first few books, is really not hard fiction at all. Rowling’s worldbuilding is only there to make for a nice, somewhat magical backdrop for a children’s story. Close to none of the in-universe rules she sets up really work if you look at them hard enough.
It starts with Wingardium Leviosa (and many other spells) blatantly breaking the laws of thermodynamics, thus allowing for infinite energy generation and thus infinite matter generation, but this continues not only throughout the magic system but also throughout every other system she sets up. Because most of it is nothing but a whimsical caricature of real things.
The money system is a caricature of the old British pre-decimal £sd money system.
Quidditch is a caricature of football (thousands of ways to perform a foul), rugby (brutal tackling and violence on the pitch) and cricket (a game can last for months) rolled into one.
The house system and house cup are only slightly embellished versions of what exists in real-life British boarding schools.
Just a few examples. The books are specifically not written in a rational-logical way. Attacking that is so easy that it’s just boring. It’s like proving that raindeer noses don’t glow bright or that gingerbread lacks the static properties to be used to build life-sized houses for witches.
- Comment on EVERYBODY IS DOING SOMETHING 1 week ago:
Was that Harry Potter and the methods of rationality?
I read the first dozen or so chapters maybe 10 years ago, until I realized that the total number of chapters approaches infinity and it got pretty boring after some time.
- Comment on Let people enjoy things 🙄 1 week ago:
I get headaches from caffeine. I prefer to go without headaches.
- Comment on Let people enjoy things 🙄 1 week ago:
Btw, what does 196 stand for?
- Comment on Let people enjoy things 🙄 1 week ago:
This.
Drinking is not a requirement. And if it is, you need better friends.
- Comment on Let people enjoy things 🙄 1 week ago:
In some countries you can even lose your (car) driving license when cycling drunk.
- Comment on Let people enjoy things 🙄 1 week ago:
TIL that I have been living dead for the last 30-odd years.
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
I totally get your point.
I think the rule of “cleared its own orbit” tried to be less arbitrary and failed horribly.
A size threshold is clearly more consistent, but it’s purely arbitrary, while the “cleared its own orbit” rule at least has the appearence of not being totally arbitrary, even though it introduces just the problem you are describing.
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
What kind of toes?
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
Pluto is a dog!
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
The main issue here is that everything from a speck of dust to the massive black hole at the centre of the galaxis is pretty much the same thing on a large spectrum.
You can clearly say that some grains of dust are something entirely different than a supermassive black hole, but it’s really hard to find solid cut-off points to categorize anything in between.
So we started with a handful of arbitrary examples for each category, which was easy when we only had these examples, but with more and more discoveries the gaps between these examples are filled and it becomes a spectrum, and then it becomes iffy what exactly fits into which category.
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
Well, it is widely know.
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
Any time you cut off a spectrum you get weirdness around the edges.
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
And this is why nobody asks for fishos’s opinion on how to name things.
- Comment on >:( 1 week ago:
You are confusing science (the process of discovering understanding of reality) with truth (how the world “really” is).
“Real science” like you describe can almost by definition not exist. Science is costly, both in time and in money. People don’t just spend lots of time and money just because. For that kind of investment you need some kind of motive, some reason. And as soon as you have that, you are into politics and emotions.
- Comment on Is anyone else not feeling that patriotic for July 4? 1 week ago:
Fair.
- Comment on Is anyone else not feeling that patriotic for July 4? 1 week ago:
It does make sense though. The main motivator for politicians is power. That means, naturally political systems flow towards maximizing power for those in power, that’s just the natural progression.
To change this, major political upheavals are necessary, so basically events where the whole old leadership is tossed out and the new leadership can try to setup something to stop the same thing from happening again.
WW2 was perfect for that. All those countries were in need of a completely new political system and thus they could be built better from the ground up.
The US never had any event like that (apart maybe from the civil war).
To change the system without such an event, two thirds of all relevant politicians would have to vote for changing the system that brought them to power. Not likely to happen.
- Comment on shrooms 1 week ago:
Now I’m hungry.
