• Technus@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      “It’s just a theory” is the most irritating and ignorant argument made by science deniers, but you can’t correct them without sounding like a pedantic asshole.

      That’s one thing (of many) that really annoyed me about MatPat’s “theory” channels is he used that as a slogan. He’s hailed as this great YouTube educator yet continued to happily perpetuate the misconception that “theory” is synonymous with “tenuously connected set of ideas formed from 3 hours of Googling stuff in your underwear”.

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Yeah, that one stood out to me, too. The green guy saying “it’s not a theory” is incorrect - it’s just not the colloquial definition that the blue guy is using. Why couldn’t “hypothesis” have been used instead, since it’s closer to the definition you said at the end of your comment? “But that’s just a hypothesis - a game hypothesis!”

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I want a bioengineer to make me Dino Nuggets.

    They probably taste like chicken nuggets. But, maybe not. It’s for science!

    • Technus@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      Natural History Docent: “A guy asked us ‘If I had a time machine, and managed to kill and cook a T-Rex, what would it have tasted like?’ and every paleontologist on staff deciced to take him seriously. They did research to learn about fat distribution, and read up on culinary science to learn what flavors meat, even did chemical analysis on the bones. They concluded that it’d be Tough (no evidence of juicy fat pockets), bitter (carnivores tend to taste foul) and would probably kill him, because heavy metals travel up the food chain and T-Rex accumulated a lot of the cadmium that was in the dirt in the late cretaceous. Wrote him a letter with our findings and he sent us back a drawing of him and his buddies cooking a T-Rex over a fire and all of them throwing up and dying, and it’s my favorite drawing in the whole world.”

      http://web.archive.org/web/20220823234045/https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/611813717676589056/weird-questions

      For some reason, my memory was really confident that this was a question on Randall Munroe’s what if? blog, but I couldn’t find it. I even checked the copy I have of the first what if? book to be sure it wasn’t in there lol

      • skulblaka@startrek.website
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        7 months ago

        It’s an extremely Randall sort of question and answer, to be fair.

        But holy shit, some of these other ones are amazing. The T-Rex question isn’t the only one in there worth reading.

        Professor: “A student asked me “So how do I use this in a conversation when my aunt is wine-drunk at thanksgiving and being a jerk again?” Which honestly is a fair question about philosophy and really changed how I teach rhetoric.”

        • Technus@lemmy.zip
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          7 months ago

          I love that post. As with many things, I originally came across it as a screenshot on /r/tumblr. I figured it’d be better received if I went for an archive link of the actual post rather than reposting the screenshot.

          A couple more of my favorites:

          • Park Ranger: “I’m so glad the Japanese couple asked me “Is bear spray like mosquito spray and it goes on the jacket, or on the bear?” instead of just trying it.”

          • Zookeeper: “People call us becuase they think they’ve found an escaped animal all the time, or they think they’re neighbor’s husky is a wolf. One guy asked me if his dog was part hyena because it had spots. But that one guy really did have a Tiger in his toolshed that one time so we try to take them seriously.”
  • OmegaMouse@pawb.social
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    7 months ago

    Idk, it seems like some mathematicians study weird numbers that aren’t… Things like number theory - what the hell is going on there??

      • Technus@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        What has group theory really done besides give negative proofs, like that there’s no general algebraic solution for quartic polynomials and higher?

        Any math that only tells you what isn’t possible is sad math.

        ^^^/s

  • Dabundis@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Not heresy, apostasy. A heretic worships god wrong. An apostate worships the wrong god. (“wrong” as defined by the church, of course)

  • lowleveldata
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    7 months ago

    What isn’t yet

    I too, am very enthusiastic in automating all works that isn’t yet so that everyone can lose their job promptly

  • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This meme is trash.

    Philosophy asks “What is?” There is literally a field of philosophy called ontology about the question of being.

    Man, STEM folks are ignorant af. I say that as a STEM-philosophy double major.