Fun fact about Christmas. In next 5 years tops, the north pole will completely melt in summer thereby drowning every last motherfucker that works and lives there!
There's one thing they aren't screaming about: how free will is a myth. It's a topic that gets shot down a lot.
That's barely an info dump on the subject. Observe -
Free will is a complicated subject. If there is a divine creation (or simulation or whatever) then then what started the universe was a seed - or rather a set series of circumstances that started everything. Then everything built on that leading to me writing and you reading this.
Free will is a choice - a decision to choose where your decisions come from. Are you truly in control or do you just choose the best possible outcome based on past relevant experiences? Obviously you will live with the consequences, no one's saying you wouldn't 👀
Regardless, we're all built on consequences of our past self which'll in turn become your new past self. And from there it'll continue till death. Obviously death itself is complicated and you'll eventually face it. And what happens afterwards is another conversation. But until then you'll make the most of everything you have. Every damn day.
Edit: formating
Actual genuine scientists tend to be the nerd type excited about whatever it is they're studying. They can't wait to tell you about the frequency oscillations of some quasar or the courtship rituals of hagfish or whatever.
The journals they have to publish in are shady as a cave though.
That secret being ‘the oil/sugar/etc lobby paid me to create this fake study to mislead you.’
"Agit-prop is a KIND of science . . . " (Lionel Hutz, probably)
It's a secret rouse so you won't suspect the stuff that they don't tell you and get together every few months to co-ordinate keeping under wraps.
You sound fun!
science makes me have faith in science.
Science is unironically one of the only things i ever trust because truth prevails, always...
Which, ironically, defeats the entire purpose of science.
thankfully i'm not a scientist, but if the people much smarter than me, and collective consensus say one thing, i'm likely to agree broadly with that sentiment. If not, same goes but in reverse.
Now if i were doing science on the other hand...
Science research on the one hand is cursed to follow the money.
My own experience leaves me a bit more optimistic, although I do see some cursed bits.
The presence of money in research depends greatly on the field and the ability of the scientists to make their research sound sexy. You can mask a lot of wierd niche basic research topics with sexy applied research talk.
Also, there's still a lot of science research without much money, being sustained by sheer enthusiasm.
I agree. A great example of why can be found in this excellent article about an extensive "dossier" of fraud allegations against a top Alzheimer's researcher: (https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion)
Specifically, this snippet:
"Microbiologist and research integrity expert Elisabeth Bik, who also worked on the Zlokovic dossier, contributed other Masliah examples and reviewed and concurred with almost all of the findings."
Elisabeth Bik is someone who has an incredible eye for fraudulently edited Western Blots images and someone I greatly admire. Calling her a "research integrity expert" is accurate, but what I find neat is that (to my knowledge) she doesn't have any particular training or funding towards this work. A lot of work she does in this area starts on, or is made public on PubPeer, an online forum. This is all to say that Elisabeth Bik's expertise and reputation in this area effectively stems from her just being a nerd on the internet.
I find it quite beautiful in a way, because she's far from the only example of this. I especially find it neat when non-scientists are able to help root out scientific fraud specifically through non-scientist expertise. As a scientist who often finds herself propelled by sheer enthusiasm, sometimes feels overwhelmed by the "Publish or Perish" atmosphere in research, and who worries about the integrity of science when there's so much trash being published, it's heartening to see that enthusiasm and commitment to Truth still matters.
Research is based on the so-called scientific method (therefore science) and that is something you can't proof, just belief in. But it's the best we have with extraordinary amount of evidence to back it up.
using the scientific method to demonstrate that the scientific method is the most effective method of science is definitely one of the moments of all time, for science.
There was this guy who spent his whole life in rural Arizona. All evidence indicated that the world is made of sand.
Never discount errors of perspective.
If you consider something that all scientists do then you might see a vast shared error.
It was evident that the world was bigger than what the guy saw, he was just not checking (lazy or insatiable or whatever) what's further. There is the difference.
This is why we put walls around our laboratories.
To form a solid base for the giant telescopes we put on them so we don't just see our small horizon.
At first I read "have you ever met a single scientist?" As in "don't you know they're all fuckin?"
Meet single scientists in your area. Click here.
We're all fucking all right. We are all fucking with the laws of nature. You like it when we stop your atoms moving and shine a laser at you, don't you, you dirty filthy condensate?
Laser bondage. Kinky
Beam me 'daddy'?
Here goes:
During my dissertation, I was lookig for information on the emissiom of 172nm scintillation light in mixtures of gaseous Xe and CO2 (95:5% - 98:2%), with results being difficult to come by. I found a collaborator who had tested this at lower CO2 concentrations (0-0.5%), but nothing else, no predictions or generalizable applications. Not knowing the optimal search engine terms or what textbook to look in for rules governing gaseous light emission, I ended up looking in fluorescence chemistry papers (my previous field of study) which had something called the Stern-Volmer relation for different concentrations of quenchant in a fluorescent solution. I figured gas scintillation queching was probably similar to liquid fluorescence quenching, but the standard relation didn't quite fit below 10% additive.
I dug around more and found a modification of this relation for diffusion-limited quenching of fluorescent solutions (the same limitation imposed in gas mixtures, quenching due to random Brownian collisions) that employed an exponential term, allowing for a smoother curve down to low additive concentrations. This perfectly matched the available data and allowed me to model the predicted behavior. I discussed this with the one member of my committee who was available, an organic chemist (my PI was on vacation, everyone else was sick, and my dissertation defense was in 2 weeks). He said my reasoning and math for using this formula made sense and gave me a thumbs up to include this analysis. When my PI came back from holiday, he asked me why I didn't use some equation generally used in the field, or even just a generic exponential fit. I was ignorant of his suggestion, but it provided the same general formulation as Stern-Volmer, though Stern-Volmer was more rigorously derived mathematically.
Mixing fields is super cool and can allow a much deeper understanding of the underlying principles, as opposed to limiting yourself to one branch of science. While my PI's recommendation would have given approximately the same answer, understanding and applying Stern-Volmer allowed me to really dig at the principles at play and generate a more accurate and in-depth model, which I managed to write up and defend at the 11th hour.
I understood so little of this lol. But good job.
The assignment was to infodump, so I will take that as a compliment. I was aiming for detailed and hyperspecific.
This is why the "secret scientists don't want you to know" always turns out to be some pseudoscience bs that at best is misinformation and at worst is actively harming people. So, yes, they are things scientists don't want you to know.
This is so true, and I can’t even type that without a severe eyeroll of agreement.
I think that’s why some people wax poetic on Reddit or Lemmy with very little provocation. Finally…a captive audience that might read this info, even if they’re just passing time on the shitter…
Yeah. No one cares if you're rambling in a comment. Just be interesting enough that someone can pause their doom scrolling to read it.
I personally have about 5 subjects where I can chime in with fun (to me) little facts.
Or essays on the subject...
Not a scientist. I have a litany of complex topics that I just can't really talk to anyone about. I'm a big computer networking nerd, and once upon a time, when I didn't know what I didn't know, I was curious what computer networking really entailed... It seemed dead simple, you connect things to a switch, connect that switch to the internet router, not much more.
Then I learned about VLANs, which are cool but it seemed like unnecessary complexity. Then I learned about Routing and L3 switching, and routing protocols and..... Holy shit, how deep is this?
Now-a-days, I want to have conversations about the merits of one routing protocol over another in various contexts, and see/build a spine and leaf network infrastructure that's nearly infinitely scalable.
I want to explore the nuance of IP unnumbered routing. I can't find anyone who will chat about it on a level that's close to my understanding, either someone knows way more than I do, or they know way less.
IP unnumbered routing is a way of connecting devices without setting an IP on the interface that is being routed to/from. The other end uses the routing protocol on top of layer 2, and while the two might have a router ID, often in the form of an IP address, the interface that is connecting the two has no IP. It's basically advanced point to point protocol (PPP) that breaks away from traditional TCP/IP routing in ways that people who have never used anything besides TCP/IP can't really comprehend. The two "IP addresses" (actually router IDs) in play can have nothing in common. Traditional TCP/IP requires that two IPs share a subnet. In routing, this is typically a /30 for IPv4, and the two IPs are adjacent to eachother, eg, 10.254.123.1 and 10.254.123.2 IP unnumbered can have 10.254.123.2 talking directly with 172.30.88.207, with no layer 3 interfaces in-between.
It's really fascinating and interesting and I've been trying to find a good model or guide to help me learn this better, but I keep ending up at dead ends, and I have nobody to talk to about it.
Sounds like you should look at IS-IS protocol if you haven't as that's very close to the ip unnumbered routing you were talking about. Though isis is usually deployed with its on the interface of each device, it doesn't have to be AFAIK.
I recently saw a post about Babel getting up unnumbered, and AFAIK OSPF and IS-IS have both had it for a while.
Implementations are spotty on support of unnumbered, there's still quite a few, mostly older OSPF devices that require an IP interface to communicate with another device for OSPF.
I've been trying to get a functional IP unnumbered lab up and running but there's a lot of unknown-unknowns for me still... At least when it comes to implementation.
Of course, a router ID is still a requirement, foreign devices still need a way to uniquely identify what device they're talking to.
Maybe I should try the lab with IS-IS, but I know less about IS-IS than I do about OSPF at the moment. I should change that.
maybe this wording works on a certain kind of voter because of the "fuck you I got mine" attitude, they probably think that if they were the scientist they would reap the benefits for themselves
benefits of what, grant money you can't get anymore because there's no more federal funding? Oops.
they wouldn't know about grants or how underpaid academics are in general, it's just a projection
Clearly those aren't real scientists. Real scientists have secret labs, where they do secret research.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
