From the Creationist Wiki, which is apparently a thing that exists.
No evidence for feathered dinosaurs. Right.
There have been some fake fossils from China. So? These have been uncovered very quickly, and the vast majority are reputable. And other countries have fossil fakers too – why does China always get singled out?
Creationists or not, people who reject genuine evidence *AREN’T SCIENTISTS*!!!!!
That’s it. That’s the end. That’s the fact. There’s no more to that statement.
Also what is the deal with these people always using the word “prove”? First thing you learn about science is the scientific method. Things can either be supported or fail to be supported by evidence. There is no “proving” anything. If you can’t be bothered to understand the most basic concept of science then no one in the field has any reason to take you seriously.
I titrated (white zinfandel) wine with an autotitrator earlier today to find out it’s acidity and it changed colors all on it’s own; without using an indicator.
Yes but can I drink it?
Yeah; it has a nice robust finish of sodium hydroxide.
If it’s a neutral solution is probably fine. I don’t think NaOH is toxic when in a low pH solution.
I titrated it with a weak acid (or weak acids since there’s several in wine) and way past the equivalence point/s; so it’s mostly basic.
fun fact! mirrors reflect each color equally, except for green. if you have ever seen a mirror perfectly aligned in front of another mirror, a.k.a. an infinite mirror, you can look through it and see that it becomes greener and greener. therefore, mirrors are technically green!
holy shit
The glass is greener over here. Not a typo.
If you look edgewise through a sheet of glass you see that it’s green because of iron impurities (Google for it). Reducing the iron reduces the green.
Perfectly aligning mirrors to multiply reflections also multiplies the apparent thickness of the glass, and the green tint becomes more apparent the “deeper” each reflection seems to be.
Science is like history: it was never this interesting at school. 🙂
Yep! And this is because – I’m sorry to say – mirrors are not a unique or separate substance with magical properties. Mirrors are silvered glass. They have two colors: the color of the silver, and the color of the glass. The “silver” doesn’t have to be silver, though it usually is because mirrors are traditionally made with silver nitrate, because it’s a whitish metal. You can have mirrors silvered in gold or black or red. You take literally any piece of glass, pour a coating of silver on it, seal it, and call it a mirror.
You have to seal it because otherwise it tarnishes and spots. Even though the glass protects it from air, the silver oxidizes just like any other silver, which is why antique mirrors have that funky age-spotted look.
Mirrors used in science are usually pure clear glass with no impurities (so the glass has no color) and are silvered in gold or aluminum, so they are white or gold. A warm-toned mirror would have a pink glass and would make things have a rose-gold look. Phryne Fisher, in the books, has a mirror with pink glass.
(Mirrors silvered in silver – that is, most mirrors you’ve seen – are probably faintly grey from the silver and faintly green from the cheap glass, but it doesn’t need to concern you at all – even if you noticed a strong color, you’re often so used to looking in them that your brain edits out any discrepancy – like how your nose doesn’t get in the way of your vision even though it’s right in front of your eyes all of the time.)
My grandmother had a mirror that was silvered in gold. It was a little disconcerting. The silver in mirrors is why vampires don’t have reflections. (And why the cutlery at Castle Dracula was made of gold.)
IS THAT TRUE ABOUT THE REFLECTIONS BECAUSE IF SO THAT CHANGES ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING???
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a protein that exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to light in the blue to ultraviolet range. Although many other marine organisms have similar green fluorescent proteins, GFP traditionally refers to the protein first isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria. Jellyfish-derived GFP has been engineered to produce a vast number of useful blue, cyan and yellow mutants, and fluorescent proteins from a variety of other species have also been identified, resulting in further expansion of the available color palette into the orange, red and far-red spectral regions. Together, these highly useful genetically encoded probes are broadly referred to as fluorescent proteins The FP gene can be introduced into organisms and maintained in their genome through breeding, injection with a viral vector, or cell transformation. Green fluorescent protein has transformed biomedical research. Using a gene that carries instructions to make GFP, scientists can attach harmless glow-in-the-dark tags to selected proteins, either in cells in lab dishes or inside living creatures, to track their activity. It’s like shining a flashlight on the inner workings of cells. These days, scientists can track how cancer cells spread, how HIV infections progress and even which male ends up fertilizing a female fruit fly’s egg. These and many other studies that offer insight into human health all benefit from a green, glowing protein first found in a sea creature.
What the fuck is she even talking about? What’s the new feminist pet issue? I don’t understand this about science and something about a yeast infection spreading in her body? What did they do that she’s bitching about
Something is sexist, that’s all we’re told
OK so I think she’s mixing up health ed with institutional science because they’re similar in that she doesn’t know anything about either because she chose to go into women’s studies, except for that one employment quip to which I reply that she chose to go into women’s studies. See the thing about slam poetry is its a way to bitch about whatever you feel like and call it art. That’s why feminists and other activist dipheads are all over it. I wonder if there’s any slam poetry that isn’t like this. Also irks me when people gender genitalia but whatever
I’m inclined to agree. Although I can’t really talk shit about slam poetry. I’m a comedian. My art form is getting up on stage and bitching in front of a bunch of strangers.
“Hey Science!”
Which science? Natural sciences? Social sciences? Formal sciences? There are so many branches of science.
“You invented the microwave 60 years ago so you could cook your hungry man steak dinners and you’re just now getting around to my body. Thanks Science!”
No one sought to invent the microwave oven. It just happened. Percy Spencer, the inventor of the microwave oven, didn’t say “Hey, I want to heat a steak up!” What actually happened is that he had a candy bar in his pocket that melted when he was near an active radar set while he was working on building magnetrons. He decided to investigate it. Eventually him and some friends wanted to see if other food could be heated. They then enclosed the system so that no electromagnetic waves would escape and he observed what happened to different foods. Then the company he worked for patented it.
There are so many scientific discoveries and inventions that happen just on accident. It isn’t a fucking checklist. No one sits there organizing which scientific discoveries and inventions will be made when.
“Thanks Science for assuming that I like to fuck men!”
The only people related to science who care about who you’re having sex with directly in relation to their career are physicians and sexologists.
But what do you expect science to do? Science can’t force people’s assumptions to change.
“Hey Science how about you start hiring women instead of quoting Freud and calling it science?”
Do chemists widely quote Freud? Do physicists widely quote Freud? Do geologists widely quote Freud? Do economists widely quote Freud? Do mathematicians widely quote Freud? Do astronomers widely quote Freud? Do geographers widely quote Freud? Do archaeologists widely quote Freud? Do linguists widely quote Freud? Do statisticians widely quote Freud? Do computer scientists widely quote Freud? Do logicians widely quote Freud? Do marine biologists quote Freud?
No, they do not. But why would you know, it’s clear you don’t know what science actually is or the purpose of it.
“Hey Science I need a health teacher that includes the clitoris in his their lesson plan.”
How is this the problem of all of science? What would science do? Really, what’s the expectation?
By the way, my fucking Catholic elementary school taught us about the clitoris. Not in detail, but where it was. Anything further would just enter the territory of masturbation. No one teaches you about how sex is better with foreskin, about the g-spot, about the clitoris, about the male prostate, or about nipples. Why? There’s no reason to.
You teach kids about birth control. You teach kids about periods. You teach kids about conception and birth. You teach kids about puberty. You teach kids about growth spurts, voice deepening, and breast development. You teach kids about sexually transmitted diseases.
Most kids learn about masturbation fine on their own.
“Hey Science I need a boyfriend that doesn’t consider masturbation a performance for him.”
That’s not Science’s fucking problem. You’re a functioning fucking adult. Learn how to filter out shitty partners and people from your life. If you want a boyfriend with a certain trait or belief, go find them yourself.
You’re so fucking entitled that you think you don’t have to do what everyone else does. How dare you have to work to find someone who you like!
“How about you let go of the necessity of the penis, how about you stop colonizing the vagina and recognize that it discovered you.”
Give whatever drugs you’re on to me, because right now most people are more hyped about colonizing mars or the moon than whatever the fuck you think is going on in your vagina.
NO ONE in Psychology who knows what the hell they’re talking about quotes Freud.
The only people I ever see take Freud seriously are people trying to act smart by thinking they know something about psychology when really they’re just showing they don’t know shit.
SIGMUND FREUD WASN’T EVEN A PSYCHOLOGIST. He never tested his ideas (I can’t even call them hypotheses because they aren’t testable, let alone “theories”. Oh my GOD.). Testable ideas are the basis of science. And since none of his ideas were really able to be tested, Freud wasn’t a scientist. He was a guy with some ideas who decided to write them down.
Idk when it was decided that Freud is the face of psychology in the general public’s eyes but it’s really fricking tiresome.
“Educate yourself!” A phrase we eagerly throw around when someone we deem ignorant is saying something we disagree with. And it’s true, some people really need to educate themselves, in particular people who have taken it upon themselves to educate others.
But how do you educate yourself? I’ve seen the self-education a lot of people come up with… and it’s not pretty.
I don’t think anything infuriates an educator more than writing something informative based on science and facts, only to have someone contradict them with isolated-incident anecdotal “evidence”, as if that means all their research and science is wrong on that basis. It’s a bit like saying, “well I’m still alive, so clearly death is a myth.”
That is not someone who has educated themselves, but rather someone who has never evaluated anything critically, from all possible angles, before coming to an informed conclusion.
So, again… how do you educate yourself?
Read. But don’t read indiscriminately. Use discernment. Be critical. Don’t just look at the best seller list, or Oprah’s Book of the Month. Take a look at 1) what topic the book is discussing and 2) who is writing about it.
Before you even start reading the book, ask yourself:
Who is the author?
What are their qualifications to write on this subject?
Is this an anecdotal book or a scientific book?
How old is this book?
What do the author’s peers have to say about this book?
For example, I picked up the book “Animal Cognition: The Mental Lives of Animals” by Clive D.L. Wynne. I then turned to the back to read the summary.
“Can ravens count? How do pigeons find their way home? Can chimpanzees use language in a human-like fashion? These are the kinds of questions that occupy scientists interested in understanding animal minds. […] presents a fascinating account of animal intelligence and abilities, covering a wide range of key topics from language and communication to sensation and problem-solving. […] Clive Wynne reviews research on species ranging from fire ants to dolphins […] complex reasoning (do cats understand that objects hidden from view still continue to exist?), balanced by a critical stance towards some of the wilder claims found in the popular media.”
Now, what does it say about the author?
“Clive D.L. Wynne is an Associate Professor in Psychology, University of Florida, and studies cognition in species from pigeons to marsupials. He worked previously at universities in Australia, the USA and in Germany, and was educated at University College London and the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of numerous scholarly papers on animal learning and cognition, and is the editor of a book on models of animal behavior, Models of Action: Mechanisms for Adaptive Behavior.”
So, the author is a professor of psychology who has made numerous contributions to the scholarly world, and the book is handling a topic he is familiar with and has professional experience with. That’s already a good start. The publishing date is 2001, which is somewhat older, so the reader should be critical of the studies being referred to and make sure they are still considered valid.
The book contains several reviews from his peers—other professors and researchers from various universities—who agree that this book is an excellent source of information, which further indicates the author has a lot to offer on this subject.
With this information in mind, you can start reading, and as you read, continue to ask yourself the following questions:
How old is the study they are referring to? Is it still considered a valid source?
Are they even referring to any valid studies?
Are they using science and logic to make their argument, or relying on emotional manipulation?
Use critical thinking while reading. Don’t look for reasons to disagree or agree with the author, but simply pause and ask yourself, “is this a logical conclusion? Does this make sense?” To the best of your ability, try to put aside personal feelings on the subject, whether it’s about the author or about the subject matter.
When reading a book like this, I take notes. I make note of undeniable truths as they come, and I make note of the author’s personal musings and hypotheses. I also make note of my own personal musings based solely on the information provided.
Toward the end of the book, I look to see if I reached the same conclusion the author did, and if not, I ask myself why that is the case, and, if necessary, go back and re-read certain aspects that may have confused me, or that I simply may have misunderstood within the context of the book.
So, now I’ve read an educational book on a subject. I’ve worked through it, and fully understand the logic and science behind it. Am I done now? No. Now it’s time to move on to the next book, the next study, the next journal, and then another, and then another.
Also, I can’t just read books on animal cognition and call it a day. There are other book focuses that are closely affiliated that have to be studied as well: physiological behavior, ethics, animal science, and animal communication.
A book on “The Biology of Animal Stress” may have a stronger focus on overall animal welfare, and a book on “Animal Play” or “Principles of Animal Communication” may focus on overall body language and inter-species norms, but they all come together to create one big picture.
Educating yourself is a never-ending process. There will always be a new study to read, and a new theory to work through, and they may end up disproving something we previously regarded as fact.
Anatomy and physiology changes as animals evolve, and animal behavioral norms change as they adapt to an ever-changing domesticated life. We must always be willing to put aside what we once embraced, and acknowledge the truth.
That, is how you educate yourself, and it’s how you educate others.
Fantastic explanation of how to vet sources!
It’s also possible to find good sources that are not written directly by researchers. You want to look for one more thing before taking them as a credible source of information – citations. Unlike academic papers, books don’t often have in-text citations, but they do have page numbers, quotes, and the citations associated with each statement in the back. The presence of those is imperative, because it tells you how thoroughly researched the work is and what it’s primary sources are.
PiraticOctopus 