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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EX
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  • It's not just purely aesthetic, although that is a big part of it.

    Some of it is actual quality not related to safety: if fruit is being processed after insects have already gone to town on it, that's not the same quality of fruit that should've been used, and might actually affect the flavor.

    Some of it is still safety. Freezing foods generally don't kill bacteria, and sometimes don't even kill molds or other fungi. Neither do packaging for shelf stable dry foods like flour, rice, cornmeal, etc. That's why the danger in raw cookie dough comes from the flour, not the eggs.

    And it's an indirect issue, but insect contamination may also be an indicator of other dangers that aren't solved by processing. Metal shavings or bits of rock can get into food, and having a tightly controlled process should prevent those dangers, too.

  • A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.

    Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.

    Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline's own paradigms or models. In Kuhn's view, scientists performed "normal science" by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn's description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the "normal science" periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.

    The prominent example was that Mercury's orbit didn't quite fit Newton's theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn't have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn't until Einstein's general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein's theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.

    Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.

    Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own "Research Programs" that weren't necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn't much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own "hard core" that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the "protective belt" around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it's perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn's "normal science" and "revolutionary science" actually happened, and how Popper's falsifiability criterion fit into each space.

    Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn't actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.

    So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper's views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.

  • Depends on how you want to use Lemmy. When using it as a link aggregator, you'd probably want to hide the stuff you've already clicked on. But as a discussion forum, it doesn't hurt to go back to threads you've already seen to see what new comments have been made since.

  • Parents

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  • There's a time and a place for some intellectual humility, and that swings both ways. There are a lot of things we just don't know about the people we're close with, and at the same time there are a lot of things we don't fully understand about ourselves, that the more objective outside observer may be able to identify pretty easily.

    And that goes both ways in a parent-child relationship, a sibling-sibling relationship, a friend-friend relationship, or even a spouse-spouse relationship.

    My wife certainly knows certain things about me that I myself have blind spots about. And vice versa.

  • I still have a few reddit alts that I lurk with, at least until we get enough activity on Lemmy on those topics:

    • Sports discussion, including specific leagues and teams
    • Discussion about my specific local city (and maybe the other cities I frequently visit)
    • Things relevant to my career/industry in law
    • Economics and financial news
    • Food and cooking
    • Television shows and movies, including specific shows or narrow discussions
    • Super specific hobbies and interests, not just the stuff I'm personally into, but also knowing that there's a community around some other hobby so that there is lots of archived discussion where I can just click around and learn something new. For example, the most recent plane crashes in DC and Toronto, I went to the aviation community on Reddit to see what experienced professionals were saying about those things as the news broke.

    Lemmy's good on all the tech and science stuff I like, and most of the memes/humor that I'm looking for. It's coming along on some mainstream interests, including the ones I've listed above, but still has a ways to go before the organic discussions reach the level of detail and expertise that reddit has. But it's on the right track, and I'm optimistic about those things filling in over time.

  • Yup. If, for example, you're designing a deep space mission, where every gram counts, there's a conversation to be had about whether it's cost effective (and appropriate risk) to send nuclear reactors and fuel aboard those spacecraft.

    Or using modern engineering, whether an aircraft carrier should be powered by nuclear fission or internal combustion of hydrocarbons.

  • Before the Internet was popular there were decals being sold of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes pissing on the logo for Ford or Chevy.

    I'm sure dueling fandoms have been around longer than that, too.

  • I haven't seen a new bank branch open with a drive through in a long, long time. Most banks just have multiple ATMs in the drive through, as there's very little you'd need a teller to do compared to what the ATMs can do now.

  • It was the fastest way to get original physical documents from one side/floor of the building to another.

    When I was a kid that was the standard way that banking drive throughs worked, too. You'd drive up to the multi-lane drive through, each station would have a pneumatic tube for handing off cash or checks or receipts between the car and the teller in the window. It pretty much ended when ATMs could start handling cash and checks.