exasperation @ exasperation @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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If you have 2 apples, and then I give you 2 more, you don't suddenly have 5 apples because we all decided 2+2=5.

No, but some types of addition follow their own rules.

Sometimes 1+1 is 2. One Apple plus one Apple is two apples.

Sometimes 1+1 is 1. Two true statements joined together in conjunction are true.

Sometimes 1+1 is 0. Two 180° rotations is the same as if you didn't rotate the thing at all.

If you don't define what kind of addition you're talking about, then it's not precise enough to talk through what is or isn't true.

I have a model of everything. Everything I am, my understanding of the world, it all fits together like a web. New ideas fit by their relationship to what I already know - maybe I'm missing nodes to fit it in and I can't accept it

Same, and I would add the clarification that I have a model for when and why people lie, tell the truth, or sincerely make false statements (mistake, having been lied to themselves, changed circumstances, etc.).

So that information comes in through a filter of both the subject matter, the speaker, and my model of the speaker's own expertise and motivations, and all of those factors mixed together.

So as an example, let's say my friend tells me that there's a new Chinese restaurant in town that's really good. I have to ask myself whether the friend's taste in Chinese restaurants is reliable (and maybe I build that model based on proxies, like friend's taste in restaurants in general, and how similar those tastes are with my own). But if it turns out that my friend is actually taking money to promote that restaurant, then the credibility of that recommendation plummets.

For those who are wondering, this is an art installation called "Armoured Pram for Derry" by Eamonn O'Doherty, and appears to be from a 2016 "Making History" exhibition at Ulster Museum.

From what I can gather, it was created in 1991 but restored in 2012 after O'Doherty's death.

Corporate buzzwords are cargo cult behavior. Jargon and industry-specific terms can be helpful for accurately communicating precise or nuanced ideas, but generic buzzwords are just people who try to sound professional or smart by mimicking the people they've seen in those roles.

Just asking "what's my role in the meeting" is a simple way to get to the point, and isn't impolite or unprofessional.

When I learned about taxonomy in the 90's they hadn't really sequenced many genomes, so taxonomy was still very much phenotype driven, rather than the modern genetic/molecular approaches. I just assumed that everything I learned has become out of date.

Gray sex.

You know, sex between people of Pierce's age.

Black, brown, then the fucking colors of the rainbow in order, gray, white.

If you need a mnemonic to memorize that, you're gonna have some trouble actually building out your lookup table in your head of immediately knowing that red=2, yellow=4, etc.

Is there another kind of table?

That's the possibly apocryphal origin story of Spanish tapas, too: a slice of bread to cover the wine glass between sips (hence the name "tapa," which means a "cover"), then a few things to dress up that slice of bread, maybe a piece of meat or cheese. So traditionally a single tapa is served for each glass of wine you order.

10 digits gets the diameter of the earth to within an inch.

Put another way, 10 digits means that your error will be caused by your imprecise model of the Earth's shape, rather than imprecision in the value of pi.

What would be the "n" in that Big O notation, though?

If you're saying that you want accuracy out to n digits, then there are algorithms with specific complexities for calculating those. But that's still just an approximation, so those aren't any better than the real-world implementation method of simply looking up that constant rather than calculating it anew.

Especially if she gave them a good deal

a woman who cheated on them

Hmmmmmm

Fun fact, that gene is only about whether you can smell the compound in the piss, not whether your body processes asparagus into that smell.

They tested this by having people smell other people's urine, and found that the people who can smell it in their own piss can also smell it in the piss of everyone who eats asparagus, even of the people who claim not to produce that smell.

Everybody's punching up.

The diversity in preferences makes "up" impossible to define and order consistently between people. If you take a survey of a population for an ordered ranking, in desire ability as potential spouses, of a particular sample set, you might get wildly different rankings.

And then those same people might rank things differently depending on who they would most want to have a one night stand with.

Even laying out specific physical characteristics and asking about attractiveness will get those isolated features ranked differently. Heterosexual men will disagree on whether it is attractive, unattractive or neutral for a woman to be:

• Being very tall
• Being very short
• Having an athletic build
• Having pale skin
• Having curly hair
• Having tattoos
• Having a Ph.D.
• Speaking multiple languages
• Being Christian
• Being vegetarian

We're all just looking for compatibility. What that means will vary from person to person, and what is very attractive to one person might be a huge turn off to another.

I'm generally of the view that you want to be with someone whose unique traits are positive to you, and who sees your unique traits as positives, too. That way both can fall within that stable equilibrium of both believing that they've married "up."

If you're accommodating another group of people you should produce enough to always feed them, too, not just sometimes in surplus years. The whole point is that you've gotta plan for a surplus, otherwise you risk starvation in bad years (and it doesn't make it any better, morally, if the people who bear the risk of starving are "another group or people").

how does waste prevent a shortage from becoming a famine ?

Making the expected production a higher number than the expected need will give the headroom necessary to deal with a shortage without people starving.

If you're aiming to produce food for a population of 100,000, but have the capacity to make food for 200,000, then you can afford to waste half of your food without starvation. You can also accommodate a 50% drop in production without starvation.

So that buffer is expected waste, but it's also starvation resistance.

Predate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.

Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.

Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein's theories really started taking off.

Plate tectonics was entirely a 20th century theory, and became accepted in the second half of the 20th century, by people who might still be alive today.

Same energy:

In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something?

Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).

Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.

A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth's relative velocity.

Plate tectonics wasn't widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.

So merely believing in something not provable doesn't make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.

Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.

Not if you want it to stay extra virgin