Psychology has an embarrassing history.

Half of their studies aren’t reproducible. Their most famous study is basically a fraud. They’re behind lobotomies, the satanic panic, and Eugenics.

I’m not anti-intelectual or a Scientologist or anything. I guess what I’m trying to say is that psychologists like Jordan Peterson might want to clean up their own room before trying to lecture the rest of us.

Down-voting because it implies Sagan behaved like a cop.

It lets us apply results from statistical physics to quantum field theory through a Wick rotation.

That sounds like Geordi’s plan to save the Enterprise.

CMV: Linguistics is a slippery slope to philosophy.

Fruit flies are made of atoms so this device obviously works.

If we could just let go of the Yakubian myth that more brains = smarter, this wouldn’t be so surprising.

This is so funny; I wish birds were real.

When left-handedness became acceptable the number of left handed people was far higher than experts had predicted.

Tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes are native to the Americas. That means that before Transatlantic trade, there were no hot peppers in China, no potatoes in Ireland, and not tomatoes in Italy.

Yea, I started to get suspicious when he called Hegel a fool and a fraud.

The ironic part is that the author himself relies on definitions to make his point. He slyly asserts that “social constructs” are “made up” and therefore should and can be ignored like Mr. Snuffleupagus. Of course, I doubt that the author would claim that there are no social differences between a black woman and black man, because that would expose his argument for what it is.

He writes to say: There is no essence in these identities, therefore we can ignore them. His argument is just a bunch of jargon piled on top of “I don’t see race”.

I’m not a Scientologist, I am suspicious of psychology because I know it’s history. Sociology never suggested stabbing someone in the eye with an icepick, or create a psychosexualsatanic fantasy that gets innocent people put in prison. Economics never spearheaded a forced sterilization movement.

But their so much better today with the pseudoscience of IQ or the land of make-believe called evolutionary psychology.

If you’re going to get rid of essentialism, you’re going to have take on bigger fish than creationists. Because the problem of essentialism is not that it objectifies everything, it’s that it refuses to understand the difference between language and ideas.

The worst essentialists are called structuralists or logocentrics. This kind of thinking is dominant in Western Philosophy and it infects the minds of people you probably respect, progressives like Noam Chomsky and reactionaries like Christopher Hitchens.

Essentialism is like capitalism. It’s in the air we breath and the water we drink. It’s so accepted and conventional that people will assume your a fool for describing or criticizing it.

Eratosthenes is a word I can only hear in Carl Sagan’s voice.

I’m making tempura bugs for dinner. On a night when everyone else gets nachos and pizza. Don’t you feel sorry for me?

The air is full of nitrogen with trace amounts of carbon. The soil is rich in carbon but nitrogen poor. Plants draw carbon from the air and nitrogen from the soil.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

This command is much faster. Instead of random bits, it just marks everything zero (dude). Is good enough.

Science jargon has always sounded so impressive until I took anatomy.

for example, the big hole in the bottom of your skull (where the spinal chord passes through) is called the “foramen magnum” which is Latin for ‘big hole’.

Is it possible you plugged your monitor into the motherboard video output? (I’ve done this)

I’ve always suspected that many of these kinds of images were staged or propaganda.

Every so often you’ll see a meme on Reddit with a bunch of American teenagers being athletic in the 60s. The meme suggests that people were healthy and fit back then, but I happen to know that the footage was for a physical fitness push at the time (gotta do more pushups than the commies) and the athletes were far from typical students.

New CEO --> layoffs ----> line go up ----> ops, not genius after all ----> deploy golden parachute.