I thought this guy was a legit scientist, but I read his recent book Quantum Supremacy and it was all shit like “with quantum computing, in the future you will be able to solve athlete’s foot”. Literally everything you can think of is going to be quantummaxxed by cubits, according to him. Need your car serviced but the garage isn’t open on Sundays? Quantum computing. Need your mother-in-law to dial down the snarky comments about your new house? QUANTUM COMPUTING. Frequently walk into a room, forget why you went in there, leave, then immediately remember why you went in the second you cross the threshold? MOTHERFUCKING QUANTUM COMPUTING!

I’m sure he is a legit scientist, of course, but as a science communicator and terminal book-hawker, he’s no better than Joe Rogan.

Does Lemmy have an equivalent to the Herman Cain Awards subreddit? We’re definitely gonna need one.

A lunatic confused by the moon. There’s a certain poetry to that.

Maybe that infamous copper salesman had selflessly excised all of his radioactive copper from his stocks so as not to rip off or harm the customer. Maybe he deserves an apology. Inferior copper that isn’t full of syphilis or whatever is better than great copper that melts your face off.

This is like me laying naked on my back with an erection and saying the shadow cast by the sun is a complex timekeeping device.

Would this render figs off limits for vegans and vegetarians? 🤔

The “do your own research” people need to have it explained to them that even experts in their respective fields aren’t automatically capable of parsing scientific literature. A family doctor with 50 years experience who prescribes antidepressants every day will have no deep understanding of what any particular scientific peer reviewed study on SSRIs is telling them. They need a grounding in statistics more than anything else, which most people just don’t have. So the idea that a non-educated, non-scientist can read peer reviewed studies and come away from them with some sort of understanding of the issue is the thing that needs to be highlighted, preferably in high school science class (earlier, frankly). A willingness to slog through scientific papers in pursuit of deeper knowledge is admirable, but is dangerously misguided without proper training. I don’t even mean training in the specific science, but just in how to speak the language of peer reviewed studies more generally. It’s very much its own discipline.

I want someone to ask Joe Rogan what ‘regression to the mean’ means. I want someone to ask him what a ‘standard deviation’ is and how to apply the concept. I don’t want to know what papers he’s read, because you could read 50 true scientific papers a day on one topic and still have no idea what the current scientific consensus is on said topic, absent the requisite training. You’ll almost certainly come away from it with a very wrong but very confident belief. Dunning-Kruger on steroids.

The sommeliers of the technology world. The perfect storm of electric hypochondria and placebo-gooning.

As with most things, there’s a kernel of truth in amongst the dross. You will have a nicer time with a set of £70 headphones than with a £3.99 set. You will have a nicer time with a FLAC file than a 64kbps MP3 of the same song. But there’s a very low ceiling of improvement that both physics and physiology will prevent you from surpassing. Maybe in the future with brain implants and shit like that we can start ramping up the fidelity of our listening abilities, but until then, you’re just trickling an ocean through a literal bottleneck and insisting you’re drowning in it.

Just listen to the damn music.

Food is so weird. Bread becomes toxic waste after 8 minutes of being opened, but there’s probably some cheese species that gets fermented up the asshole of a mountain llama for 6 months, being stuffed back in after every bowel movement, and is still edible (if you’re into that sort of thing) after 400 years of being left in a dank cave amongst the frothing remains of a rotting gerbil cemetery.

Is there a consensus view on whether or not Gwyneth is a genuine numbnut or is just cynically exploiting people who are?

Fuck clipping health insurance CEOs and college-touring bigots, these are the ones…

There’s a 100% correlation between a child coming into direct physical contact with their family doctor and that same child later being diagnosed with autism. Show me an example where this was not the case. Family doctors are sporing autismomes like a tickled mushroom and no one is talking about it.

It’s an ancient astronaut working the levers on his Stormtrooper speeder

Psychoanalysts hate those blotchy black & white images of my mother’s pussy giving birth to my father who is wielding a knife with my name written along the hilt. “Stop bringing these fucking drawings in here!” she yells. God forbid a man have hobbies.

If it even partially alleviates loneliness, and if it encourages the person to become more open and confident when communicating with humans, then it’s a great thing.

/cope

We’re so fucking fucked.

This is somehow more offensive to my brain than if they’d simply said “electricity is god”. The way they completely muddy the issue, making the reader not just misinformed but made to feel complacent, like there’s no correct information to be found, is way more grotesque. It shuts down the mind of the reader. It’s anti-education.

Believers: God exists, look at the wondrous complexity and beauty of life!

Snails:

Boots should really come with an exhaust so that with every step you’re pushing air/moisture out the back end. Nothing like a big pipe or anything, just a wee hole and a sort of bladder that fills with air when you lift your foot and pushes it out again when you step on it. Sure, you’ll sound like you’re stepping on farting mices everywhere you go, but if you just cough with each step you should be fine.

Can someone ELI5 why pre-Newton mathematics wasn’t up to the task?