Whewell proposed the word again more seriously (and not anonymously) in his 1840[31] The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences:
The terminations ize (rather than ise), ism, and ist, are applied to words of all origins: thus we have to pulverize, to colonize, Witticism, Heathenism, Journalist, Tobacconist. Hence we may make such words when they are wanted. As we cannot use physician for a cultivator of physics, I have called him a Physicist. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.
I found it interesting to learn “Scientist” is such a new word though! I assumed it was some ancient word, not something some guy just sat down and came up with pretty recently
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who worked on number theory, infinite series and analysis. He said that he would have dreams of drops of blood (a symbol of his village deity, the goddess Namagiri Thayar), followed by complex mathematical equations. Even with the help of his formally-trained friend GH Hardy, he was only able to prove a small fraction of his insights.
Gregori Perelman is a Russian mathematician best known for solving the Poincare conjecture. He posted his results on arXiv in 2002-03, but never published them in a journal and never accepted any prize or money. He has expressed dismay over the lack of ethics in research.
Anon is a /sci/ user who in 2011 proved the current lower bound of a superpermutation for any size greater than 2 (the Haruhi Problem). Their proof has been archived for posterity, but we don’t know anything more about them.
He said that he would have dreams of drops of blood (a symbol of his village deity, the goddess Namagiri Thayar), followed by complex mathematical equations. Even with the help of his formally-trained friend GH Hardy, he was only able to prove a small fraction of his insights.
“It came to me in a dream and I forgot it in another dream”
Those are riding boots, or dress boots. They also make Western style boots with rugged soles for work. I have a pair and they’re outstanding on all terrain, including snow. Here’s an example:
I got them because we decided not to wear shoes inside our house, and unlacing my work boots several times per day was a real PITA. These take about two seconds to take off or put on.
And the leather soles get mushy...and the salt used to melt the ice absolutely shreds the leather just above the stitching when it dries out. Western boots suck in the snow, and it's a quick way to ruin them. Even rubber-soled ones like some of Ariat's don't last, but they're better on wet surfaces.
Hmm, interesting indeed! I get what you’re trying to say, but I would also tend to believe that it’s still the same animal? If not that, then wouldn’t the caterpillar cease to exist when it metamorphosised into something else?
“Caterpillar” is not a species. It’s a stage of some animals’ life cycle. It means 99% of catepillars die before they become butterflies or moths or whatever
I wish it were 100% in tomato hornworms. Seeing that 99% of them die before turning into moths makes me think all of the surviving ones just hang out in my garden.
For some reason people seem to think they’re fundamentally smarter than people were back then.
Yeah, you may have technically had a better education, but you’re not inherently more intelligent than the average person back then, and a genius from that time is still miles ahead of you.
Yeah, it’s been linked to systemic racist thought patterns (which are often unintentional but should be acknowledged). I explain it to people like this: take a handful of sand and turn your fist so that your palm faces perpendicular to the ground. Now release the sand slowly… What shape does it form? It isn’t rocket science.
Pyramids = basic engineering shape for a sturdy structure. Wide base, tapered top. A lot of early monumental structures were constructed with that basic concept in mind.
Ancient aliens literally has Nazi origins. They didn’t just have race-science, but race-history. I guess you could call their thinking ancient-Aryans because they believed that impressive structures built by brown people must have been led by a Northern European diaspora who eventually vanished because of race-mixing.
You can watch the History channel all you want, but nobody is going to question the Parthenon or the Colosseum. Stonehenge is the only one I can think of where Aliens had to help white people.
Yeah, and it is hard for many people to see the direct correlation of “Chariot of the Gods” etc. with Nazis because it isn’t hitting them in the face. I try to show people that people were smart back then, too, instead of punishing these icky mindsets because they tend to be a bit reactionary anyway. Some people just don’t know any better for a variety of reasons.
The two things you named were built thousands of years after the pyramids are believed to have been built though. You said it yourself, people think aliens helped with Stonehenge. That’s because it’s much older and there is no written history from when it was built.
I don’t doubt racism is factor in all sorts of aspects in life but this seems like a massive fucking stretch. Maybe come up with better examples.
Pseudoarchaeology has a pretty long and not-so-awesome background due to the profession’s colonial roots with treasure hunters, adventurers, and the like, especially in antiquarian circles.
In the late 18th to 19th century archaeology became a national endeavor as personal cabinets of curios turned into national museums. People were now being hired to go out and collect artifacts to make a nation’s collection more grand and to show how far a nation’s reach extends. For example, Giovanni Battista Belzoni was hired by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to gather antiquities for Britain. In nineteenth-century Mexico, the expansion of the National Museum of Anthropology and the excavation of major archaeological ruins by Leopoldo Batres were part of the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz to create a glorious image of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past.[22]
So that’s great evidence for racism being in archeology in general but I still don’t see the connection between that and people crediting aliens for things we don’t completely understand.
Edit: There are definitely good examples in the article but they also use your argument about things that were built way more recently compared to things that were built before written language. Egyptians definitely built the pyramids, they’re in Egypt so by definition that’s what happened. But I really don’t believe people getting excited over the mystery around how it happened and then pointing to aliens as a possible answer is rooted in racism at all. That being said, there seems be all sorts of nefarious reasons to put that alien explanation on things that are much easier explained without aliens.
He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don’t think that was his intention, but good came from it.
The only reason people don’t like it is because they haven’t tried it. I was a holdout for the longest time. Fun fact: Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada by a Greek man.
Eastern North American Destroying Angel. Half a mushroom is enough to completely destroy your liver and symptoms show up too late to do anything about them
Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.
The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).
Aragón conducted a study on farm productivity of more than 4,000 farming households in Uganda over a five-year period. The study considered farm productivity based on land, labour and tools as well as yields per unit area of cultivated land. His findings suggested that even though yields were higher for smaller farms, farm productivity was actually higher for larger farms. Similar research in Peru, Tanzania and Bangladesh supported these findings.
What explains these divergent findings? Answering this question is important given its consequential policy implications. If small farms are indeed more productive, then policies that encourage small landholdings (such as land redistribution) could increase aggregate productivity (see the discussion in Collier and Dercon, 2014).
We argue that these divergent results reflect the limitation of using yields as a measure of productivity. Our contribution is to show that, in many empirical applications, yields are not informative of the size-productivity relationship, and can lead to qualitatively different insights. Our findings cast doubts on the interpretation of the inverse yield-size relationship as evidence that small farms are more productive, and stress the need to revisit the existing empirical evidence.
Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.
First, farmers have small scale operations (the average cultivated area is 2.3 hectares).
The definition of “small family farms” in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.
My god it’s like they’re deliberately trying to make their paper unintelligible to other humans. If I am reading this paper correctly, it is in line with other research on the topic, by indicating that smaller farms tend to have higher yields due to greater labor inputs. While I’m sure an economist would think this puts the issue to rest, being able to feed more people on a smaller land area might still be beneficial even if it requires more labor. Economists often assume that the economy represents the ideal allocation of resources, but I reject this assumption.
By the way, 5 acres is minuscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.
If you think 5 acres on average isn’t subsidized or industrialized then I challenge you to try it out of your own pocket: fertilize with shovels, till with a hoe, water and pest control without anything but hand pumps or windmills, reap the harvest with a scythe.
We do all by hand on a 1/2 acre of mixed veg. We feed our family of five and sell our extras. All the work is done by two adults. 5 acres would be insane and we are hard workers. I can’t imagine that size without a tractor.
Wait, 5 acres wouldn’t be all vegetables! Fruit trees, grains, grassland all spread in time so you can work on them when your vegetables don’t need attention.
Two people. No mechanical equipment. Even with using animals in order to maintain all that space. Then add harvesting and threshing grains by hand along with those animals. Good luck. Our entire working space is an acre with fruit and nut trees and chickens for meat and eggs. The workload is immense and if our lifestyle was similar to most (day jobs) there is no earthly way we could manage what we have let alone 5 acres. We have been doing this for decades and have systems in place to help us as much as possible and it just would not be physically possible. Just garden prep for us alone takes months at a half acre and simple maintenance and picking is a daily chore all season long. We start planting in February and grow until Oct/Nov. We don’t vacation in those months at all and we have seasonal jobs so we can put as much time as possible into food. Oh and we don’t get paid to grow food because we consume the vast majority of it ourselves so we need those real jobs too. Where are you finding all the time and money?
I don’t know why you’re assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology—that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that 5 acre farms are far smaller than typical for modern agribusiness, and the differences in management are enormous. And I’ve actually worked on a farm that was 8 acres and we did much (though not all) of the labor by hand.
The average US farm is just under 500 acres. It’s totally different to grow food on that scale.
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
Also, you can’t just look at the amount of food produced, but the amount produced vs waste, storage and transportation costs. Most things in the garden can stay ripe on the plant for a while and can be picked as needed.
Anecdotally, we were supplying about 80% of our fruit and veg needs on our own garden plot on our standard city residential lot with a family of 7. And we were literally giving tomatoes, citrus and zucchini away as fast as we could.
It’s neat seeing someone learn about Mt St Helen’s for the first time. It was such a big deal in the 80s that I can’t remember not knowing about it. It makes me excited to discover major events I know nothing about…
Anyway… The thing with it wasn’t necessarily the size of the eruption. There have been much, much bigger eruptions. It’s that it was one of the first with really good footage (since it was one of the earlier predicted eruptions), it occurred in the US, and it blew out sideways instead of the top.
Haha, yea, I wasn’t born in the right decade on the right continent to know about this, so I had a really good time learning about something new!
The only reason I even know about the Yellowstone caldera eruption zone is because my American cousin once told me about it in the form of a horror story when we were both younger, and I started crying because I thought the world was going to end while we were visiting Connecticut, lol.
Mt, St. Helen compared to Yellowstone or the Phlegraean Fields in Italy was an a simple New Year’s Eve rocket. Both capable to create an month long night on the whole Earth.
The Yellowstone volcano is about 8 times larger than the entirety of park that has Mt St Helens in it (~860,000 acres of volcano vs ~110,000 acres of park).
That would definitely explain why it’s sped up if the source was a bunch of still images. I’ve seen other edits of it that look a little more like a real-time video.
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