My mom was the head of a math department at a community college and I have fond childhood memories of the crazy mail she got. I think all math departments get this kind of mail. Basically people who think they've proven the Riemann hypothesis and such. She'd have me look for math errors in them because they always had SO MANY errors.
So, the idea of writing about biology scares me because I don't want to be "one of those guys" for some poor biology department head.
@kechpaja@futurebird Well, don't leave us in suspense! What the hell is it about? Why are those naked women in the pool, and where can I find those plants?
@kechpaja@futurebird PS If people ask me how mastodon differs from the bird site, I can now say, "On mastodon, there's a nonzero chance of running into someone who knows what the Voynich Manuscript is." (If they then ask, "The Whatnow Manuscript?" I can mysteriously and knowingly say, "Come to mastodon if you want to find out...")
@eribosot@futurebird Linguistics, Uralic linguistics, and conlang Twitter were very much a thing (and may still be; I don't log in there anymore), and it makes me a bit sad that you never found (enough of) them. But it sounds like you found as much of those communities as you wanted to on here?
@kechpaja@futurebird I quit Twitter last week after being a user for 16 years. Never ran into those kinds of Twitter accounts, and I'm sure I wouldn't be able to find them now among the nazis and the bots.
My email folder titled "cranks" is exactly that: a museum of the deluded and their theories on how the brain works. It's frankly extraordinary how fast and loose they go. While I don't reply to them, I keep them like a neuroscientist collects magic tricks the study of which help explain how vision works.
@albertcardona@futurebird Even with a cat like Robert Sapolsky how he knows what he knows and ends up at "there's no free will, everything is determined" is ... something. I mean not a crank by any means, but still how much opinion there is in even hard data interpretation.
As long as the "opinion" is substantiated, it can take the title of "speculation", and there's nothing wrong with that, on the contrary, it's the seed to further knowledge by means of then formulating testable hypotheses.
Yes if you send a paper to your local community college saying your proved some unproven theorem in like six pages it's probably the department head's 13 year old kid who's reading it.
That is if they are kind enough to send responses to papers. I don't think many places bother to do that anymore. Which is sad in a way.
@futurebird A professor at Columbia started charging for these papers, promising to waive the charge if the proof was correct; the reviewer would be a grad student, who'd get to keep the money.
@futurebird I get so many emails from people telling me they have solved gravity or they have discovered the true nature of light at my work email address
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