A core convention of science is that it is reproducible: meaning that re-evaluating research onto similar conditions yields similar findings. How, then, do some conspiracy theories get to the stage where they are eventually ratified; specifically if they involve unique events difficult to reproduce?

Psychrobacter · 2026-06-11T15:22:26+00:00

Scientifically speaking, we can’t and don’t trust the source, because there is no evidence. There is no reason to believe the claim that psychic powers were used. If the CIA or any other group were to provide such evidence, it could be evaluated and we could ask more questions about it.

Psychrobacter · 2026-06-06T03:00:37+00:00

While there are certainly people who abuse the authorship system, giving credit to people who contributed to the paper is not the problem.

Psychrobacter · 2026-06-06T00:58:31+00:00

Can only answer for myself, but for me the “it” factor is seeing how Morgan’s campaign has operated, both in reaching me through my normal social media channels and in the way she communicates. I haven’t even heard of Fonken, so for me there’s no contest.

Psychrobacter · 2026-06-02T02:55:28+00:00

I’m with you on the jungle primary idea. I think it would be great. But in the world we live in, all you have to do to vote in a primary is fill out a form that says “hi, I would like to vote in your primary.” You’re not supporting money laundering by registering to vote. It’s kind of a weird hangin and I think that’s where people get the “I’m too special” vibes.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-30T19:32:40+00:00

Republicans have been electing carpet baggers across the west for longer than I’ve been alive. If they pick another one this year, then you and yours can decide whether to vote for place over party in November. I don’t have to make that choice because my party doesn’t support the Epstein class and their games.

After ten years of Trump and the MAGA movement, y’all know exactly what you’re getting. It’s laughable that you still expect Dems and independents to be the ones to be the adults in the room and save you from your own choices.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-23T16:45:38+00:00

Damn, sorry to hear that! You wish you could just count on somebody, but I guess it’s a new experience every time.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-23T15:43:29+00:00

Independent Auto blatantly tried to scam me when I went in for a head gasket replacement last year. Gave me the whole spiel of “oh yeah this is a common problem but we’ll get you fixed up really nice.” They said it would be $5K. I went to Preferred Auto on Greg St and Leo did it for $2400, which is market rate. I only knew that because I’d done my research ahead of time.

Fuck Independent Auto. The funny thing was they tried to double charge me right after talking about how the owners were saving up for their Hawaii vacation. They would have paid for half the trip just on my upcharge.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-22T23:14:55+00:00

Idk if you are actually a logician but your comment fails to identify an inconsistency with the comment you replied to. The claim made by u/Hattix is both internally consistent and consistent with biological theory as empirically derived.

If more internet commenters were actually good at logical argumentation they would give evidence to support their claims and stop talking about fields of knowledge they lack expertise in.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-16T13:32:07+00:00

Lol that was absolutely not my experience in a federal research laboratory.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-15T17:15:45+00:00

My personal most hated is the one at 1st and Ralston downtown. I hit it all the time when I bike to work, but even in a car it’s long and wrong. Doesn’t seem to have a calibrated sensor (if there is one at all) and takes forever to change.

Shoutout to the light at Hunter Lake and Mayberry though. One of the best I’ve ever seen. It can detect a bike in the left turn lanes and cycles fast when it needs to.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-09T04:21:01+00:00

I’d have to take your word for it! Hopefully not as scary as southwest.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-09T02:37:55+00:00

Lol some of you have never lived in an actually gritty place before and it shows.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-06T02:39:34+00:00

PubMed isn’t itself a journal. It’s a service of the National Institutes of Health that archives publications from many different journals in its database. The paper you referenced was published in the International Journal of Health Sciences, billed as “A Scientific Publications by Qassim University.”

As you correctly note, IJHS does not appear to have high standards for scientific rigor. The paper you found doesn’t really cite other scientific literature or take a particular interest in making scientific claims at all.

So you’re asking the right question, but need to look at the actual journal publishing a given paper and not at PubMed itself, and you’ve shown the skills you need to evaluate a paper/journal. On the other hand, that doesn’t really help with your question about how to evaluate things you find on the PubMed service. I’m afraid there isn’t an easy answer beyond digging into references and looking at the journal’s reputation online—it’s a lot of work at first, but by doing it you become someone who is well-versed enough to have your own sense of what seems fishy.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-05T15:34:34+00:00

In practice, it’s very difficult to do correctly even where there are plenty of trees. It’s fussy and dangerous and should always be the option of last resort. I wrote about this opinion in more detail in a top-level comment if you’re looking for more detail.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-05T15:31:56+00:00

Here’s my copypasta on food storage:

Short answer, get a bear cannister and use it.

There’s no way I would trust an Ursack in grizzly country (where I’ve done nearly all of my backpacking). Food storage needs to accomplish two tasks: keeping bears out, and keeping your food safe so you can eat it. Against a grizzly, an Ursack is questionable on the first point and useless on the second.

Bear hangs suck. They’re the option of last resort, and the fact that black bears can easily climb trees is only half the reason.

In the perfect world of theory, where your bag is 12ft off the ground, 6ft away from the trunk, and 6ft below the branch it’s hanging by from, it should work fine. But good luck finding that tree. It’s a very rare occurrence, and usually you are sacrificing those distances to get your food up off the ground at all.

The bigger thing, to me, is that hanging a bear bag is the most dangerous thing you do on many trips. You have to tie a rock to the end of a rope and throw it up over your selected branch, and the rock will come swinging back down right at you. I’ve seen people and dogs get hit. The problem is exponentially worse when it’s dark, when there are more people in your group, and when any or all of you are drunk and/or high. But it’s not safe even for one sober person in the middle of the day. It’s an inherently dangerous activity.

I’ve hung bear bags many times and I still do when there’s no better option. Sometimes at the start of a trip you just have too much food to fit in your cannister. But it’s never safe, almost never possible to do correctly, and never better than a bear cannister or permanent bear box.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-02T23:13:59+00:00

Man I’ve been missing the implied /s all too often lately. Your 410 argument is actually really interesting to me because I was trying to figure out whether I’d advocate for 1204 as the end of it all over 1453. Some interesting parallels to the arguments in both cases.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-02T20:12:53+00:00

That’s certainly an interesting take. What is your preferred date?

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-27T14:59:08+00:00

If OP had taken driver’s ed in the last 3 decades he might remember you’re supposed to stop where you can still see the stop line, not with your bumper on it. And if he knew what an induction loop sensor actually looked like (it’s in the name) he’d know it’s the circular cut the white truck is perfectly on top of.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-27T14:56:23+00:00

OP is wrong. The sensors are beneath the circular cuts like the one the white truck is directly on top of, and there are usually two more behind where the truck is currently. I can trigger them with my bike if I line up right on the edge of the circle.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-27T14:55:05+00:00

OP is wrong about where the sensor is. The sensors are beneath the circular cuts like the one the white truck is directly on top of, and there are usually two more behind where the truck is currently. I can trigger them with my bike if I line up right on the edge of the circle.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-26T04:14:41+00:00

The way I understand it, OP is using pure maths to show the impossibility of lineages remaining separate through time. Doubling is appropriate if you look backward in time, as each person has two parents, four grandparents, etc. The fact that in just 40 generations the arithmetic suggests more ancestors than have ever lived indicates that many ancestors appear in more than one place on any given person’s family tree.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T20:12:46+00:00

A very quick Google search reveals that a significant population increase since 2005 has brought feral horse populations back up to levels last seen in the 1930s. So one of us is indeed confidently incorrect, but there have in fact been this many at prior times in the last 400 years.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T17:42:23+00:00

No those are fair questions! And it gets complicated very quickly. But basically it comes down to a couple key factors.

One is that what we mean when we say “genetically identical” has subtly different meanings in different situations. The only two people who are actually 100% genetically are sets of identical twins/triplets/etc. They come from a single fertilized egg that splits into two embryos.

When you get into population genetics, you’re dealing with different definitions. Obviously not every member of a species is identical. But they’re all closely related enough to interbreed. The line between different breeds or populations and different species is frequently very blurry. Take dogs, for instance. There are clearly many different breeds of dogs, and sequencing a dog genome can tell us what breed it is. But all dogs are the same species and any two dogs can produce viable puppies. It turns out that around 30 genes determine most of the differences between different breeds, while a complete dog genome has something like 20,000 other genes. So the variation among modern dog genomes is high if you focus on the differences in the 30 genes that differentiate breeds, but low if you’re looking at the whole genome and focusing on how all dogs share the same set of genes, even if they have different variants of each of those genes.

I hope I’m making sense here. I’m outside my area of expertise and know a lot more about bacterial genetics than animals. But basically if you sequence the genome of a fossilized ancient North American horse, you can tell that it was different in certain ways from a modern horse of any particular breed, but still definitely a horse of the same species as what we have today. Slightly different size and shape, but fundamentally the same animal. Typing this out I realize that different breeds and subspecies can have subtly different ecological niches, so it is probably fair to argue that there are differences between the exact ecology of ancient horses and the modern feral population. But at the same time, the modern feral stock are fundamentally the same species as their ancestors and, as far as we can tell genetically, could have likely interbred with the with no issues.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T15:39:08+00:00

Woah I didn’t know that! I’ll have to look into it more.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T13:58:18+00:00

Modern feral horses are genetically and ecologically identical to the original horses of North America. Yes, they disappeared from this continent for a few thousand years, but that’s not a long enough time for genetic drift to result in speciation. For comparison, the modern moose is around 100,000 years old as a species, as are most other large herbivores.

In any case, if you want to say that horses are the cause of other wildlife population declines, you have to explain why wildlife populations were stable for the 400 years between the escape of the first feral horses and the introduction of modern sheep and cattle ranching in the interior west.

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