Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • 6 Posts
  • 2.31K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’ll take a stab at this.

    The Scientific Method, as I was taught it from middle school to college:

    1. Observe a phenomenon.
    2. Raise a question about said phenomenon.
    3. Research the topic in question.
    4. Form a hypothesis as to the nature of the phenomenon.
    5. design an experiment to test that hypothesis against a control.
    6. Analyze the data yielded by experiment.
    7. Repeat the experiment to verify it isn’t a fluke.
    8. Publish all of the above in sufficient detail that other scientists may examine your work for flawed methodology and repeat your experiments to further verify it isn’t a fluke.
    9. Conclude whether your hypothesis is or is not supported by experimental evidence.

    THIS WORKS

    What is being done all over the world right now:

    1. Get hired by a multinational corporation traded on the Dow Jones.
    2. Be assigned a fact to prove, probably about an existing product.
    3. Research the topic in question.
    4. Design an experiment that will support the fact you’re looking to prove.
    5. Use a very small sample size.
    6. Conclude something wishy-washy like “there’s a statistically significant correlation”.
    7. Publish a densely written paper with a very convoluted title in some obscure sketchy journal somewhere.
    8. Cite that paper in your own press releases with headlines that blow the conclusion way out of proportion.
    9. No one ever follows up on any of this, the experiment is never really peer reviewed, or is reviewed by others engaged in similar nonsense, and the public only ever reads the headline.




  • Not quite how that worked out.

    Yes, the Ottoman empire did either outright cut off the spice trade to mainland Europe or heavily tax it, which caused Portugal and Spain to seek sea routes to the Far East.

    The Portuguese claimed the route around Africa as theirs. It was long, but not too long. The route was known, and you don’t have to sail far from the coast the entire way.

    To say Columbus was “commissioned” was a bit much. Columbus went to great lengths to approach the Spanish crown to propose his “going to the East by sailing West” plan, which was based on some bad math. Like he read an Arab scholar’s work on the subject which gave the Earth’s circumference in Arabic miles, which he read as the shorter European miles, so he underestimated the size of the earth by about 1/3. The cartoon I was shown in elementary school depicted Columbus as the visionary who first thought the Earth was round, when it’s quite the opposite. It’s more like he was a crackpot small earther. But he did finally convince Isabella and Ferdinand to sponsor a voyage. Three ships departed Lisbon in 1492, sailed down the African coast to the Canaries and then did something monumentally stupid: They made a right turn and headed due West straight out to sea.

    Columbus, if not his men, deserved to sail out to sea and starve to death eight time zones East of Japan, but in the most impactful stroke of dumb luck in human history right about where he predicted Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands to be, he found Central America and the Caribbean. Columbus ended up making 3 more trips to the Caribbean, he saw the shores of Mexico, the mouth of the Orinoco river, was shipwrecked on Jamaica. He went to his death believing he had visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a New World. Credit for realizing “Look, we’ve sailed 400 miles down the coast, there’s no way this is Indonesia” goes to Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan actually achieved reaching the Spice islands by sailing west from Europe, though most of his men including Magellan himself died in the process and what few men remained completed a circumnavigation because starving on the way back across the Pacific sounded less fun than possibly dealing with the Portuguese.



  • It was real fucking fun arriving in the workforce college educated with computer literacy classes on my transcripts not knowing how to run MS Office because they changed it out from under me. Even if the ribbon interface is objectively superior, they just dumped it on people.

    My father found, buried on Microsoft’s website, a tool (I think written in Silverlight because it was about that time) that simulated MS Office 2003, you could click on a function, and then it would play an animation about how to do that function in Office 2007. This wasn’t advertised and it wasn’t shipped on the disc with Office '07, which NEEDED a retraining tool.

    Office '10 was different yet again, and they also shifted a lot from XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 and that’s when I switched to Linux.