I don’t agree with this. The stuff written by, for example, the “vaccines cause autism” people can sound as sophisticated and authoritative as any textbook. A high-school education isn’t going to help someone judge it according to its merits. Thus the problem is a collapse of trust in authority rather than a lack of basic knowledge, because ultimately an ordinary person can only decide to trust the scientific consensus without meaningfully verifying it.
The advantage of that last approach is that it has side effects and cannot therefore be optimized out by the compiler.
They grab the hook because they intend to pull you into the water.
I did a double-take too, but she’s wearing skin-colored shorts with a red stripe on them over tights.
Maybe they’re like starfish, which mature from bilaterally symmetrical larvae into many-limbed adults?
Note how the adult starfish body starts out like an organ in the larva and then grows as the rest of the larva is absorbed.
Fun fact: vertebrates are descended from echinoderms - our ancestors were larvae that acquired the ability to reproduce without developing into adults. So if you’re feeling like something is missing from your life but you don’t know exactly what it is, consider the possibility that you subconsciously long to transform into your true adult form, which would look something like this:
Oh to be a sessile filter feeder!
But the money is actually pretty good.
That’s what I’m saying.
Things that are numbers:
Things that are not numbers:
You’ll soon be free!
You’re right!
Then why is there an odd number of gerbils?
One day we might be able to create operators with three or maybe even four question marks. Imagine the possibilities!
Winning a Nobel prize causes one to consume enormous amounts of chocolate? Is that what the prize money pays for?
What gets me is when I’m not allowed to remove an external drive. Deleting a file can be delayed until later but here I am with a physical object that I need to detach from my computer and first I need to play hide and seek with the OS.
Your options are an ugly wall that works or the beautiful lack of a wall.
I think that’s what I was actually thinking of but I mixed it up.
I read an article once about a guy who got a NO PLATE licence plate and ended up being automatically blamed whenever a cop wrote in that a car had no licence plate. I wonder what 0X00000 would do.
You can have non-alphanumeric characters on license plates? What do the cops do if they need to catch you? Do they put out an APB for emoticons?
But both sides sound as if they have done real science, so a basic understanding of how science is done won’t be enough to tell them apart. You can get anti-vaccine books written in an academic tone with citations. They go through the appearance of presenting evidence. The only difference between the two sides that is visible to an ordinary member of the public is that one side represents “the establishment” and the other side doesn’t.
Even professional scientists have to have a lot of trust in the institutions of science - if I read a paper then unless there is something egregiously wrong, I rely on the journal and the scientific community to check that the authors did what they claimed to do and that they got the results they claim to have.