“preantepenultimate […], and I’m not just saying that to use the word.”

Whatever your reasons, I’m glad you used that word, because it’s a damn good word and I’m putting it on my list of good words (a silly project that I’ve had for a few years now)

“Science without morals and ethics leads to amazing developments, but often misguided or twisted understanding, and unbridled human suffering.”

Exactly this. I see way too many scientists who may not be actively bad people, but they convince themselves that it’s possible to do science in an apolitical manner.

I believe that science is able to get as close to objectivity as is possible to achieve. However, individual scientists can never be objective, and the more they think of themselves in that way, the less objective the resulting science is.

It’s analogous to a combined count of how many people have commented on the post, or shared it (or “reblogged”, to use the Tumblr term). It might also include likes? I only use Tumblr occasionally so I’m not sure.

I don’t know why Tumblr counts things like this. I sort of like it though — it makes it feel like a distinct place. Tumblr hasn’t escaped enshittification, but it makes me happy that it still exists as a little pocket of weirdos

The CPU is the silver squarish shape towards the right. It generates a lot of heat when in use, so having good cooling for it is important. So important that CPUs come with a fan in the box. This involves a heat sink to help draw heat away from the CPU. This screws on mounting points around the CPU, but thermal paste is also used to help heat transfer up. Then there’s a fan that attaches to that heat sink, so that the hot air from the CPU can be blown away from the CPU.

People spend a heckton of money on cooling for their CPU and GPU, because when things overheat, they throttle themselves and performance becomes super slow. Longevity of components can also be harmed by higher temperatures. If it gets too bad, then it will crash entirely.

This PC has put the CPU heatsink on the case fan on the left. I don’t think this is especially harmful in and of itself — the big problem is that the CPU is entirely “naked” and has no cooling whatsoever. This means the CPU begins overheating basically as soon as the PC is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

The big silver heat sink that’s on the left is meant to be on the CPU, which is the Silver squarish shape towards the right. Keeping the CPU cool is a big deal — CPUs come with a smaller fan which is sufficient for many people, but people who use their PC more intensively, or want to extend the life of their CPU typically buy an additional cooler. Here’s an example of a stock cooler, and here’s a motherboard that’s using the fairly basic aftermarket CPU cooler that I have. It was only $30, but when I was new to PC building, it was strongly recommended, because if your CPU gets too hot, it’ll throttle itself and slow down. People who over clock their CPU (running it at a higher voltage for better performance) have to get even beefier cooling, such as water cooling. You can completely fry your CPU if you do something wrong when overclocking, and even if it doesn’t get that bad, minor mistakes can cause crashes due to CPU overheating.

So TL;DR: keeping your CPU cool is super important for both performance and longevity of the CPU.

The PC in the top photo has zero cooling for the CPU. Not even the stock fan that comes with the CPU. That heatsink that’s attached to the case fan is almost certainly intended for the CPU — you don’t even need a heatsink in that location.

This means that this person’s CPU will rapidly overheat soon after it is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

I love the fact that you wrote this in a science meme sub. I like getting learning alongside my memes

(I’m a biochemist, so I didn’t learn anything in this particular instance, but I frequently find my day brightened by helpful people like yourself, who take the time to explain stuff)

I am overcome with the desperate desire to share this meme with someone, but I don’t know who.

Yeah, I think I’d agree with that. Although it’s gotten large enough that it doesn’t feel like a subset of sociology anymore, it still feels descended from sociology. (To give an example of what I mean by being large enough it’s now distinct from sociology, biochemistry sprang forth from biology/biomedicine, but now is its own distinct field, with methods and modes of inquiry that are distinct from biology/biomedicine)

This is an interesting perspective. I feel like I disagree with you, but I don’t know why. Whenever I feel like this, it usually means that there is some interesting learning ahead of me if I am willing to chew on some ideas for a while, so thanks for writing this comment

Something that I often end up ranting about when I’ve had a few drinks at the pub is how I wish that all science education included some philosophy. I don’t mean as a brief, one off unit, but actually woven throughout.

I actually got really into learning about the philosophy of science because I found this insufficiency became apparent when learning about machine learning systems in the context of bioinformatics and protein structure prediction. There were some absolutely brain-dead takes in papers that seemed to believe that big data methods have the potential of basically removing scientists from the process of science. Fortunately, there were also papers that called this out as nonsense, because expert knowledge is more important than ever in building and using machine learning systems.

Shout out to Sabine Leonelli, author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, which was the book I read that looked at this in detail. Her work is what really cemented my passion for the philosophy of science, and got me into philosophy more generally.

I think that economics is a science, but contrary to the insistence of many economists I have known, it is absolutely a soft science. This is not a pejorative (though I reluctantly admit that I used to view it as such). My view is that economists would be wise to learn from their fellow social scientists in other fields. That would do a lot to help improve the rigour of economics.

You raise an interesting point, but there’s more to science than just measuring stuff. Most of my beef with economics comes from how economists react when their model’s predictions don’t align with reality. If a physicist’s theory makes incorrect predictions, then there’s not really much wiggle room to explain away the problem. If a psychologist’s theory makes predictions that aren’t correct, then my impression is that “explaining away” errors by gesturing at additional complexities not able to be accounted for is a much more acceptable thing to happen. This isn’t necessarily bad, but rather seems to be a part of how knowledge production happens in the social sciences.

I can’t comment too much on the specifics, as I am very much not a social scientist. Like I said above though, I have come around from looking down on these fields. In fact, I’ve come to appreciate them precisely because the skills used in the soft sciences are so alien to me. Economics uses a heckton of quantitative methods, but the phenomena they study are fundamentally social in nature, and thus they reduce the utility of their work by trying to distance themselves from the social sciences

What makes a difference is how models are evaluated in light of new evidence. If a model makes predictions that turn out to be incorrect, then a big part of scientific progress is in re-examining the underlying assumptions of the model.

My beef with economics isn’t that it’s often wrong, but that economists are often keen to present themselves as scientists to boost their epistemic authority, whilst also acting in a deeply unscientific way.

The worst economists for this get very offended if you say that economics is a soft science, with more in common with psychology than physics. This offends them because they hear “soft science” as a pejorative. Economics absolutely is a science, but the more that economists try to pretend that their object of study isn’t wibbly wobbly as hell, the less I respect them.

You — I like you.

I hated how statistics was taught in my university science course. I did a ton of extra advanced modules when I was doing my A levels before university, so I learned more stats than most people do in high school. This just made the poor statistics taught to biochemists all the more confusing. There were things that they taught that were straight up wrong, and it really made me doubt myself.

I ended up going away and learning statistics in a more thorough way, which ended up being a lot of fun. In a weird way, I’m glad for how grim the stats course was because it led me to a much deeper understanding than I’d have gotten otherwise

This is incredible! I love how the natural irregularities in the lines give a real sense of texture, especially on the fabric

This goes way before the Spotify thing. This is just a court ruling that took a long time to come through.

At a certain point, if your entire raison d’être is to do illegal things, you might as well fully commit

A big thank you to the moderators of this community for the work you do.

I say this because, even not having read the contents of this thread yet, I know that there will have been plenty of instances where discussions get a bit too… spicy, potentially requiring moderator action. Enforcing the boundaries of civility is a tricky and often thankless task, but an important one. People are angry, and justifiably so. This makes it easy for threads to degrade into toxic chaos, so thanks for trying your best to stop or slow the decline of this thread.

I would never have made the connection without reading your comment, but once I read it, I almost spat out my coffee.

Something that especially resonates with my experience is that my optometrist advised practicing holding my eye open for contacts without trying to put anything near my eye, because even before I tried putting in the contacts, my upper lid kept trying to close , and that made it harder to hold my lids in the correct position.

Man, this made me laugh. I feel like I’ve mentally saved away your original comment, because some day, there will be an opportunity to make this comparison to someone else who will find it as hilarious as I did.

You can start practicing just with your fingers — I find it easiest with two. Put your fingers in your mouth as far back as you can without gagging, and leave them there for a few moments, breathing through your nose. It’s important that you don’t go so far as to make yourself gag — I’ve heard that this can actually strengthen your gag reflex, so go slowly.

I found the breathing the most challenging part of it, so practicing with my fingers in this way helped a lot with that. Doing this every day made a huge difference after only a week or two. A big tip that I’d give is that you shouldn’t take a big breath in before trying to deep throat — in hindsight, that’s something that I would often do, and it made things harder. What actually got me started practicing this was that I saw someone who could go all the way down and basically hold a large cock in their throat for an extended time — far longer than one could do in one breath. That made me realise that I needed to focus on being able to calmly breathe through my nose at a regular rate.

If you want to move to something larger, a softer jelly dildo can be useful to practice on, I’ve heard, but I found that practicing with fingers was sufficient.

When you’re actually going down on someone, note whether their penis has a curve to it, as many does. When I had a partner who had an upwards curve, I found that I needed to approach it from the direction of their stomach (so either lounging on the bed beside them, or straddling their chest). A downward curve makes it much easier to approach from below, which is convenient if you’re kneeling and your partner is standing.

I also found it useful to actively try to relax my throat muscles. It was hard for me to know what a relaxed throat felt like at first, which meant that I found exercises like this helpful. I also found that when I was being too ambitious when practicing with a partner, my throat muscles becamenless relaxed. That’s why I found it useful to practice with fingers: I had as much time as I needed to practice until things became automatic, rather than having to worry about putting on a titillating performance for a partner.

An auxiliary tip that’s useful in general for blowjobs is that you can use your hands to sort of simulate deep throating by stimulating the base of the penis at the same rhythm as what your head is moving at. This also makes it easier to gradually working up to taking more of the penis in your throat, in your own time (the last thing most people want is to end up puking on their partner, after all)

That may be true, but given that doctors are better equipped to understand the changing landscape of medical knowledge, it’s wisest to take medication as prescribed

Humans are very clever. Sometimes I feel very clever because I have learned so many cool facts and skills with the internet, and then I think about all the knowledge I hold that people of the past managed to figure out from scratch, and it blows my mind