Recent Comments

1. 3 days ago on The Duplex

   So much troubles, It’s a cryin’ sin

2. 3 days ago on Nancy Classics

   Interesting to see the appreciation. I don’t know his era. (I only started reading Nancy due to gocomics.) In the past many to most seemed negative on Gilchrist’s work.

3. 3 days ago on Peanuts

   Yeah. Peppermint Patty has kind of an odd home life, but not sure I want to imagine it being what you might be implying.

   Don’t know Lucy’s deal as she seems to come from an intact two-parent family in a nice neighborhood.

4. 3 days ago on Peanuts Begins

   That got me a little. (I’ve had some cancer in my family this year.)

5. 3 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I was at a site once where I was not allowed to say Charles Dickens. It took me awhile to even realize that was what got me censored.

6. 3 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I really couldn’t stand Nirvana when they were popular. Now I’ll grant Cobain did some intersting stuff with folk music on occasion. (Oddly I was into jazz, New Age, World, Classic Rock, and Soul Music. Of musicians who died in 1994 Harry Nilsson and Antônio Carlos Jobim were likely my favorites. Although I may remember more the passing of Sonny Sharrock due to Space Ghost Coast to Coast.)

7. 3 days ago on Ziggy

   Azardoz beat me to it. Anyone I don’t know if people who study algae are weird, but I’d doubt they are that common.

8. 3 days ago on Nancy

   Mostly. Although, and this is a bit dark, I could maybe see it if their home life is bad.

9. 5 days ago on Peanuts Begins

   As prejudice looks to mean, “preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience” I’d agree everyone has them. I’m not even sure they’re all bad as I’m not sure reason and experience should be the only metrics for judging things.

   I have no experience with the Raelians. (UFO religion that believes in like free-love and cloning people.) I’m not sure my feelings on them are based on reason either as what I know of their actions are mixed. But I likely have a negative opinion on some level.

10. 6 days ago on Ziggy

    I kind of feel like you might be exaggerating the problem a bit, but fraud certainly has a long history in science.

    I think the hope/principle is that fraud or misjudgment of one scientist or even an entire lab will be corrected by multiple studies from multiple sources. So you can still believe in scientific consensus in a general sense without having to have to trust individual scientists more than you’d trust individual anyone. (It’s not likely all money will flow in only one direction on a topic and topics like the number of stars don’t have a clear politics or profit motive.)

    Still there is the possibility that an entire field could become biased toward a given direction and ignore results that contradict that direction. This feels to me more likely in sciences that study people (medicine, psychology, sociology) because the researchers may mostly come from a broadly Western intellectual culture so read data based on that. And possibly the questions we ask through science, even sciences not involving humans, are constrained by our own biases or perception.