• slowmorella@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 day ago

    I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to study. Although i would be more interesred in a comparison of the aerodynamics of different breeds of hunting dogs while running.

    • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I hate, hate, hate when a reporter interviews a scientist about something, and the interview is going fine, then the reporter inevitably asks, “How could this be used?” And suddenly, the scientist has to start bullshitting. You get to hear a completely respectable scientist start making all sorts of dubious claims, because they aren’t allowed to tell the truth, that its use is up to the future. There have been uncountable experimental results that didn’t seem to have a use at the time, only to be regarded as essential in the future.

      If they were trying to invent some product, they’d be called an engineer instead of a scientist.

      But in this case, the scientist wouldn’t even have to bullshit. “We’ve already learned a lot about aerodynamics by looking at other animals in wind tunnels. There’s no reason to think we might not learn anything useful here about aerodynamic shapes.”

      In my book, that makes this guy who said “absolutely no one” in the meme an anti-intellectual.

      • otacon239@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I’ve come to believe there’s a reasonable correlation to the deep-fried-ness of a meme and the level of thought put into the original post. It’s always odd that the pictures that look like they’ve been screen-shotted, filtered and compressed half a dozen times are often the worst drivel and lowest common denominator of meme content. I wonder if, in general, the better-quality memes are shared by people who generally respect the original enough to go and find a high-quality version more often.

        Someone could make a study on this…

        • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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          21 hours ago

          Or maybe viralness is just proportional to stupid and so the stupid ones simply get copied and reencoded lossily more.