skeletorfw

I’m sorry, I’m confused here. I’m obviously all against race science and greenwashing, but I was talking about the quoted study in my post.

That aside, it definitely is good to have more people talking about the inherent subjectivity and impermanence of science though!

Honestly (and I see you do recognise this in your comment) but this really seems like a kinda crappy study that I’m surprised made it into plos.

For instance I couldn’t find any evidence of them considering that the dietary choices of the guardian may affect the attitudes of the guardian to vetenarians (and thus the self-reported health of those animals). To take this further, in the scenario that a cat guardian believes their choices make their cat healthier, especially when going against vetinary orthodoxy, the guardian is probably less likely to take the cat to the vet for minor issues. This confounds the analysis of “healthiness” as performed by the authors.

Furthermore any cat that is not an indoor cat is likely also not fed a purely vegan diet (as they do hunt), so they should possibly account for that via a sort of bootstrapped approach. Generally the stats were okay though, and don’t make super strong claims from some pretty weak data. Though GAMs were a pretty odd choice and I’d have preferred some sort of explicit model fit with Bayesian fitting or NLLS.

In the end all of this points to the sort of thing where they should really have been doing perturbational research. I.e. feeding cats different diets in a controlled lab space. This is not the sort of research that lends itself to surveys and that seriously impacts the actual practicality of its findings.

Also as an aside, I really cannot abide anyone who includes a questionably inspirational quote that they said themselves in the fucking French Alps on their own website. That’s just pure wankery. The only people I usually see doing things like that are scientists like Trivers, which is not company one should wish to be in.

Right, some advice from an allo person with an ace family member:

1. Dating and meeting people is hard, I’m sorry to say. Same as making friends, sometimes it just happens but most of the time it takes putting yourself out there in a meaningful and deliberate way.

2. Liking someone and being interested in dating them does not usually hit like a bolt from the blue. It often grows over a while. You’ll often have to build a friendship with someone before you build a relationship.

3. If you find someone tiring and boring, don’t date them. If you find everyone you meet boring and tiring after very little time then you have two options, either really challenge that preconception internally or consider whether you actually want to date.

If you want to date but aren’t ready to actually put in the time and effort to get to know people then you are really going to struggle. Are you going to want to date someone long term when you don’t even want to be connected to them for more than a few days?

There is also no guidebook, as much as it would be easier that way. People are individuals and dating requires you to see another as a person, not a puzzle to be solved. The only piece of advice that actually applies as a blanket is “be interested in them”. You need to actually take an interest in who they are, what they do, how they feel. Ask the questions and listen to the answers.

Good luck, truly. Learning how to do friendship and relationship stuff is fucking hard. But getting interested in people is the most rewarding approach to take (at least in my experience, and that of my close friends).

Even as a Brit that’d be fast. Here you’re funded for 3.5y with 6mo unfunded “writing up time”.

I do love that tidal power is actually just moon power. I think we should call it that more often.

Ahh yes, that’s the one! Thank you

Yeah that’s the one! Only seen it once (coinciding with a supermoon which was frankly surreal).

Coronas are a bit different I believe, though another one of the same group. I’ve always just called them their individual names, with coronas being tighter and more spectrally-distorting than halos. Maybe the only other collective name I’ve heard would be the minimally descriptive “atmospheric phenomenon” but that’s no fun at all.

Edit: Just took a brief look and indeed coronas are related but formed by refraction through water droplets rather than ice crystals! Cool to know!

That would be a 22° halo, a fairly uncommon atmospheric phenomenon where light refracts through hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere resulting in an average deviation from the angle it comes in at by around (funnily enough) 22°.

There are lots of other interesting atmospheric phenomena including sundogs, moonbows, and the much rarer 46° halo!

Not at all, but it does add context. I’m sure you agree the phrase “build a wall” has a significantly different implication to what it had in 2005.

Well a dictionary is descriptive, and so describes how people use words. It’ll change with societal meaning as it always has.

I am very much a scientist here specifically I am a biologist but we weren’t doing science in this meme were we? More specifically we weren’t asking what gender the people in the image had.

Nonetheless maybe it’s easier to think of gender like a name. You are given one at birth and you don’t get to choose it. For the majority of people they’re okay with their name. Others feel that their name doesn’t fit them and so change it. If you don’t know someone’s name then I assume you don’t just call them “Bob”, you probably ask them what their name is. Same goes with pronouns, you can just ask. Or if they seem like if you ask they’ll punch your face in, maybe just assume, that is okay in context.

In the end we’re not very different in age, I do understand that the world changes and adds an extra load to the stresses you already face. That said it really is just a case of trying not to assume too much and bring chill if someone says “hey actually I’d prefer they rather than she”. You are really unlikely to get cancelled by anyone that matters if you just say “oh of course, I’ll remember that”.

I say that as someone who has definitely put my foot in it many times before when not understanding a social nuance and making a faux pas.

Sorry, bit of a long one here, but bear with me ♥️

Specifically it is more often in the phrase “biological females”.

It’s a very unnatural way to refer to a person, and as such is usually a very specifically chosen wording. In a very literal sense everyone who can be described as female can also be described as biological, however here the term has an implied delineation in it. A “biological” and a “non-biological” or “artificial” female. This is where the anti-transness comes in; the appeal to nature of “artificial” women being inferior to the “biological” women.

Now there’s an extra little bit of subtlety here in that it often is contextual. Usually you would not refer to a person as a female as a noun, but rather as female as an adjective. There is a significant subset of people thus who use “female” as a noun either as a substitute for “biological female” or sometimes just as a chauvinistic way of dehumanising women. Either way it’s rarely a good look.

The anti-trans movement, and the right wing in general has a distinct trend in not quite saying what they mean too. So in the same way that the right wing will demonise “groomers”, “scroungers”, and “the woke left” (i.e. LGBTQ+ people, the homeless, anyone that will call them out), the TERFs will demonise the implied “non-biological” females.

It is a parlour trick, an extremely thin veneer of plausible deniability that means they can go “nooooo you’re overreacting, I never SAID that I hate trans people, I just don’t like it when people deny that biology exists”. It’s a way of shutting down arguments so the right wing can say whatever they want with impunity.

Tldr: some nasty folk use “females” as a shorthand for “biological human females” which is a very terfy phrase in the same way as “blood and soil” is very distinctly fascistic.

In this particular case however I don’t think that the reddit OP was being a terf and the mods were definitely just flat out wrong. It probably warranted a post removal and a warning but not a ban.