this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Science Memes

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A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



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[–] [email protected] 175 points 6 months ago (4 children)

The compression artifacts (from converting B/W line art to jpg) being printed on the page have given me a new pet peeve

[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Now imagine these corrupted images being engraved into stone or steel by machine. Turned into literal artifacts for future generations to ponder over.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"The intentional grey diamonds, you see this was a highly advanced society capable of high definition videos and images, represents a loving fealty to that which is complete or known. The imperfections in the art represent an acknowledgement of their societal short falls. This will be on the exam by the way."

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (2 children)

"There is much debate about how aware the primitive minds were of the degradation of their information. Did they believe older things looked worse when they were photographed or did they understand it was their photographs themselves that got worse over time?

Even more surprising is that their oldest media wasn't even able to maintain any information at all about colour."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Jpg for photos, png for everything else.

It’s an easy rule of thumb, it hurts that 20 years of repeating it seems to have had zero effect.

Maybe this helps: Jpg fucks up your image, and png doesn’t.

Or: jpg is lossy, png is lossless.

Or: It’s better to save photos as png than cartoons as jpg.

Seriously, I hope some of this breaks through because deep fried images are so fucking unnecessary.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 6 months ago (6 children)

At which point does an egg of non-chicken become an egg of chicken?

[–] [email protected] 101 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Chickenness is a spectrum, not a binary

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Is archeopteryx a chicken?

[–] [email protected] 47 points 6 months ago (2 children)

If I say no, are you going to pick the next most recent named ancestor of the chicken, and keep repeating until someone says yes?

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I've never seen one run from a fight.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 6 months ago (17 children)

Is a "chicken egg" an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that will hatch into a chicken?

[–] [email protected] 49 points 6 months ago (23 children)

It's an egg that will hatch into a chicken, since the "first" chicken must have hatched out of an egg that was laid and fertilized by two "non-chickens" whose DNA combined together to make a full-blown chicken. Of course it wasn't actually just one egg, but really, no matter how you think about it, the egg came first.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

When first chicken lay egg, duh!

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (14 children)

The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.

It’s been about religion vs science.

Science says the egg came first: something nearly imperceptibly not quite a chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.

Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence. The chicken came first, and only ever laid pure chicken eggs. The eggs will forever hatch a chicken and nothing but a chicken.

That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.

e: simplified. I’m too wordy by default.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You can interpret it that way now but that's not the original meanig.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_the_egg

I understand and respect where you are coming from but i prefer not to rewrite history while arguing about ideas.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yes, thank you, you're exactly right. The person you're responding to is correct that it's come to have science vs religion overtones, but that's not what the expression meant to people for ages and ages.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

a metaphoric adjective describing situations where it is not clear which of two events should be considered the cause and which should be considered the effect

I guess the overtones are a product of their times. Currently, it seems to be: is science/religion the "cause" or "effect".

I always staked claim that it was a "scientific vs philosophical" question; but I never considered how timeline could change the overtones or underlying thinking of "The chicken and the egg" concept. Neat

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

You’re right, I shouldn’t have said ‘never’. It was a paradox in ancient history, but at least in my lifetime, I’ve read it as basically solved. That may be a relatively recent stance (since 100-200 years ago), but it doesn’t seem useful to continue presenting it as a paradox at this point.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago (14 children)

I've always interpreted it as which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?

But I'd just like to point out not all religions have that view of creationism vs evolution, and even within Christianity it's really only your super conservative, and very loud, fundamentalists. Catholicism doesn't have an official stance on evolution, iirc, the Episcopal church in the USA is fully supportive of evolution, as are most mainline Christians. Not to detract from your point or anything, I just don't like seeing all religious people, or all Christians, lumped together with some of the worst examples of religiosity that the US has to offer.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

literally no one in the world means that when they talk about chicken vs egg. what a weird way to look at the world.

also citation needed on religion saying god proofed chicken into existence without the egg.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

It made Fox News in 2015.

A biology paper that same year.

Religious people seem to care.

More religious people care.

Biologists have been talking about it.

BBC Science covered it.

I didn’t pull this out of my arse.

And re: that citation you asked for:

God created mature birds with the ability to reproduce. So the bird was first, ready to lay eggs.

—Answers In Genesis

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 months ago (7 children)

I don't like this because it's not addressing the actual saying. Obviously the saying is about chicken eggs specifically.

But I've always felt obviously the egg came first. The first chicken was born in an egg, so the egg came first. That egg could have been produced from a creature with a mutation which caused it to produce the first chicken egg when it is not itself the exact same species.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ah, but when that line of tiny change is so arbitrary... Is it a true chicken until it grows up and fulfils its destiny? Is it a chicken based purely on its genetic code, so the egg whence it hatched is a chicken egg; or is it truly a chicken when it becomes a chicken..... meh, I write this far and find I still agree with you: even in that case the egg it hatched from becomes a chicken egg by virtue of the chicken it grew into.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (3 children)

In other words, the question becomes: "Is an egg defined by the creature that laid it, or the creature that will hatch from it?"

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago

I very much like that I have a clear cut answer for this now.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago

Over time, a population of proto-chickens lay eggs with unique genetic variations that randomly direct the population towards laying eggs that result in modern chickens. The egg comes first, and it's a whole bunch of them

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I know this is a science meme community but the amount of factually inaccurate comments is concerning.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There are more stars in the galaxy than there are atoms in the universe

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This cladogram is outdated about turtles, which are no longer considered the most phylogenetically basal reptiles.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

TIL turtles are older than crocodiles

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

No, turtles and crocodiles share an older closest common ancestor than lizards and crocodiles.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The snake and lizard branch is wrong. I care very much about the accuracy of memes, and I have to point out that many lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)
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