🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇 @2ck@qoto.org

"This disorder, which was eventually called encephalitis lethargica or von Economo's sleeping sickness, swept through Europe and North America during the second decade of the twentieth century; by the end of the following decade it had apparently disappeared, as only sporadic and unconvincing reports have appeared since. [...] *the virus that caused it was never identified*"

There was a passage in one of the Foundation novels where an armchair scientist described his doing science in terms of comparing the writings of various authors, and Salvor Hardin (I think) appraised the man's perspective on science negatively. I've always remembered that, and took on Hardin's attitude, but since I've actually had to do research...honestly, that's actually a lot of it. There is, perhaps, more effort that must go into systematizing one's own knowledge in parsing the various studies rather than just comparing the relative "authority" of the authors of different studies as I believe the armchair scientist was doing, but, significantly, it's not all just observation and experiment: there's theorizing that has to happen too, which depends on close reading and critically comparing results.

I'm not sure if I'm really arguing against anyone's actual perspective on how science is done here (I barely remember the passage from the novel in the first place.), but I just wanted to make a record of this way of thinking that I suppose has caused me a measure of embarrassment in years past about not being more hands-on in my research.
#science #research

@rabia_elizabeth@mefi.social thanks! I'll look into this

@rabia_elizabeth@mefi.social what resources have you found most helpful for learning Arabic? are you learning to speak or just read it? I bought a Quran that's all in Arabic, but I can only read the numbers so far 😆

@Nancy_A @asrivkin
> That’s the class of stony meteorites which account for over 80% of total meteorite falls on Earth. This means DART’s test was an extremely good proxy for the type of asteroids that might pose a threat one day.

the S type may be most of the ones we know impact earth, but is that necessarily the ones we should worry about, or could there be other types that, while less frequently encountered, would be larger when they reach us, don't break up as much in atmosphere, or be harder to redirect, so that they pose a greater risk overall?

@DejahEntendu @bookstodon the new one in the series is available for pre-order. release Nov 14 #murderbot #MarthaWells #SystemCollapse

@shauna not knowing what kind of problems that package is causing, it's hard to say, but I'd try to work with the maintainers of that package so it's more well-behaved.

If the maintainers aren't interested in that, you could consider forking...but that has a whole other set of problems. I've done it for small libraries, but the nature of your initial problem makes me think that's not your case.