There's also the assumption that humans in the Americas, prior to the mass arrival of Europeans, were primitive and did not form sophisticated societies like those found in the "Old World". I think this has been otherwise shown, but old assumptions die hard.
The large American civilizations (Inca, Aztec, etc) were essentially bronze-age civilizations. Perhaps Europe would have been so as well had there not been a bronze-age collapse.
if you have 2000 small craters in an area from 100000 years ago, and then one big crater obliterates all that 1000 years ago - do you have relatively few craters?
Your explanation makes sense to me for some of the relatively smooth areas, especially the ones that are generally circular.
I don't think it adequately explains those smooth areas that are not so circular, especially if you claim that these smooth areas are due to craters formed quite recently.
ok I went and investigated https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/surface-features-mo... evidently the areas that appear to be smooth to us from far away were covered by lava relatively late in moon's evolution and also have lots of craters as well, we just don't see them as well as we see the other areas that were not covered and took maybe more damage.
Actually, the cartoon infographic from that article offers a short and to the point explanation: "Giant impacts created oceans of molten rock that formed the dark maria" ("Maria" being the plural of sea in Latin) - so the craters that were there before were actually molten, and any craters that can be seen were formed later and are therefore fewer than in older regions.
Oh man, thanks for this! (Something I should've done myself!)
Really interesting. Yeah, the crater patterns that I saw seemed a little too complex to be explained simply.
Also, my naive self would've assumed that the spatial distribution of meteor impacts would be uniform, but apparently this doesn't appear to be the case.
One HUGE thing it's missing, though, is the deliberate hacking of results to reach statistical significance. I'm willing to bet that the results of a majority of psychology studies are not reproducible.
In another lifetime, I worked as a research assistant at a very large, well-funded, Ivy League psychology lab. Talk about p-hacking. Our PI would go so far as to deny potential candidates entry into our study, as well as the therapy, simply because the PI thought these candidates wouldn't help the therapy our PI developed look good in our study. Note, these candidates did meet all our OFFICIAL study criteria for entry into the study.
"I'm willing to bet that the results of a majority of psychology studies are not reproducible"
Indeed
> Study replication rates were 23% for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48% for Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and 38% for Psychological Science. Studies in the field of cognitive psychology had a higher replication rate (50%) than studies in the field of social psychology (25%).
That is appalling, imho you might as well call an area of study, that has less than 50% reproducibility for studies published in “credible” journals, a pseudoscience.
There probably should be room in some of the social sciences for flexibility like this as long as it's called out right at the top as part of the experiment design so that the reader knows this is exploratory initial research being done for directional purposes - and that's it.
Unfortunately as the movement from History, Philosophy, and the other liberal arts disciplines became 'sciencified', the ability to deliberate on something rigorous but still with enough room to explore has been sacrificed in favor of trying to be more like the physical sciences.
Honestly after reading that it seems impossible to really conclude anything...as it's just full of conflicting results...is that innately fraud? No but certainly careers/$ have been made from biased/agenda-driven interpretations which seems fraudulent.
If someone collects data and the study outcome is not preregistered, you can assume p-hacking. It would be implausible not to. And in most fields, preregistration is not common. (And even if there's preregistration, regularly people just switch their outcomes, and nobody cares.)
And to play the devil's advocate: psychology is probably doing better these days than most other fields, because it's been the posterchild example of the replication crisis.
"He wore delicate blue-and-white-striped slip-ons, his clothes unchanged across the three days I saw him: baggy black pants salted with cigarette ash and a deep blue shirt that, owing to its epaulets, lent him a vaguely military air. You would assume he chain-smokes, and you would be right, except the term doesn’t go quite far enough; so constant was the smoking that it seemed his cigarettes were little oxygen tanks he drew on to sustain life."
You probably shouldn't ask an artist about a useful formula for concrete, or to troubleshoot your jacquard loom, or which js framework to use: that's what engineers are for. But the products of those tools will be more successful if someone other than an engineer has input into the building's proportions, or the cloth's colors, or the page's layout. That's all art, and imminently sensible - even by the most nakedly commercial definition of "sense".
At a larger scale, and just to pick the least controversial and most popular on this board: did Ridley Scott and Matt Damon say nothing sensible about technology in The Martian? Or Neal Stephenson in, like, anything?
At a still larger scale, artists have always engaged with the ways technology changes society (or, in fact, the way that technology changes art) - in celebration and in warning, in observation and in speculation, and in all modes between. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire is an easily-graspable example.
Often artists are wrong, of course, as anyone (including technologists and venture capitalists) can be, but that's very different than not "sensible".
Ha! Thanks. Irony's so easy to miss on the internet - and this topic especially seems to attract "non-sensible" responses on this board, so my antennae are a bit too finely tuned.
Alberta really does seem like the Texas of Canada.
On another note, I did a cross-country road trip across Canada many years ago. I loved it, and people were so nice everywhere, except in Edmonton, Alberta. The people there walked around with sneers and seemed to be suspicious of all visitors, like me. I won't ever be back in Edmonton for sure. Calgary, on the other hand, was super nice and the people friendly.
That's interesting. Edmonton was the closest major city to me growing up. I always kind of liked it. There are definitely nicer cities in the world, but I have never had any complaints about it.
Calling Alberta the Texas of Canada is exactly what it wants. It’s much more like an incompetent Michigan with an unreasonable amount of Trump supporters. Its heavy reliance on oil is a lot like Detroits heavy reliance on the automotive industry.
The fact that leadership was even seriously considering abandoning one of the worlds best public pension funds is indicative of how short term greed is killing the province.
Probably too many comments. Too much activity compared to the number of votes is interpreted as a sign of flame wars and heated and unproductive discussions, and sink stories. This kind of topics don’t stay on the front page for long, usually.
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