#bad science

[alexanderwales]

(content warning: clinical discussion of suicide)

The "suicide paradox" is the observation that women report suicidal thoughts at a much greater rate than men, but commit suicide at a much lower rate (though this is culturally dependent). Women attempt suicide more often, but there's some quibbling in the literature over the distinction between "parasuicide" where someone does something that looks like suicide for whatever reason and "attempt" which implies that it was an unsuccessful effort. Depending on the assumptions that you make, women are more likely to engage in "parasuicide", at least according to the studies that I've been reading.

So there's a lot of speculation within different fields of science about why this might be the case. My pet theory is that part of it is that men are simply less likely to report suicidal thoughts, but I haven't actually seen this mentioned in the papers that I've read, not even to rule it out.

One of the theories from early in the history of modern psychology is that women have a much higher rate of suicide attempts than men but a lower rate of completion because ... they're incompetent. I find this really darkly hilarious, because it feels like such a 50s doctor conclusion to draw. The more I try to steelman it, the more I can see it sort of making sense, at least if I try to put myself in the shoes of e.g. a housewife who has never had much education and has never learned that much about anything outside of housework and child rearing. But then you wouldn't expect that the so-called paradox would have survived into the modern day through many many changes in society and gender, and it very much has. Even some of the more modern explanations seem a little sexist to me, rooted more in preconceptions of the genders than actual data, but my survey of the literature isn't complete.

The suicide paradox is something that people argue about a lot, sometimes indirectly. People engaging in the gender war use either side of it to argue that men or women "have it worse", which I think is sort of a dumb thing to argue about. The ratios seem extreme enough that it's obviously pretty clinically important, since men and women will present differently and have different needs. But it's got me diving into some of the other gender research, particularly about how we parse differences in survey responses given different socialization. It kind of seems like most researchers just ... take answers at face value, and I guess if you suspect that one gender is underreporting or overreporting (or just that there's a gender difference in reporting that's not based in ground truth) there's not much you can do about that aside from changing some of the questions to avoid it (and this is hard). It does seem like something I would have thought would get more thought put into it, so I guess it's just a matter of reading the right study.

[existennialmemes]

Photosynthesis is one of those things that you usually learn about in a simplified way when you're little, that we grow up kinda taking for granted that we "know how that works."

But the process is actually so spine tinglingly bizarre, that if you heard about it for the first time as an adult, you wouldn't even believe it.

Plants are just transmuting light beams into highly complex molecules of sugar. By using the light as a fuckin' battering ram to shatter molecules of water apart. And we're just like "oh yeah, they do that, no big deal" as if that's not a seven layer bizarro dip of what the fuck.

[osokasstuff]

i think about a lot of overlaps between fatphobia and intersexism, look:

normal variations of anatomy and physiology are claimed inherently bad and disordered. (fatness is a normal variation of body type, intersex variations are normal variations of sex characteristics, but both are claimed not normal).

fear mongering and pulling "risks" out of the ass. if a person is fat, they get 100500 "health concerns" from everyone and may be medically labeled as unhealthy just because of weight. fatness is equated to being unhealthy without taking anything else in account. even if a person is perfectly healthy, their fatness is treated like it's health problem (or a step to future health problems). same for intersex variations: every single intersex variation is treated like a health problem, despite how it actually affects the person. and every try to confront these beliefs is faced with hostility and "BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS SPECIFIC CASE WHERE IT'S A PROBLEM???? SEE??? SEE?? I'M RIGHT! IT'S BAD!" fuck, yes, sometimes it is a problem. but even in those cases, it doesn't work like society wants: the problem lies not in normal body diversity but in a specific condition that causes specific discomfort or risk. for example, some intersex variations cause inability to urinate. and the problem here is the inability to urinate and not ambiguous sex traits. (so you need to address this specific problem and not mutilate a person's body to fit in social expectations).

the discrimination is protected by biased science. bigots refer to biased scientific sources to justify their bigotry. authors of these sources refuse to admit their prejudices and change their opinions even when new information is provided because they don't want to be fucking scientists and reevaluate their opinions after new data appear. they'd better protect their image of the world and use every existing logical fallacy and shitty argument to justify their outdated sources. so, medical and scientific fields are extremely biased on these topics.

unnecessary, unsafe, and actually harmful methods of "treatment" are pushed on people, often without their consent. it is closely related to the previous point (about biased science). all potential risks are either ignored and denied or "justified" by fear mongering around not intervening.

there definitely are more, but all other points i can come up with are more universal for different discriminations.

no conclusions except society really likes to police people's bodies.

[bigrobotbee]

How to see dinosaurs:

1.) Travel 66 million light years away from Earth.

2.) Look at Earth through a telescope.

3.) Dinosaurs.

[photoblogdujour]

Continuing with the language lessons, this is Geranium, Geran ium from mid-early late new century schoolbook Malay to mean ium-grant or grantium according to google translate. This is the act of giving, which geraniums do in great abundance and with devoted care.

[enlitment]

People will laugh at Galen's humoral theory and then come up with stuff like this:

Too much mindless scrolling produces black bile so watch out!!

✨🌼Gotta keep the humours balanced 😌✨

[fox-bright]

OKAY SO I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THE WHOLE SENDING CREMAINS TO THE MOON THING If you haven't heard about it, a bunch'a dead people (cremated) (just a teaspoon or less of each) are going to the Moon, where they will stay forever. They left this morning, riding up on a United Launch Alliance rocket for Peregine Mission One, technically out of Pittsburgh, PA but launched as usual from Florida. There are five NASA payloads on the mission, so Science is Happening. That’s cool, I’m all for it. But I, and it turns out the Navajo Nation, are not very cool with the Elysium and Celestis parts of the deal, which is sending a hundred something dead people’s remains up there. I’m against it because while I’m all for scattering cremains in nature—returning your carbon to the cycle—and I’m all for cemeteries and tombs, this won’t be either; there’s not any breaking down, there’s not any cycle, and there’s no hallowed ground. The Navajo Nation, in the letter they wrote to NASA in December, is against it because to them the Moon is sacred. You don’t just drop corpses on sacred things, basically. They weren’t asking to stop the mission, just to be consulted about how to handle it with grace; their request was denied. NASA couldn’t have done anything for them, anyway, because this isn’t a NASA mission even if they’re sending payloads up. So the Magical Flying Husband and I good-naturedly Got Into It on the topic, on Saturday, and we still don’t quite agree. To my mind, it’s gross and tacky to throw a Space Rubbermaid full’a cremains up there. There were already the remains of one single person on the moon, as Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes went up with the Lunar Prospector thirty-something years ago. He was a scientist who trained Apollo astronauts about what to expect when they reached the Moon; a geologist with his eyes on the stars. Having him up there doesn’t oog me out. Having a bunch of randos who only get to go there because their families have the money for it, that oogs me out. And then there’s just the pure metaphysical aspect; we put gates around our cemeteries for a reason. We make specific places out to be the resting places of the dead, so that we can say here are the dead and here the dead are not. Most of the religions or belief systems which have the dead remain in the home, on altars or in special (holy!) rooms within the building, also have requirements for attendance on those lost relatives. Incense, prayer, attention. You can’t do that if you lawn-dart Grandma onto the Moon. So throwing a bunch of bodies into a place where they will never degrade, without marking out land as “this specific place is where our dead go,” is either a hugely expensive method of littering, or it makes the whole Moon into a cemetery.

So the MFH and I have this discussion, back and forth, and then we realize we don’t really have any data. How many people are going up? Who are they? What’s the deal? So I looked it up. There are two companies sending cremains on this trip, Celestis and Elysium. Both of them have (frankly, tacky) websites selling you the ability to send Grandma to the Moon.

Celestis starts you at about three thousand US dollars to put some ashes onto a payload that goes up, and then comes down again; the equivalent of tying her to an Estes rocket that you launch from the park, only this is a proper spacegoing rocket that gets up there. She just doesn't get to take the whole ride.

Further Celestis packages allow you to put Grandma into orbit, send Grandma to the Moon, or send Grandma out into Deep Space.

(Reading that aloud is the point where the MFH's ears really quirked. It is very difficult and very expensive to get something properly into Deep Space. That offering is bullshit, and can't not be bullshit, and this is where the MFH decided probably this whole thing was more than a little scammy.)

The Orbit Grandma package is particularly romantic; the orbit she'll be put into is a degrading one, so that after some time spinning around our gorgeous blue marble, she'll reenter the atmosphere and become a visible shooting star.

(The MFH said "Is there going to be a big enough payload to be visible with the naked eye? What amount of matter is required for that?" and then we had to do Math about it. Of course, it's not just Grandma who would be on that bus, it's another hundred people or whatever; the image appears to show a hundred or more thimbles of cremains stored separately in basically a large cube container. So maybe the size of a soccer ball? I think it would be visible. It is, however, impossible to say "look there, and you'll see Grandma!" so while it would be visible to someone, it's not going to be something you can make sure to see.)

Elysium offers all the same packages, with slightly different names. But unlike Celestis, Elysium has a little row at the bottom of the page with photographs of previous launches. They've done this before, they're saying, and Grandma is safe with them.

So I looked up the launches, and found a Wikipedia page on them. And oh my god. That's where my ears quirked, and then I started cackling, and the whole slightly-fractious discussion with the MFH absolutely dissolved into macabre jokes.

Because, yeah, there have been two previous launches. One of them failed to reach orbit. A payload of Grandmas was put onto the next one, to make up for the failure.

The second launch, which was to be a Shooting Star trip for the god knows how many people that the first launch failed? That one made it to orbit! All good, right? Now Grandma can orbit for a while, and then immolate for a second time, this one much more spectacular and high-velocity than the first?

ABSOLUTELY not.

Because of licensing issues.

(image: two columns of text describing Elysium launches: ORS-4 Elysium Star I, launched on a Super Strypi, was destined for reentry failed to reach orbit.

SSO-A Elysium STar II, launched on a Falcon 9, was destined for reentry and made orbit successfully. "Orbit was to decay in 2 years, but satellite was locked into the Lower Free-Flyer dispenser due to license timing issues." )

Grandma is stuck in the dispenser. Grandma's in a gacha-gacha that just spins around and around and around and around, never releasing its prize to her glorious conflagration.

Because of licensing issues.

I'm siding with the Navajo Nation with this one, either way, but I have to wonder if those folks are actually getting to the Moon as planned.

[marzipanandminutiae]

The newest video from lab muffin beauty science seems like exactly up the alley of someone with your crusade for fact-checking. It was a wild ride of enlightenment, highly recommend.

Oh this is REALLY interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!

I first noticed the benzoyl peroxide scare when someone mentioned it in a post I made about the Radium Girls story inducing "what are they hiding from us now?!" anxiety, and I looked it up. I don't use any products with that ingredient at the moment, but it seemed worth checking into. And despite me not being a scientist, the fact that the benzene levels they cited showed up at VERY high temperatures seemed...off. Like how frequently are the products ever at those temperatures? "Maybe in a hot car?" I thought, but still wondered how often acne cream is left in a car in Australian high summer for that long.

And hey- the history professional with little chemistry knowledge was right! Seems like even ordinary laypeople can see the issue here if they just read the study even a little bit.

But because humans respond more to dramatic headlines- and, not going to lie, because we've been primed to believe in this by companies CONSTANTLY doing it for real throughout history with heavy metal dyes, radium, tobacco products, asbestos, fossil fuels, PFAs, etc. -you get "we're all rubbing cancer on our faces!!!!" reactions.

Really highlights the need for a balance between watching companies like hawks because they've proven that they will kill us if it pads their bottom line, and not falling for junk science.

[downthegenderriver]

@a-dinosaur-a-day @quark-nova

So I was looking through my textbook (assigned by my university) and got to the bit on dinosaurs and...

The textbook is Evolution 5th Edition, it's not about dinosaurs specifically but this shit makes me question everything else in the book.

My first thought was they want on shutterstock, looked up triceratops and clicked on the first thing but i up triceratops and this image was not there so idk what happened.

I'm not even sure what dinosaur this is actually meant to be because the frill shape does like triceratopsy but the spikes on it and the lack of brow horns makes me think Styaracosaurus, but the frill shape is wrong for that.

Triceratops is one of the most well known dinosaurs how do you make a mistake this basic in a fucking textbook, this wouldn't be ok in a random cartoon.

Is this some kind of weird trick to make sure my critical thinking is turned on.

Can someone help.

[dr-robert-chase-apologist]

why jesse spencer tiny

He is affected by gravity much more than the average person. Instead of his mass times 9.81 being the force of gravity on him, he gets his mass times 19.81. So it just kind of squashed him.

[alternateworldcomics]

From Green Lantern # 8, 1960

Writen by John Broome, art by Gil Kane and Joe Giella.

Wait... hold on a moment. Let's see that again.

Considered by whom?

I believe "infrayellow" is better known as orange, infraorange would be red and infrared, now that is one we can't see.

[existennialmemes]

Nothing matters, and 99% of Everything is Nothing, so Everything matters. Especially you.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

My phone likes showing me clickbait I Might Like and today I thought of your frequent posting about mammal bias/human bias when I saw this:

My second thought was, well it'd be real awkward if humans had no ancestors that survived the asteroid, considering that as far as we know, we do exist.

(it also mentions using statistics and "molecular data" to determine how long placental mammals have been around, which iirc you've also posted about being inaccurate? this article is a train wreck)

There’s a whole lot to unpack here o-o

[lycanthrop-ee]

everyone clap and cheer for my special boy constant barrett and his special boy sebastien lucius whinery

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

ok @ratstuckinamarble u see it goes like this-

i aim to skew the statistics at the local frog pond each spring >:D

[leo-fie]

List of stuff that's not only bad science in the sense that someone did some bad science, but in the sense that some asshole just made shit up:

Vaccines cause autism

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

Everything Sigmund Freud ever did

Neoliberalism

Autogynophilia