this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I was always told not to quote Wikipedia. They told everyone this because people would constantly quote Wikipedia and then someone would edit it so that the paragraph was now different. It was a right pain even if the information was correct.
What you do is you check Wikipedia's sources and then quote those sources. Hopefully they're quoting academic papers and not blog posts because otherwise you're just kicking the cam down the road.
I hated in high school that teachers always said the internet isn't a good source.
In college I finally realized that websites were poor sources because they change and move, whereas a published book, edition, and page number won't change. But that doesn't mean you can't use the Internet to find a good source - you just need to cite the source itself and not the site.
Everything I've published is published digitally, but the journals still have editions and page numbers. When someone cites my work, they need to cite that information - not the website that may change names or shut down.
So now I'm mostly mad that teachers don't explain why websites shouldn't be cited. It makes good sense in that context.
I think it definitely was a huge breakdown in academic's to adapt to new technology, and it is at the core of a lot of the societal problems we face today. Of course, a lot of the reasons for this were by design at the hands of a few corporate actors, and they share a lot of culpability.
There are philosophical underpinnings too - a lot of academics are still caught up on modernism (which would rightfully distrust new internet sources in favor of legacy sources of proven idealistic knowledge) vs. Postmodernism, which would provide a framework to recognize the truth in these systems.
One thing to keep in mind is that computers and the internet are still extremely new, and we are still figuring them out. It has only been a decade and a half where everyone has a general purpose, internet connected computer in their pocket.