exasperation

Industrious eye

What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

There's an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it's not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.

It's a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it's not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.

And I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I think there's probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).

Nothing's been done about it since then.

Research has gone into safer replacements. Many companies have been switching to BPA-free formulas, most notably CVS (notorious for sheer area of thermal paper receipts) that went BPA/BPS free in 2019. Some governments have banned BPA thermal paper, and others, including the EU, have set limits. BPA has been getting phased out because of these studies.

Nothing will be done about it now.

Well no, this organization is lining up to try to replicate the success with getting BPA out of thermal paper by trying to get BPS replaced, too.

Here's a study of Switzerland. Between 2014 and 2019, the incidence of BPA thermal paper went from 81% down to around 50%, and then after the ban it went to around 10%. BPS has seen some backsliding, and has increased from 3.1% to 19.1%. Still, that's a significant reduction in the past decade of papers that use either BPA or BPS.

People are doing the work. There's no reason to sit around and do nothing and complain that others are doing nothing, too.

You don't need a normal distribution or statistical independence. It just requires that any given key combination remain possible.

No matter how unlikely, anything that is possible will eventually happen in an infinite time.

Some infinities are bigger than others, though.

Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven't typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.

Cantor's diagonalization proves it.

Two new monkeys show up, and even though the infinite rooms and infinite typewriters are already occupied, you can make room for them by making all of the monkeys move over one room, and putting the new monkeys in that newly vacant room with the newly available typewriters.

Have you ever had to clean public restrooms? Nothing microscopic about the drops of splashback.

Gotta paint some faces on there, with puckered lips.

You can afford the moldy stuff?!?

It's not just purely aesthetic, although that is a big part of it.

Some of it is actual quality not related to safety: if fruit is being processed after insects have already gone to town on it, that's not the same quality of fruit that should've been used, and might actually affect the flavor.

Some of it is still safety. Freezing foods generally don't kill bacteria, and sometimes don't even kill molds or other fungi. Neither do packaging for shelf stable dry foods like flour, rice, cornmeal, etc. That's why the danger in raw cookie dough comes from the flour, not the eggs.

And it's an indirect issue, but insect contamination may also be an indicator of other dangers that aren't solved by processing. Metal shavings or bits of rock can get into food, and having a tightly controlled process should prevent those dangers, too.

A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.

Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.

Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline's own paradigms or models. In Kuhn's view, scientists performed "normal science" by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn's description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the "normal science" periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.

The prominent example was that Mercury's orbit didn't quite fit Newton's theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn't have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn't until Einstein's general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein's theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.

Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.

Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own "Research Programs" that weren't necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn't much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own "hard core" that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the "protective belt" around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it's perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn's "normal science" and "revolutionary science" actually happened, and how Popper's falsifiability criterion fit into each space.

Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn't actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.

So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper's views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.

If you don't have the time for homemade, store bought is fine.