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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • This is obvious though — currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.

    …but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn’t care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you “believe” in it, which is the beautiful thing about science — so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)

    Now, taking a step back, maybe you’re right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that’s getting into a whole “sociology of science” discussion.










  • You can ride your bike on many highways in the USA at least. Generally you cannot on the freeway, but there are some exceptions — in California there are requirements about bike accessibility which means that certain segments of a freeway may be bike accessible.

    If you live far from a store then groceries are a problem unless you use a trailer, but if you live in a city it’s totally reasonable to use a bike (or walk) for your weekly groceries.

    And you can get a new Trek FX for under $600, and that’s just from a quick search. Yes of you want Ultegra or better and a carbon frame, the sky is the limit.



  • Living things are “entropy eaters” — they take in energy, reduce their own entropy, and poop out entropy to the environment. This is fine, and it doesn’t violate any thermodynamics if you look at the whole picture.

    So I think the point is that creationists take a myopic view and only look at the creature itself, where indeed it reduces its own entropy…but that’s because the creationists are stupid and ignore, you know…everything else.

    This is true not only for individual animals, but for evolution itself — more complexity in animals can be viewed as a decrease in entropy (again, this is only a problem if you ignore the rest of the universe).

    Their argument is the same as saying that you can open your fridge door to cool off your room.