Fun fact, that gene is only about whether you can smell the compound in the piss, not whether your body processes asparagus into that smell.

They tested this by having people smell other people’s urine, and found that the people who can smell it in their own piss can also smell it in the piss of everyone who eats asparagus, even of the people who claim not to produce that smell.

Everybody’s punching up.

The diversity in preferences makes “up” impossible to define and order consistently between people. If you take a survey of a population for an ordered ranking, in desire ability as potential spouses, of a particular sample set, you might get wildly different rankings.

And then those same people might rank things differently depending on who they would most want to have a one night stand with.

Even laying out specific physical characteristics and asking about attractiveness will get those isolated features ranked differently. Heterosexual men will disagree on whether it is attractive, unattractive or neutral for a woman to be:

• Being very tall
• Being very short
• Having an athletic build
• Having pale skin
• Having curly hair
• Having tattoos
• Having a Ph.D.
• Speaking multiple languages
• Being Christian
• Being vegetarian

We’re all just looking for compatibility. What that means will vary from person to person, and what is very attractive to one person might be a huge turn off to another.

I’m generally of the view that you want to be with someone whose unique traits are positive to you, and who sees your unique traits as positives, too. That way both can fall within that stable equilibrium of both believing that they’ve married “up.”

Predate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.

Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.

Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein’s theories really started taking off.

Plate tectonics was entirely a 20th century theory, and became accepted in the second half of the 20th century, by people who might still be alive today.

Same energy:

In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something?

Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).

Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.

A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth’s relative velocity.

Plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.

So merely believing in something not provable doesn’t make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.

Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.

Not if you want it to stay extra virgin

Shotgun gauge is wonky, so it’s not a given that the number would just be a diameter in units they are familiar with.

Yeah, it’s not intuitive that bigger gauge numbers = narrower diameter unless you’ve specifically worked with wire or shotguns before.

That still makes no sense. Is the commenter surprised to learn that a 0.223 inch caliber is approximately 0.223 inches? That a .45 inch caliber is about .45 inches? Yes, that’s how units work.

Yeah, anyone who has biked in city streets will tell you that the buses are much wider than even the big SUVs.