I Knew It!
People are stupid. (h/t to The Buck Stops Here.)
Microwaved water kills plants. Just reading the convolutions some of the commenters go through makes my head hurt. FYI: this is in reference to (supposedly) an elementary school student’s project to see if giving a plant microwaved water was good for it.
My favorite comment wasn’t: “If the effect is real (and noting the criticisms here and on the page linked to), then I wonder if it’s connected with the oxygen levels in the water?”
It was the response: “Plants don’t take up oxygen from water (via roots), as far as I know.”
Sigh. While technically true, if you, good reader, don’t know what’s wrong with that, your opinion on global warming has just been invalidated, because you are are a scientific illiterate and ignorant of one of the basic parameters. Now go retake high-school biology. And stop reading this blog; the pictures are too intelligent for you.
Damn, but that much concentrated stupidity makes me snarky.
June 9th, 2006 at 10:13 am
Did you follow the link to the JREF forums? There wasn’t much left when they got through with it.
June 9th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
I don’t think so. I went back to Reddi and didn’t see anything about a JREF, unless that’s it.
Every now and then, someone said something intelligent on that forum but the average understanding level was awful. The comment I quoted just kills me because the author is trying to sound intelligent by being pedantic about the roots. If people can’t get more out of our educational system, why should they bother expressing an opinion? I’m rather cynical about the intelligence of the average voter these days.
Witness SDB’s recent set-to after we bagged Zarqawi. One nimrod described the attitude of glee over that success as “sanctimonious bullshit.” I thought that was a perfect description of the attitude of people who think it’s morally inferior to cause slimeballs to meet a very messy end if they’re guilty of participating in or supporting the kidnap, torture, murder, and beheading of folks they don’t like. Such sanctimonious bullshitters (I use the term deliberately) seem to think that they can just excuse those terrorists, excuse me, militants, because they’re different that us — and if we’d just understand them better — then maybe they wouldn’t have to be that way.
There are times when I think Heinlein’s rant against warm-body democracies at the end of Extended Universe was entirely too generous. Or more to the point, from Tunnel Into the Sky: “Anyone who thinks of the world in terms of what it ‘ought’ to be, rather than what it is, isn’t ready for final examination.”
People who think plants absorb oxygen aren’t ready to be treated as adults.
Yes, I’m feeling VERY snarky this week.
June 12th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
[...] Recently, Steven Den Beste let himself get pulled into another argument on Metafilter. I had to shake my head at that, because I avoid those big mass lists like the plague. There’s always some barely-literate type who thinks plants absorb oxygen or something, and you can’t reason with them because they live in their own little world. I have a visceral reaction to seeing someone make that mistake, like Bill Whittle to a friend he thought was about to get embarassed by a beautiful woman: He threw down his napkin, took a belt of his drink, and worked his way around our table heading straight for fluffy wittle bunny wabbit with the Sharp. Pointy. Teeth. I remember I damn near grabbed at his legs, like a wounded Confederate begging a comrade not to advance on the withering fire coming down from Cemetery Ridge. No Jim, don’t do it! I was thinking. No one can take that hill. It’s death to try! [...]
June 13th, 2006 at 2:38 am
JREF link: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=55420
(JREF is the James Randi Educational Foundation)
In the thread, the denizens of JREF prove beyond any doubt that the experiment as presented is a fraud created in Photoshop. Which is tangential to the whole plants-breathing-oxygen-through-their-roots angle, but their analytical response gives one at least some hope for our species.
June 13th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Heh, well, even if they don’t know biology, they know Photoshop!