Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That’s when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

From Wikipedia:

Dabie bandavirus, also called SFTS virus, is a tick-borne virus in the genus Bandavirus in the family Phenuiviridae, order Bunyavirales.[2] The clinical condition it caused is known as severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS).[2] SFTS is an emerging infectious disease that was first described in northeast and central China 2009 and now has also been discovered in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan in 2015. SFTS has a fatality rate of 12% and as high as over 30% in some areas. The major clinical symptoms of SFTS are fever, vomiting, diarrhea, multiple organ failure, thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), leukopenia (low white blood cell count) and elevated liver enzyme levels. Another outbreak occurred in East China in the early half of 2020.

This is barely related, but I’ve recently discovered it using Firefox and just wanted to share my misery. If you’re not using Chrome with the Google Docs extension, then Google Sheets will REFUSE to let you copy and paste with a right click context menu. But you can just press the keyboard keys to do so, or use the menu options to do so.

Like…what? It works, but they refuse to let you do it with the context menu, despite including them in the context menu.

If you try, it pops up a window and tells you that you have to install their extension or pound sand.

“5E3”

The article is misusing the word sceptic here, which is a pet peeve of mine. That language indirectly contributes to a lack of respect for actual experts and a sense of “there is no objective truth” BS.

Skepticism is not blindly denying things. That would be more akin to cynicism, or well, denialism. You can’t be a “climate change skeptic”, any more than you can be a “round earth skeptic”, or a “gravity skeptic”.

Skepticism is about being willing to update or disregard beliefs that do not match the evidence. It’s about determining what is or isn’t high quality evidence, and letting your ideas be challenged and tested, as only the things most likely to be true will survive. It’s a process for how you approach new information, deeply held beliefs, your own assumptions, and the claims of others. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than anything else we’ve got.

And unfortunately for “climate change skeptics”, that also means we can know with fairly high confidence, the truth of certain things. Climate science and climate change are some of the things we have very strong evidence for, and to be “skeptical” of them in this day is not critical thinking. It’s either lying, political posturing, or burying your head in the sand.