This was a particularly bad case of some bagel being cut in half.

When I learned about taxonomy in the 90’s they hadn’t really sequenced many genomes, so taxonomy was still very much phenotype driven, rather than the modern genetic/molecular approaches. I just assumed that everything I learned has become out of date.

Gray sex.

You know, sex between people of Pierce’s age.

Black, brown, then the fucking colors of the rainbow in order, gray, white.

If you need a mnemonic to memorize that, you’re gonna have some trouble actually building out your lookup table in your head of immediately knowing that red=2, yellow=4, etc.

10 digits gets the diameter of the earth to within an inch.

Put another way, 10 digits means that your error will be caused by your imprecise model of the Earth’s shape, rather than imprecision in the value of pi.

What would be the “n” in that Big O notation, though?

If you’re saying that you want accuracy out to n digits, then there are algorithms with specific complexities for calculating those. But that’s still just an approximation, so those aren’t any better than the real-world implementation method of simply looking up that constant rather than calculating it anew.

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.

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.