The absolute problem with your answer is that in among the post from the real life high energy physicist will be 30 posts from internet high energy physicists—all of whom will be clueless. Of course, the OP can’t tell the real life physicist from the pretend physicist.
There are only a handful of things I know very well, and maybe only a few of them really, really well, so I tend to pay attention to those threads. I am often amazed at the abject ignorance (and intended in a non pejorative sense) that is presented as fact.
This is not intended as an indictment of the SDMB, but of the internet (and message boards) in general. I will say, however, that this is the only message board that so consistently breaks it’s arm patting itself on the back.
I agree with many of those posts, but they are in large part minor irritants to me. But this whole “We’re special!” meme often makes this place insufferable.
I have little interest in whether this is true or not, actually. Wiki says, in part,
At any rate, within the SDMB community it has been common to hear the “concept” that this message board is somehow special. It’s pervasive enough that I’ve seen newbies sucked in quickly and parroting the theme.
Whether that meets your definition of meme or not, it doesn’t matter to me. My point, then and now, is that it’s long overdue to give this theme a rest.
" everybody is more attracted to larger or obese women than those that are weight-proportionate-to-height, and so on. "
Um, I’m kind of attracted to anaemic and tubercular looking ladies from asia. Is that OK ?
It probably has something to do with where I grew up (Ewa Beach, Hawaii). So perhaps instead of tolerating my un-PC presence because I have a birth defect, perhaps you could get away with tolerating it because I have a puberty-locale-defect.
I can’t figure out why it is a bad thing to think the SDMB is special. What is the definition of ‘special’ to most people, I wonder? There is not another site on the entire world wide web that has inspired me to post to it even close to half of two thousand times. People have listed other great sites, like Bad Astronomy. Ok, they are special, and the Dope is also special. What is the deal with folks always being to cool for the room around here? A lot of posters here think this place is a cut above, and so they enjoy posting here; why begrudge them the honor of singing the place’s praises?
I work in a call center. A really good one. The jobs are stable, the pay is good, the opportunity for advancement is there for anyone that wants it, one could even pick up and move to India and work there at headquarters if one wanted to; they give that option. I go to work, and I do a good job; an honorable job. Every day, lots of coworkers spend seven out of nine hours putting the place down as ‘just a call center. I’m gonna be a (name fancy profession); I’m just here biding my time’. I always feel like, if you are not proud of yourself now, you won’t be proud of yourself when you get your degree in Rocket Science. You will just be proud of the degree.
And that is how I feel on this topic, too. If you are cooler than the room at the SDMB then you are not going to go on over to Thetruesmartandintellectualmessageboard.com and be all of a sudden right at home. You are just going to be waiting for the op to tell them they are not as special as they think they are.
ETA: I didn’t mean to say you don’t have a right to your opinion, raindog…I was actually venting about what I have seen on this board a bunch of times, in general.
For me this place is special I guess. It’s my favorite general topic message board. My sole objection, I suppose, is not so much the notion that SDMB is “special” (because it is a cool place) but that we are smarter than anyone else.
For me, it’s enough that there is a cool mix of people, and some of them are very smart. I just don’t need to hear that we’re The Internet Brain Trust.
Walmart in the UK is Asda (a supermarket, that addresses one of your other points). Yes, it has inordinately better customer service than the kinds of shops that it replaced. I get to experience the difference every time I go home. There’s a reason why people are willing to drive to the outskirts of town, rather than walk to the shops in the village centre.
I don’t know what the situation is with Asda, but the general cultural effect of Walmart in the United States is that it makes the communities in which it operates poorer, as in driving out well-paying jobs and replacing them with Walmart jobs,and basically it has forced the exportation of the entire U.S. manufacturing industry. What’s the overall benefit of being able to shop at a place with cheaper prices if your income is also going down in real terms?
Wal-Mart has been highly successful at spreading the “always cheaper” meme. Often cheaper? Yep. Usually cheaper? That’s probably even true. But there have been a lot of times when people have mentioned what they paid for something at Wal-Mart and there’s a small shop in town that has it cheaper. Sometimes quite a bit cheaper.
Sure, there are plenty of people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but in my experience it’s really not that hard to tell the difference. With science questions at least, the people who know what they’re talking about tend to include more specifics. Also, having hung around the boards for a while one learns who can regularly be relied on to give a good answer on particular topics.
Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about from a current thread in GQ:
OP:
Would Pontius Pilate’s first name be prounced “PONT e us,” “PON shus” or something else?
First response:
I pronounce it Pont-chus.
Second response:
Classical Latin didn’t have anything like English “sh,” [ETA: or “ch”] so probably not that last one. Cassell’s Latin dictionary says that all the vowels are short, so I assume “Pon” as in pond*, “ti” as in still, and “us” as in us. Alternatively, it may have been “Pont” + “yus” — I’m not sure how many syllables it’s supposed to have, and -ius can be “ih-us” or “yuss.” Classical Latin is also supposed to have had a pitch accent as well as a stress accent, but don’t ask me how that works.
*But not aspirated like an English speaker would, more like French, Spanish, or Italian.
Third response:
As far as I know it should be something like:
[ˈpɔntijʊs]
Stress on the first syllable
“pond” with a “t” seems about right, just without aspiration
“i” between consonant and vowel becomes [ij].
Short “u” is a [ʊ] as in “put”.
Voiceless “s”
While it’s not clear that any of these posters are experts on Latin, it certainly isn’t hard to tell that the second and third responders probably know more about it than the first one.
I agree with the “I win this thread” because I can only think of one time the person did win the thread in my mind, and it was the other day in the most surprising cameo and the poster’s answer was someone I can’t remember and Sean Penn in Two and a Half Men. Other than that, they are never even close to winning. The other one I can’t stand is “I can’t believe no one has mentioned blah blah” because blah blah has always been mentioned at least twice. For such a smart group here, some have some pretty shitty reading comprehension.
These might not even be meme’s, but I don’t care about the linguistics fight of it.
Oh, and also agree with “How YOU doin”, but at least the person is just being lame, and not actively acting like they are so much better/cooler/smarter for thinking of THIS when no one else did like the two examples I listed above.
Before I swore off WalMart, they took it seriously. You could go to the dept. manager with a claim that Kmart had it for $10 less, they’d ring it up for less than the Kmart price. When I was taking up fishing, it saved me a lot of coin.
But the analogy Dawkins was making with his coinage of “meme” was with genes – units of heredity that are capable of reproducing. However, a gene is not obligated to reproduce in order to be a gene. Its success in doing so depends to some extent on the suitability of the phenotypic expression of the gene for the environment in which it exists, but failure to reproduce doesn’t mean it wasn’t a gene – just that it wasn’t a reproductively successful one.
Not that there aren’t problems with the whole concept of memes from a scientific standpoint, but as non-rigorous way of communicating a certain, well, meme, it’s often useful.