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The Moon

Orbits Terra.

On [1969-07-16 Wed] ([1969-07-20 Sun]?), Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to set foot on the Moon.

And they left a golden plaque that said, "We come in peace for all mankind".

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Created (3 years ago)

Medicine

Healing arts started being written about with Hippocrates, Galen, Empiricus(?). Then came the 15th century in which Copernicus and Vesalius published their works on astronomy and anatomy, respectively, in the same year. Vesalius had stolen dead bodies to analyze how they work. Smashed many preconceptions that ancients like Galen had.

Then came the germ theory. Semmelweiss, Jenner, Lister were early figures advocating hygiene.

Then Fleming found penicillin (apocryphal story?).

Ancient debate continues to this day, between "rationalist" and "empiricist" medicine (these terms have specific meanings in the context of medicine).

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Created (3 years ago)

Epistemic status

See commonplace.doubleloop.net/epistemic-disclosure

As of [2022-09-05 Mon], I prefer to express confidences as odds instead of percentages, may be more intuitive; the difference between 80% and 99.5% seems not as clear to non-numerate readers as the difference between 4:1 and 500:1. Also benefits me the writer, who may struggle with whether to assign 99% or 98% or 97% whereas it's easier to compare 100:1 vs 50:1 vs 32:1.

Also with the right style of writing, you may not need to express an epistemic status. While it's useful to supplement opinions and impressions (like "it's my understanding that…"), when you walk through all the reasoning you use, the reader can follow that and arrive at whatever confidence level is appropriate for them. I use epistemic status as a tool for exploring my own beliefs, which has sometimes humbled me about them, but I don't know how much readers benefit.

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Created (3 years ago)
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