this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Science Memes

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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



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If you are here asking: "Is this a science meme?"

Probably, yes. We use the Dawkins definition of meme: a replicating idea, not just an image macro with a fact on it. A good post here doesn't need to teach you something. It needs to make you ask something: who, what, where, when, and especially why or how.

Science isn't a filing cabinet of facts, it's a conversation. For example, a photo of an eel or other localized wildlife counts because most people never see one, and wonder is the first step of inquiry. A car meme counts if it makes you curious about what's under the bonnet. If you want to talk about something you noticed in the world, chances are someone else wants to talk about it too.

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See the pinned paper on Shitposting as Public Pedagogy if you want the academic case for why this works.



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[–] PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

(this is the part where you tack on a silly harmless lie at the end, like - "this specific packing optimization improvement was actually discovered accidentally, through a small mini-game introduced into Candy Crush in 2013. Players discovered the novel improvement, hundreds of individual times, within the first several minutes of launch. Scholars pursuing novel packing algorithms even colloquially call this event 'The Crushening'")

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Are you sure the story is real? I can find anything that points to it, so a link would help a lot

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That candy crush story is, as the commenter said, a lie. I don't know why they would suggest that adding on a lie is in any way good, since we know that this packing was discovered in the late 1990s. It's on the wikipedia article for square packing (with sources) but I don't feel like looking it up again.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago

I didn't even understand the point that it was a lie, and not the original comment had a lie, reading skill issue

[–] PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

For the lolz? Little harmless fun? Not everyone's cup of tea, admittedly.

[–] PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 4 months ago

I'm not sure where I came across it, but it's out there somewhere. You can do it!