[Zancarius]

I think some people thrive on being contrarian, regardless of whether they have a valid reason for it or not. I just can't decide whether some people do it for the sake of appearing smart (look at me! I call everything into question!) or because they're extremely pessimistic and/or skeptical in nature. The problem with the latter is that it almost seems to be expressed in online discussions to a pathological extreme, so I'm sure it shares something with those personality traits that lend themselves to trolling (at least to a degree).

There's an interesting discussion on the bottled plant over at skeptics.stackexchange.com [1] that covers many of these reasons, but in more detail. The crux of it is that we can't really prove whether or not David Latimer did or did not water this plant in the 40-odd years since bottling it, so we're left with taking his word for it.

But at the end of the day I don't think it really matters. He looks like a nice guy I wouldn't mind having for a neighbor and really appreciates his plants. Maybe he's spinning a yarn, maybe he's not. Does it really matter? No.

[1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15838/can-a-plan...

Edit: Someone already linked this 5 hours ago (I should've ctrl+f'd it), so toss 'em some upvotes [2].

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7858522

[A_COMPUTER]

I try to be rigorous in my thinking but I have also run into "skeptics" that are far too rigorous for daily life. My only complaint about this story is that it should be in the human interest section rather than the science section if it's too frivolous to subject to scrutiny.