Only had a couple minutes to try this but I'm already confused by a couple things.
- "UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE" I guess this is a joke but I don't really get it, just seems like a weird thing to have there.
- In the first popup, the "audio transmission" is significantly different than the printed text.
- "The Earth is a sphere." - this is not true, I think it should be classified as a hypothesis
- "The universe is expanding." Isn't this a theory? I don't think it can be called "a basic statement", it is a well-tested theory based on a lot of observational evidence.
- "Humans and gorillas evolved from a common ancestor species." This is obviously a theory, it's like THE theory when you need an example of what a theory is. You cannot establish this by experiment or observation.
- "Light is an electromagnetic phenomenon described by Maxwell's Laws" Why is this classified as a theory?
etc.
The categorization of this first lesson seems very arbitrary, and often contradictory with the "knowledge database" on the left.
Edit: Did you AI-generate these questions and then not proofread them?
I do agree much of the categorisation is baffling (I could nitpick several others). In that respect it's a shame to start off with that lesson when some of the others are so much more relevant to the mission concept, interesting and less debatable
I'm trying to overthink the space power systems exercise now ;-)
Actually very nicely designed, but the pedant in me is screaming "you can't just expect the other 3 solar panels to have the same number of dead zones" and I can't find the source either...
There are photos of the Earth taken from the neighborhood of the Moon. They show something that is indistinguishable from a sphere to the naked eye.
Sure, with instruments you can measure it and find that it deviates from a perfect sphere. But every object that is made of atoms multiple atoms is not a perfect sphere.
I don't think it's a pedantic point, this is supposed to be a site about learning math that NASA scientists use, and the exact shape of the Earth is very relevant to them.
I just think it shouldn't be used as a canonical example of a fact when you'll probably learn at some point that it technically isn't true.
Some point being any half-decent middle-school textbook, or any popular science space book for teens. There's usually a footnote or an info box explaining that Earth isn't a perfect sphere.
It's not some arcane nerd knowledge. It's just a detail people don't remember from school because it's irrelevant to their lives.
I doubt it, around ten million people watch 60 minutes live every week. Maybe that many will hear about the cancellation, but I don't think most will then seek out the full segment online, even if it's easy to find.
Yeah, even those looking for the full segment will have trouble finding it if they are not tech savvy and highly motivated.
A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.
I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.
It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.
My best guess is that someone saw a recent front page post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330726) that is hosted on bearblog.dev, clicked on Discover which brought them to that trending list, and then saw this "Hacker News slop" post on that list and decided to post it here.
The Machine Stops (https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...), a 1909 short story, predicted Zoom fatigue, notification fatigue, the isolating effect of widespread digital communication, atrophying of real-world skills as people become dependent on technology, blind acceptance of whatever the computer says, online lectures and remote learning, useless automated customer support systems, and overconsumption of digital media in place of more difficult but more fulfilling real life experiences.
It's the most prescient thing I've ever read, and it's pretty short and a genuinely good story, I recommend everyone read it.
Edit: Just skimmed it again and realized there's an LLM-like prediction as well. Access to the Earth's surface is banned and some people complain, until "even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject."
There is even more to it than that. Also remember this is 1909. I think this classifies as a deeply mysterious story. It's almost inconceivable for that time period.
-people a depicted as grey aliens (no teeth, large eyes, no hair). Lesson the Greys are a future version of us.
The air is poisoned and ruined cities. People live in underground bunkers...1909...nuclear war was unimaginable then. This was still the age of steam ships and coal power trains. Even respirators would have been low on the public imagination.
The air ships with metal blinds sound more like UFOs than blimps.
The white worms.
People are the blood cells of the machine which runs on their thoughts social media data harvesting of ai.
China invaded Australia. This story was 8 years or so after the Boxer Rebellion so that would have sounded like say Iraq invading the USA in the context of its time.
The story suggests this is a cyclical process of a bifurcated human race.
The blimp crashing into the steel evokes 9/11, 91+1 years later...
Zamatyin’s We was prescient politically, socially and technologically - but didn’t fall into the trap of everyone being machine men with antennae.
It’s interesting - Forster wrote like the Huxley of his day, Zamyatin like the Orwell - but both felt they were carrying Wells’ baton - and they were, just from differing perspectives.
Separation of church and state, especially when schools don’t allow alternative books (eg in some Bible Belt areas). Also, the bible does have violence, sex (including rape and incest), etc.
I understand there are reasons it could be banned, but I'm saying that in reality it is not. It is widely available in elementary and middle school libraries.
There have been many attempts to ban it, but a backlash usually results in its reinstatement. IIRC there are often cases where questionable verses are blotted out or it's only the new testament (which is in general less "graphic"), but it really depends on the jurisdiction.
Except for one case in Texas that made a splash in the news last year, I didn't find other cases of the Bible being banned from school libraries. Did I miss something?
If not, it would make sense that Texas made the news because it's out of the ordinary.
I mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.
Is lying by omission and juxtaposition. It's manipulation. And it pisses me off to no end. I read the original source. It has NOTHING to do with Parkinson’s. It’s a suicidal dose ingested, and when extracted, it was still a dangerous chemical. If I drank a gallon of gasoline and you pumped it out of me, then it caught fire, it wouldn't explain anything except that gasoline is dangerous and burns. Nobody disputes that with regard to this chemical. So why slip it in like that? And the fact that people don't care just shows why they CAN “just slip it in there” in an article about Parkinson’s... nobody cares as long as it confirms their bias.
I only care about evidence that proves that it causes Parkinson’s, with basic scientific rigor. I’ll eat my hat if any of the cited studies did basic attempt at falsification.
reply