My mom was playing Jeopardy on her Alexa and one of the questions was about a state in Mexico. Her boyfriend, who was very drunk, adamantly insists that it’s a trick question because “Mexico doesn’t have states.” It’s literally called the United Mexican States. Two of my aunts are from Mexico. It took like two hours to get him off the subject.
Confidently ignorant people really bother me. Even if I thought that I would’ve thought “Is that true?” and spent a second googling it. It is amazing how some folks are devoid of even the slightest curiosity but are blindly overconfident.
i got into an argument with my in law about a 60$ sticker to block the ‘waves’ on my phone. for my health. and my phone will still work… it was a hologram sticker.
the one where the democrats are the ‘party of slavery’ because of what the parties stood for in 1860. yeah that’s why I’m voting for Lincoln and the union this year dumbfucks
And yet California—a solidly blue state—just voted by public referendum to uphold slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_California_Proposition_6
I wonder why so many Democrats left the party during the civil rights movement? I wonder why David Duke left the Democrat party? I guess we’ll never know.
Probably had a big fight with Jefferson Davis
They might want to look up how the parties flipped during the civil rights era.
Toss up : a coworker who I would have counted as quite intelligent said we haven’t been to the moon because “it’s impossible to launch a rocket to the moon and land on it because rockets go in a straight line. Trying to time the shot of the rocket, and get to the moon at the exact moment when the moon gets to the right spot would be astronomically impossible. The odds of pulling that off at the speed you would be traveling and the distance you travel… Well the odds are effectively zero.”
"Also you can’t catch up to the moon because the moon is traveling faster then our rockets can go "
Either that or a prochoice individual who voted for Trump…
How does this person think things like ICBMs work? They just go straight up and away from the earth and can’t turn?
When he used both arguments in the same conversation. I shrugged and stopped talking. Nothing to gain by continuing the conversation
No, you must go back and tell him that the moon moves at a very predictable rate and once you get close enough it will even pull you in.
Also I’m pretty sure the ISS moves a lot faster than the moon but we still manage to dock spacecraft with it. I’m pretty sure it’s a bit smaller than the moon and docking can require higher precision than landing on a surface. Even Boeing managed to do it.
How does this person think guided missiles work? “Well the plane moved so we missed.”
"Also you can’t catch up to the moon because the moon is traveling faster then our rockets can go "
- Not true so discussion over right there
- Even if its angular velocity was faster than a rocket its radial velocity is nearly 0 so all you would have to do to intercept it is to lead it. No different than shooting a moving target at long ranges.
If you really want to confuse most folks tell them why shooting stuff into the sun is actually VERY hard to do.
Okay im curious. What about shooting something into the sun is very hard?
The earth has a lot of angular momentum, in fact the planets combined have more than the sun and planet formation may actually be necessary to “bleed off” angular momentum from protostellar discs for star formation, but I digress. So if you were to aim directly at the sun you’d miss it wildly as the tangential motion of the earth would be added to your motion. Even worse it would miss the sun, go around it, and orbit back to where you came from. A bad thing if you were trying to toss, say, radioactive waste into the sun. To hit the sun you have to bleed off all of that angular momentum by using rockets (very expensive) or do what NASA usually does and use gravity assists swinging by planets to gain or lose energy. The Parker solar probe had to do a bunch of swings past Venus to lose enough angular momentum to get close to the sun.
I was assuming rockets were an option like going to the moon. Cost wasnt something i thought we were factoring in thats not really a factor in just trying to send a space ship at the sun and having it get there. It doesnt have to be moving fast (relatively) to get there so you just need good aim and to keep it on track.
Cost should be its own problem separate from the objective. Assume 0 costs, how hard would it be?
It requires a LOT of energy to counter the earth’s orbital motion. Hitting the moon is different because the moon is traveling with the earth and you are going outwards. Energy is always part of the equation since orbital mechanics is all about energy. You can’t ignore it by saying “Assume 0 costs, how hard would it be?” then we could just say it can approach the speed of light since we are ignoring any energy costs.
“It doesnt have to be moving fast”
But you will be moving fast, you are starting at an angular speed of 30km/s. The Apollo missions with their massive engines reached 11 km/s. Now think of someone wanting to dump hundreds of tons of nuclear waste into the sun and the energy that would require.
Maybe this explains it better:
Obligatory mention: Full Body Workout Every Other Day?
Kinda related, I studied in Spain for a semester. Was taking with my fellow American roommate about the debate of if a tomato is a fruit or vegetable. Our host mom’s daughter’s boyfriend (Cuban, fwiw) overheard, and we told him about the “controversy” in the US but all 3 of us agreed it was a fruit. Host mom overheard us and asked what we were talking about, and the Cuban told her. “Well yeah, of course it’s a vegetable”
I couldn’t understand every word but when I could tell they were arguing about some vegetables having seeds or something like that I knew I spread something.
All fruits are vegetables, not all vegetables are fruits. All edible plant matter is vegetable. Fruits are, well, the fruit of a plant.
People think of fruits as having to be sweet and tomatoes are acidic and are used like non-fruit vegetables in cooking so I can see why someone who hasn’t thought about botanical definitions would think that way.
That’s kinda strange, I was taught in school that tomato was a fruit so that’s what I always went with. As to why, I honestly have no idea and wouldn’t be able to argue
Someone on Bluesky last night mentioned Woody Allen for some offhand reason, and some sock puppet account was loudly defending Woody and saying he never did anything wrong and that Soon-Yin was never parented by him or anything like that. Imagine being a shill for Woody Allen of all people.
So someone chimed in on a subject that was never broached in the first place? It reminds me of the people on reddit who will always pipe in about how mean John Lennon was no matter what the subject about him is.
Literally someone joked “don’t Woody Allen me” and this account went off with a bunch of “facts”. It was super odd.
When I was on Reddit I was talking about Jian Ghomeshi’s sexual abuse charges on r/Canada (before it got overrun by racists), and a sock puppet account sent me the weirdest PM, about how I wanted to “touch the diamond that is Jian’s life, but holding a melting diamond in your hands is dangerous” or some such shit. I actually feel it was Jian Ghomeshi because it was so narcissistic and weird. I could of course be wrong, but I really think it was. The wording was just too weird.
I fought with my aunt about “mom jeans.” I was telling her it was a style of jeans and she was adament that it was any kind of jeans that a “mother” is wearing.
Well technically you are both right though she is being pedantic.
So dumb.
Hour argument, that the final cliff fall scene in Predator 1 was two different jumps in the 2 cuts.
Can see in the first one he is rotating. Second cut is a straight plumb drop into the water.
How were the rotational moments counteracted?
They weren’t, it’s two different jumps/takes.
2 friends came up with some hair-brained arguments that you could stop rotating on the way down. (눈_눈)
The only way would be air resistance, and hands/arms is not going to be enough to create drag to counter the rotation.
Jackie Chan: Always shoot the punch twice.
I hate when people get into minute arguments about what is visually happening on screen versus the story that’s being told. It can be a single jump narratively but two jumps in production. (I’ve never seen the movie.)
I was not invested in the outcome of the argument, just seeing how far they were willing to take being wrong about aerodynamics/physics. Quite far it turns out.
