Tomorrow (Sunday) is the day when the Super Bowl is played, when much of America gathers around their TVs to watch the game and/or the commercials and/or the halftime show. I will not be among them, having sworn off the game because of the accumulating evidence of the serious brain damage that the players are risking. I think that while adults can choose to take such risks, it is immoral for schools and universities to encourage young people to do so and they should remove it from the list of activities.
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We know that global warming skeptics like to use the fact that it snows in winter as an argument that global warming is a big hoax, a silly argument that is a perennial favorite, But 2018 was the fourth warmest year since accurate records started being kept. The last four years have been the warmest with the very highest in 2016 and the other two in 2015 and 2017, followed by 2018. That looks bad, no? But not for for global warming skeptics who are willing to misrepresent and distort statistics to turn this new information into an argument against global warming.
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Adam Conover from the show Adam Ruins Everything explains why the theories of how the moon landing was faked by director Stanley Kubrick working for NASA could not possibly be true. Not that this will convince the skeptics of course. They will say that Adam is part of the conspiracy.
UPDATE: I came across this Mitchell and Webb sketch on this topic.
The flight of an arrow is often used as a metaphor for going straight. Xeni Jardin says that Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame has a new show called Mythbusters, Jr. where he teams up with young people to see how straight an arrow flies. He recruits an expert archer Byron Ferguson who can shoot an apple thrown in the air. Pretty amazing.
How good is master archer Byron Ferguson, who is helping @donttrythis and his #MythBustersJr co-hosts out on tomorrow's Straight as an Arrow myth? Yeah. THIS GOOD. Watch Wednesday at 9p on @ScienceChannel. pic.twitter.com/3HLFVWUDNs
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) January 16, 2019
I keep learning new stuff about dishwashers. Almost five years ago, I wrote about one misconception of how it worked that got removed when I saw a video taken inside one while it was operating. Now this article tells me that my practice of pre-rinsing before putting items in the dishwasher is not only wasteful of water, it actually leads to less clean dishes!
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Via Rob Beschizza I came across this fascinating video about how it works.
Sean Carroll has compiled a nice list of 19 items of what we currently know and don’t know about the Big Bang, in the hope of dispelling some common misconceptions. I found items #12 and #16 helpful in clarifying my own thinking about how to express these ideas.
12. The early universe had a low entropy. It looks like a thermal gas, but that’s only high-entropy if we ignore gravity. A truly high-entropy Big Bang would have been extremely lumpy, not smooth.
16. Dark energy is not a new force; it’s a new substance. The force causing the universe to accelerate is gravity.
There is a report that the Flat Earth International Conference is organizing a big sea cruise for its members. But they seem to have overlooked one important detail.
“Ships navigate based on the principle that the Earth is round,” said Henk Keijer, a former cruise ship captain who sailed all over the globe during a 23-year career.
“Nautical charts are designed with that in mind: that the Earth is round.”
Keijer, who now works as a forensic marine expert for Robson Forensic, said the existence of GPS, the global positioning system, alone is proof that the Earth is a sphere, not a flat disc. GPS relies on 24 main satellites which orbit the Earth to provide positional and navigational information.
“The reason why 24 satellites were used is because on the curvature of the Earth,” Keijer said.
“A minimum of three satellites are required to determine a position. But someone located on the other side of the Earth would also like to know their position, so they also require a certain number of satellites.
“Had the Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to everyone on Earth. But it is not enough, because the Earth is round.”