I’m infamous on Reddit as “that moon landing denier gal”. Sorry but I just don’t buy it. No goalpost was safe that decade and you don’t need the analytical videos to tell you that.
What do you think about the event when about Buzz Aldrin punched a moonlanding denier in the face after they called him a coward, liar, and a thief?
Genuinely curious. I know I can’t know for certain - I cant go back in time and ride on that rocket with them. But the guy that supposedly went there seems pretty convinced he did. Even if I did believe it was faked, I’d have a hard time believing he didn’t think he went.
There wouldn’t be any other way I could think of it aside from it being nothing short of escalation. Aldrin’s defenders would later claim the accuser “cornered him”, but this is certainly neither true nor would make sense in the context. Sometimes the narrative is going to do what a narrative does, though I (unlike some here) do not judge others for having different conclusions than me.
My main come back for this: It was the height of the Cold War and the Soviets didnt question it. Also, recently, the Chinese moon missions has photographs of modules left by the Apollo missions on the moon.
To be fair, the Soviets also thought the space race to be all done with once they put their astronauts in orbit, and they weren’t really paying attention when America went to the moon.
At the time anyways. Especially the population at large wasn’t interested. It strikes me as weird to say you’re not interested in proving superiority in a certain field when you are when the whole point of making a statement is to be declarative about it.
If making a statement, why be quiet about it? That ruins the whole point of making a statement like how better someone is at something, doesn’t it? The civilian population in particular didn’t really care.
I don’t understand what you are saying. They had a moon landing program.
Also, do you really think that if the Soviets had the opportunity to embarrass the Americans by proving the landing was fake, they wouldn’t take it? Of course they would. Instead they were able to track the Apollo mission all the way and knew it was real.
But they also said they weren’t interested in the space race. Note that you can be interested in an endeavor other people are interested with without wanting to engage in a “race” with them. In this case they are claimed as being interested in showing off while simultaneously being insecure about said thing. I would be puzzled if someone’s method of showing off was precisely that, to not show off.
You say the rest like they did see it that way, that we absolutely went to the moon. How do you think censorship works? There is plenty of documentation about the case against the moon landing. Despite looking like plot armor though, the power of our culture has promoted the counters to it over it though.
Even if the Soviets had given up on the space race, they still had a vested interest in embarrassing America. They had every motivation to prove that America faked it, but they didn’t do it, because they had all the evidence that it was real. They could track the space craft and listen in on the same signals everyone else did.
All documentation against the moon landing has been thoroughly debunked many times. But you don’t care about that.
You don’t have to trust the Americans, there is plenty of independent third party evidence from multiple sources
You’re welcome. Seeing the reaction, I’m wondering if people read the title of the OP and were expecting popular opinions. Lemmy is more Reddit than Lemmy probably wants to admit.
Well there is not much meaningful discussion to be had about a decades old conspiracy theory that has been memed on plenty in the past. I think that is where the downvotes are coming from.
If that’s the standard, there aren’t really a lot of meaningful discussions anywhere on this thread to be honest. Any documentaries on mothers co-sleeping with infants, humans fighting bears, or one for each of the three people denying the big bang theory?
All of those are more interesting topics than a dumb mega-debunked conspiracy theory. Seems like your standard for interesting is History channel at 2 am?
You say that like the opposing standard for interesting ever had a timeslot on any channel. I wouldn’t hold this against anyone though, I for one am not one to be as judgy or to come to a question like this expecting narrative conformity.
This is all performative. You knew you’d draw ire and that was your goal. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t have announced you’re reddit famous for believing a slew of debunked lies
The problem with psychiatry is that it’s expected to have quick fixes like other schools of medicine. Often the conditions are chronic and the treatment is long term at best which makes it slow and expensive. Drugs can help in the short term but they’re often not able to be replaced by correct treatment due to funding.
I’m not an expert by any means but just happen to have some knowledge on the subject.
It really depends on the condition, how severe it is and if there are any compounding issues. Take something like depression as an example. In my country, UK, you’ll often end up on antidepressants, and get a referral to a specialist if you’re lucky. The specialist likely won’t have the funding or at least a huge backlog of patients to work through so they’ll be trying to get you out on your own as soon a possible, which means getting you to ‘good enough’. As a result you’ll likely remain on antidepressants when continued therapy would be much more beneficial and could take you off the medication. Drugs are cheap but time with a therapist is not.
It’s a statistical science. While other branches can be all like “splitting atoms will definitely give you an energetic reaction” psychology is like "this helps in 60% of cases so we’re gonna try it on you ".
To be fair here, technically throwing neutrons at matter has only some probability of causing it to fission, and statistics tells us how many do. It’s just that there are so many more neutrons and nuclei than there are people, so we can say with statistical confidence that under such and such conditions, y will occur when x happens.
Not that different. Just more samples and observations.
i agree with you, figuring useful and fun UI using touch and swipes is a real challenge. but ive never seen someone whip out a bluetooth joypad for their phone in public.
Everyone in the replies here is sleeping on the raw emulation power of most people's phone, doubly so if you're willing to bt sync a controller to it. I've got a significant percentage of the SNES and PS1 libraries playable on mine.
Aside from dictators (who are by definition very, very shitty people, but almost always have an art career for some reason), assuming actors don’t count as artists, I’d have to say the only example I can think of is Butch Hartman, not shitty because of his character but because he’s like the other JK Rowling.
To answer the second question, literally all the e-artists I’ve ever met, though art is relative enough I don’t feel like art can have a “negative” value. I trust they will never see this.
I love Tom Cruise. The man is an amazing, committed actor. He doesn’t need flashy CGI or visual effects and he does insane stunts for our entertainment. Too bad he’s a fucking nutjob.
This thread has already mentioned a lot of artists I was already going to mention…and I’ll add a semi-recent one for me, Scott Adams. I started reading Dilbert while I was still learning to read and my exposure to it helped me recover from my literacy anxiety (which I sometimes still have to an extent). I’ve mentioned a bit of my associations of it in previous posts but to recap, my mom worked at another “Baby Bell” company, Nynex, later Bell Atlantic then Verizon, (like Scott who worked at Pacific Bell and Dilbert and friends who worked at an unnamed company implied to be in the telecom sector) I liked the simplistic designs a lot, as well as the introduction of new vocabulary. I soon started making my own comic strips. Scott Adams’ views on race, medicine, politics and several other subjects are perplexing. If I could logically follow them, I’d be offended. My dad’s high school experience was diminished by segregation apologists during Boston bussing mandates of the 1970s when they would protest at school campuses. The fact that Adams was on board with such a stupid practice in that infamous vlog is upsetting. Then again, Adams is a contrarian so I can’t be sure if he sincerely feels that way, especially since he tweeted something afterwards saying “I’m not actually bothered by black people. I am actually just annoyed by white people who advocate for black people” (paraphrase). Maybe it’s a true clarification or maybe he’s just trying to walk back his statements. He needs help. There’s probably something traumatic in his life that made him snap. Off hand, I know his wife filed for divorce from him and his stepson died of an overdose, and he may still be mourning in a strange way. Still, if I see Dilbert merch at a secondhand shop or in the library, I’d gladly take them out. I will not subscribe to his new pay-walled comic, but if his distributors and publishers ever decide to re-sign their contracts with him and start printing new Dilbert books again, I may buy them. Anecdotally print publishers seem to do more vetting than web publishers, so I’d hope that if they ever reunite he’d be in the right headspace. Anyway, great comic, troubled person. Hope the guy gets some help.
I got in to Dilbert Young, too. I don’t know why it appealed to me exactly, but I started reading his comic strips around 8 or so, and even got some compilation books. I also read some of his non-comic books… They were largely hippy woowoo bullshit, but still good reads. Then he came out with God’s Debris which I thought was genuinely interesting.
So I don’t think he was always this way, or maybe he hid it better. To teenage me, at least, he seemed pretty logical and fairly progressive. A bit of a hippie at times, a bit of a look at times, fairly anti-corporate and pro-little guy, overall his writing made him seem like a decent person. Maybe some vaguely problematic takes here and there, but nothing all that bad.
It was like some combination of success and wealth and Twitter access broke his mind. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn’t recognize it and I’m blinded by nostalgia. It was just a wild rollercoaster ride watching him melt down.
Behind the Bastards did an episode on him. Honestly I think from what I recall he was just drawing what got good feedback, but then he had a few issues with health, one that made him unable to speak for years and iirc ended his marriage?
So one of their takes is maybe this trauma did some damage to him mentally as well. I’m grossly oversimplfying, so I recommend checking the episode. You can also find statements and articles about his Spasmodic Aphonia and him attributing his divorce partially to it.
They do have some arguments against his anti-corporate rep though.
It’s like a punch in the face. We bought 2 bottles, passed one around on my wedding night and most people hated it, it’s so strong, we didn’t even finish it. I ended up giving that one to a buddy, and I still have the other bottle, but I haven’t found a reason to crack it open yet.
Science articles that reference paywalled journals you can’t actually read. Most of them are probably making stuff up because they know no one will be able to call them out on it.
First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.
With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.
Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.
So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:
I have an idea for some research. If it’s good and I’m lucky, I get money from the government (or whomever) to do the work, and I use it to pay my expenses (salaries, materials, equipment, whatever). I also get taxed on it by my institution so they can pay the admins and other costs. When submitting a proposal, those are all line items in your budget. If you’re doing expensive research at an expensive institution, it’s pretty trivial to set aside $10-20k for pub fees. If your entire grant was $35k, that’s a lot harder to justify.
You write the paper after doing the work. You don’t get paid to write the paper specifically - it’s part of the research that you are doing. The point here is that, unlike book authors, researchers see zero of any money you’d pay for the article. If you do locate a copyrighted copy, you’re not taking a dime out of my pocket. Again, just thrilled someone’s reading the damn thing.
You pick a journal and send it in. The journal has a contact list of researchers and their fields, and sends out requests for reviewers. They usually require 2 or 3.
The reviewers read the paper making notes on questions they have and recommend revisions before publication. Reviewing is an unpaid service researchers do because we know that’s how it works. The irony is that it challenges the academic notion of the tragedy of the commons. You could be a freeloader and never review, but enough people do it that the system keeps rolling.
You revise, reviewers approve, publisher accepts and schedules date. There can be some back and forth here (this is a legitimate publisher expense, but the level of effort and interaction isn’t like with a book editor).
Your paper comes out.
As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.
And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:
Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.
Appreciate the thoughtful and in-depth response. My worry is more that a science article’s editorialized interpretation of the paper may be wrong or misleading, than that the public isn’t very able to scrutinize the quality of science in the paper itself. Waiting for a possible email response from a researcher is pretty much always going to be a little too high effort for someone wanting to spend a few minutes comparing claims in the article and claims in the paper to potentially call bullshit on discrepancies between them in an online comment.
I absolutely agree with you there. I just commented a short time ago on an article about the effects of primate vocalizations on the human brain. The article not only got the conclusion of the paper wrong, they got the very nature of evolution wrong. I didn’t even have to read the paper - I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s admittedly the kind of mistake non-biologists make. Journalists should probably avoid drawing conclusions that aren’t specifically in the source material. My point is that, going off of the author’s quotes the pulled and my own knowledge of evolutionary dynamics, I knew it was wrong. However, I am not at all sure that someone without a background in biology would be able to understand the paper well enough to catch the error in the article.
I am all for open access, and I share your frustration. I think you should be able to access any paper you want for free. But I’ll also say that if you don’t have the background in the subject to know what the underlying paper will have said, the chances are pretty good that you’re not going to understand the paper well enough to find the flaws.
I used to talk to a physicist named Lee Smolin who proposed a Darwinian model for universe formation. I can follow the evolutionary part, but when it gets down to the physics of it, I’m lost at sea. So when I read an article about him - I read something about him recently - I mostly have to go on my basic understanding because there’s no way I’d make it through that paper.
And literally the only reason I’m throwing this out there at all is that, unlike a physics paper that’s totally incomprehensible and obviously so, people believe in their own interpretations on social science or public health papers. I see more kinds of cherry-picking abuses and simple misunderstandings there than elsewhere.
I think most of the time it’s really not going to be as hard as all that, because the problem is something like, article makes broad claim based on a very easy to understand study where the data is results of survey questions. The paper clearly and explicitly outlined caveats and qualifications for their results, but the article chose to ignore these, so all that would be required to call them out on it is basic reading comprehension and the ability to copy paste a brief quote from the paper. Or maybe there are stark, obvious differences between the question asked in a survey and the claim of a clickbait headline.
Even for something more complex, if the paper is well written I think people without a background in the field could get stuff out of it, at least enough to spot direct contradictions between it and a summary. It’s just reading. A lot of people can read and have some higher education.
For that wikipedia article, I think it would make more sense if it expanded on “may differ slightly” and how that interacts with this criticism of black hole information transfer being impossible. Would that criticism imply the parameters for new universes must be always the same? Have infinite variance with no reference point? Not exist at all? Is “may differ slightly” a claim that each universe is a reference point around which the cosmological constants of child universes randomly vary a little bit and then there could be drift based on which constants result in a universe with more black holes? If that stuff was concisely clarified it would probably seem less arcane.
I’ve had a field day while writing my thesis recently, realising I could bypass the paywalls by accessing the papers through the university proxy. It’s still bs, though, because it leaves this stuff only accessible to researchers and not your regular people who may be interested.
Though like PrinceWith999Enemies said, many paper writers will happily send you a copy if you email them about it.
To add onto that, whenever a newspaper says “based on the findings of researchers at [Random University]” but they don’t list the citation anywhere at all. That is just evil, but somehow industry standard.
I have an unopened bottle of Seagrams from 1946, and a bottle of Old Forester from 1953, where time + the VERY heavy glass stopper cracked the plastic seal and broke the cork. Both belonged to my better half’s grandfather
I once tasted some regular Cuervo gold my buddy brought to a cabin weekend. He was going to make margaritas (with HFCS mix) and I nabbed a pour to sip on. It was one of the best tequilas I’ve ever tasted. I couldn’t believe it was Cuervo, and then he told me that it was a bottle his Dad brought back from Mexico in the 80’s. Apparently that stuff was really good back in the day.
I accept this. I saw these when they premiered- like lining up outside the theatre and everyone cheering, etc. That was in middle school and high school and it was a true experience at the time. So, I’ll always have a soft spot for them, but you’re basically correct.
Same with original Star Trek. I love Trek, but that shit is unwatchable. I read the novels to get the context to better enjoy TNG and after, I can’t hand the godawful sound effects and William Shatner’s smug mug. How are there so many episodes based around how “attractive” that man is?!
To be fair it’s still AI, If I remember correctly what I learned from uni LLM are in the category what we call expert systems. We could call them that way, then again LLM did not exist back then, and most of the public does not know all this techno mumbo-jumbo words. So here we are AI it is.
Chipped off about a mm² of one of my front upper teeth while trying to eat my food fast and opening and closing my mouth fast. I did it faster than I pulled the fork out of my mouth and my teeth hit the fork…
I also was jumping on the couch and I fell on a table hitting my face between my eyebrows and now I have a scar there…
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