D isbelief in the theory of gravity is easily disproven by experiment: place the disbeliever on a ledge, push him off, and observe whether he goes up or down. In this experiment, the observation annihilates the object under test; on the other hand, another recipient has been added to the Darwin Awards, and en passé Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has been demonstrated once again. Now consider the following thought problem: if the universe and everything in it suddenly became ten times bigger, could you tell? Most people would use this logic: “If everything got bigger, then so would I, and therefore I would not notice.” Wrong! You would notice because all the hams would fall from the ceiling in every butcher shop on earth. The mass of an object is proportional to its volume (length cubed), but the strength of a string is proportional to its crosssectional area (length squared), so the strings could no longer hold the massive hams. Intuition doesn’t get you very far in engineering, nor in life in general. If we base our perceptions of truth on what are essentially feelings rather than knowledge, we are getting it cattywompus. We are using the wrong part of our noggin. Which brings me to the flat earth community. The flat earthers have devised a system that explains everything we see around us based on a disk-shaped earth, and they claim that everyone who disagrees is part of a global (pardon me, disk-wide) conspiracy by those pesky Illuminati. A great illustration of this belief system is Orlando Ferguson’s 1893 map of a flat earth (www.livescience.com/14754ingenious-flat-earth-theory-revealedmap.html), which was based on “four hundred passages in the Bible that condemn the globe theory.” I find Ferguson’s square and stationary earth fascinating. Among many other impossible quirks, it implies that flying the shortest distance from Australia to South Africa would require crossing the North Pole. There would never be a sunset, let alone a solar eclipse, no seasons, and no midnight sun. Wow. It is baffling to me how flat earthers can unabashedly spew nonsense that was refuted in antiquity. The ancient Greeks noticed that departing ships disappeared from bottom up as they passed over the horizon, with the sails still visible after the hull was out of sight. Around 240 B.C., Eratosthenes estimated the diameter of the earth to within less than a percentage point of the currently accepted value. If flat earthers travel from Europe to Australia, hoping to observe the Northern Lights, they will see a few familiar constellations turned upside down and a night sky that is largely invisible from Europe. How is their misunderstanding possible in the age of the internet, when the accumulated knowledge of humanity is accessible on smartphones? Misinformation endures not in spite of the internet, but because of it. This is also the age of confirmation bias. Information is now so filtered to each reader’s preconceptions that ludicrous ideas persist in the face o
{"title":"CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL","authors":"T. Grift","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fj853p.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fj853p.4","url":null,"abstract":"D isbelief in the theory of gravity is easily disproven by experiment: place the disbeliever on a ledge, push him off, and observe whether he goes up or down. In this experiment, the observation annihilates the object under test; on the other hand, another recipient has been added to the Darwin Awards, and en passé Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has been demonstrated once again. Now consider the following thought problem: if the universe and everything in it suddenly became ten times bigger, could you tell? Most people would use this logic: “If everything got bigger, then so would I, and therefore I would not notice.” Wrong! You would notice because all the hams would fall from the ceiling in every butcher shop on earth. The mass of an object is proportional to its volume (length cubed), but the strength of a string is proportional to its crosssectional area (length squared), so the strings could no longer hold the massive hams. Intuition doesn’t get you very far in engineering, nor in life in general. If we base our perceptions of truth on what are essentially feelings rather than knowledge, we are getting it cattywompus. We are using the wrong part of our noggin. Which brings me to the flat earth community. The flat earthers have devised a system that explains everything we see around us based on a disk-shaped earth, and they claim that everyone who disagrees is part of a global (pardon me, disk-wide) conspiracy by those pesky Illuminati. A great illustration of this belief system is Orlando Ferguson’s 1893 map of a flat earth (www.livescience.com/14754ingenious-flat-earth-theory-revealedmap.html), which was based on “four hundred passages in the Bible that condemn the globe theory.” I find Ferguson’s square and stationary earth fascinating. Among many other impossible quirks, it implies that flying the shortest distance from Australia to South Africa would require crossing the North Pole. There would never be a sunset, let alone a solar eclipse, no seasons, and no midnight sun. Wow. It is baffling to me how flat earthers can unabashedly spew nonsense that was refuted in antiquity. The ancient Greeks noticed that departing ships disappeared from bottom up as they passed over the horizon, with the sails still visible after the hull was out of sight. Around 240 B.C., Eratosthenes estimated the diameter of the earth to within less than a percentage point of the currently accepted value. If flat earthers travel from Europe to Australia, hoping to observe the Northern Lights, they will see a few familiar constellations turned upside down and a night sky that is largely invisible from Europe. How is their misunderstanding possible in the age of the internet, when the accumulated knowledge of humanity is accessible on smartphones? Misinformation endures not in spite of the internet, but because of it. This is also the age of confirmation bias. Information is now so filtered to each reader’s preconceptions that ludicrous ideas persist in the face o","PeriodicalId":325739,"journal":{"name":"Our Angry Eden","volume":"229 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131229206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE","authors":"Hoobastank, Daniel Estrin, D. Robb","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fj853p.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fj853p.5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":325739,"journal":{"name":"Our Angry Eden","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116721858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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