THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FLAT EARTHERS! These are Trolls! They even framed and lit the picture of the rock reflecting light so it would LOOK like the moon? It’s the Pastafarians all over again, but most people just don’t seem to get the joke!
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I got stuck talking to a creationist at the company picnik. I work at a research lab. He wasn’t one of the scientists, but he worked in management. He was talking about how the complexity of life could not arise from random processes, and I tried to explain that even though evolution was not a plan, it wasn’t random either. Our particular forms are unlikely, but so is you winning the lottery. But SOMEBODY wins it. Evolution can make things less random. If you took 10 dice and tried to roll all sixes it would take a long time if you re-rolled them all every time. But if you only re-rolled the dice that came up with non-sixes it wouldn’t take very long before you had all sixes.
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Bah, Einstein is just taking credit for Zeno’s much earlier work. Piker!! (//s)
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Be sure to call it, please: research.
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In my earlier post about the sun and the moon being the same thing I was going to try to offer some proof that the sun must always be in the sky because it can’t get back to the east by going under the bottom of the Earth - the turtles would get in the way. I couldn’t figure out any way to phrase that, so instead I went with the dramatically more obscure reference to the fictional eccentric de Selby referenced in The Third Policeman.
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Well said.
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Good point.
God, I hate humans. We’re such a bunch of assholes.
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It is my firm belief that the college-based antiwar protests of the 60s turned this tide in ConservaLand away from strong public education and towards mind control
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It’s also refracting light 
explain that science, bingo.
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That is the premise of Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld story, before the series. In it, the Universe is our regular universe, but the Discworld turns out to be manufactured by some uber-species or person, as a kind of signature on the universe: “I made this.”
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I love that the format of this very excellent gif-related image is actually a .png (ping? pong? pang? pung? peng? pyng?.. NowDon’tStartThatAgain.gif)
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How is this even a question? Like, on the list of things that are remotely ambiguous or debatable, this ain’t even on there. The “g” stands for “graphics,” and even if wasn’t an acronym, but a word created de novo, it’s one letter short of “gift” and thus has a logical pronunciation. This isn’t one of those “As it’s derived from Latin, the actual pronunciation should be ‘fish’!” type situations. People who pronounce it “jiff” are as bad as flat-Earthers.
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Jet the fuck out.
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This is usually where the creationists I see leave off - talking about an external energy source rather gives the game away. But every time I see that argument, I think, “So, you’re arguing your refrigerator doesn’t - and can’t, in theory - work?”
That was probably the start. But I think the Republican party adopting positions in the '80s and '90s that were contrary to observable reality had a part, too. Every time someone who was actually knowledgeable pointed out they were factually wrong, they had to be able to say, “You’re just biased!” as a retort.
I wish. There certainly are a lot of trolley flat-Earthers (and whoever came up with this ‘self-owning’ picture may have been one of them… although Poe’s Law), but there are also are real flat-Earthers. There always have been, among the number of religious fundamentalists and the wildly ignorant. I’ve spoken to people who really believe this stuff. An increase in conspiratorial thinking (and a rejection of logic and the very idea of expertise) have increased the number of “honest” flat-Earthers in recent years.
Those flat-Earther diagrams to “prove” how things work always break my brain, because they even more clearly illustrate all the problems that model creates. Even if we assume non-straight light rays (to prevent everyone from always seeing the Sun, and to allow sunrises and sunsets), the sun’s light would obviously also have to be shaped (the shape of which changes over the course of the year, no less), as if by a giant, alterable mask. The closer you get to the South Pole, the more distorted distances and landmasses get from their actual shapes (though it’s interesting that this image also does a North-South distortion to diminish the extreme East-West distortions somewhat).
In order for their solutions to “work,” the entire world essentially has to be a massive conspiracy set on a literal stage, with giant stage lighting and a whole lot of stage managing so that no one could figure out the real shapes of the continents, the real distances between things, the “truth” about the Antarctic, space, physics, etc. (Clearly these people have never worked in theater.)
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P-N-Gs are neat for not being huge-ass image files…
Regarding the whole dumb Gif vs Jif argument, it always seemed to me that the guy who invented them was just trolling by not bothering to specify the pronunciation for the first 20 years that it existed, and then making his “announcement” on a televised awards show.
‘G’ stands for Graphic, which has a hard g, so that’s how the hell I’ll continue to pronounce it.
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You know the inventor of the file format says it’s GIF like Jif peanut butter… 
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/battle-over-gif-pronunciation-erupts/
I’ve always said “jif,” but what do I know. Oh, I know how to properly pronounce it! heheh
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Whenever I think jif I think of this:
Cant imagine it’s good on a sandwich, which I suppose it has in common with peanut butter
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ok this is where you lost me
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Both oven cleaner and peanut butter are terrible things to put in a sandwich
