I just wish I could get some students I know to read up on stuff like this.
They think the cutting edge is all they need to know, not realising they’re a) probably not anywhere near it and b) about to be challenged to retain it the moment they graduate. They also don’t realise that knowing computer history is important for finding new things in the computer present.
Interesting (and depressing) article. I once worked with a woman who said her work in grad school was published by her advisor, without her name on the paper. She at least did get her PhD.
I do have one nitpick with the Atlantic article:
Rochelle Reyes, one of the students, says that she was “extremely motivated” to do this work, having grown up on stories of under-recognized pioneers like Rosalind Franklin, who was pivotal in deciphering the structure of DNA, and Henrietta Lacks, whose cells revolutionized medical research.
This should have been explained better, as it seems to imply that Lacks also was an unrecognized peer and ignored woman scientist. The story is different – Lacks’ wasn’t a scientist; she had a horrible cancer, and her cancer cells were used without her permission, knowledge, attribution, or payment, in research (continuing to this day). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fabulous book about her life and (unknowing) contribution to science.
But most flat earthers think the sun is close enough that the shadows should differ in their cosmology too. So I think the eclipses are important evidence too.
280km in one day – the guy must have calves like a lacrosse player.
The Flat Earthers can refute this, and refute that, but they can’t refute everything at once.
The one number that did distress me in the video, though, was that 1 in 10 Americans now believe the earth is flat. That seems, to me, to be an increase.
Which, of course, doesn’t square with the proofs that the sun is far enough away to be treated as a point light source (one easy one mentioned/linked in the video).
…and then they claim the moon is its own light source, or somesuch. It’s a heck of a rabbit hole to go down once you try refuting things point by point.
This popped up in my own youtube recommendations for some reason a week or two ago. A good video, but really could have used some editing to tighten it up. I spent half of it thinking “yes, you’ve described what you’re doing in broad strokes a few times so far, get to the actual detail already!”
And UFOs, since it’s ridiculous to suppose they travelled light-years from other disks in our globist cosmology, instead of just from beyond the Great Ice Wall in their flat-earth cosmology.
To be fair, that’s 280 km of flats, and not at Tour de France speeds. It’s impressive, but it’s the kind of thing a mortal could work up to doing in a few weeks/months.
Can you get a message to her about the fact that Amazon’s reviews were screwed up? I tried to contact Amazon about it but I can’t get through all the email reply bots. Maybe as author, Rebecca Skloot can.