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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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politics
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Tell Michael Moore to join Neil deGrasse Tyson in the "We don't want to hear from you anymore" line.
Add Maher to the list. Good god he's so in love with himself.
Maher is a straight up conservative hack though, not in the same category.
Are we to begin classifying narcissists using criteria lists like we do for planets?
"Yes, but is he a major non-shill narcissist (smart or stupid) if he just has a podcast and hasn't been on Sesame Street in its first 37 seasons? I think not. Out, Sorbo!"
it will be interesting to see which narcissists have cleared their orbits
How is he comparable to Neil? I've been listening to Michael Moore's podcast off and on since 2020 and he's only come across as humble and empathetic to me which is not how I'd characterize Neil.
I honestly don't know who he is off the top of my head. I'm glad more people are sick of NDT though. He just seems like a conceited ass that refuses to be wrong
We need a reincarnation of Carl Sagan. He was a great science communicator.
Was Bill Nye really as bad as people acted upon his return? I feel like he just took off the child gloves and talked to his audience as adults. Unfortunately, he failed to realize a large majority of the population is childlike in mentality
The people who hated on Bill Nye were conservatives, and they did so because he explained concepts like Gender which they did not appreciate (i.e. does not fit into their reductionist misogynistic harmful ideology). Bill Nye is great.
Yeah, my partner explained it to me a bit. Go Bill! I think my point stands though. He tried to talk to them like adults. They are fucking children
Ah, good point! That’s also the impression I get from his work. His Netflix series was pretty much written for adults who watched him on PBS as kids.
It was very much a "hello fellow kids" type vibe for me. He was desperately trying to make it hip to be square. I found it utterly unwatchable and only made it through half of the second episode. I appreciated the attempt but the result was embarrassing.
Isn't NDT a great science communicator ? I've seen some of his lives and I think he does a great job
I think NDT is a good science communicator, he just lacks the personable quality that laypeople generally prefer when having something explained to them. Personally, I like NDT. He's knowledgeable in his field, and when he really gets into talking about stuff you can tell he has a sense of awe and wonder about the universe. But, I think he also suffers a bit from that issue of really intelligent people just not grasping that there's a lot of their niche knowledge that is not common knowledge. It's not at all uncommon for NDT to put off a, "You really didn't already know that?" vibe. I don't at all think it's malicious, it's just when you reach a certain level of knowledge on a topic, it's easy to forget how much you yourself had to learn.
TL;DR: NDT is a great science communicator if you already know enough of the basics to follow what he's saying. Carl Sagan was an even greater communicator because he could break down subjects to explain them to people whether they were a 5 year old with a budding interest in astronomy, or a college grad studying more advanced topics.
fair enough, I can see it
We just need Carl Sagan, Fred Rodgers, Bob Ross, and Harambe back, and then everything will be okay again.
If I said the shit he says on a regular basis people would straight up say “ okay stoner” and laugh at me. Dude thinks he’s so fucking profound.
Shit, am I OOTL? i like NDGT, but should i not? Did he do something shitty?
He's conceited and refuses to admit that he could be wrong because his views are based on science, ignoring that they're just his interpretations of it. This is a good example:
(He did apologize for this)
But to tweet something with the connotation of "gun violence isn't that bad" while ignoring half of the gun violence stats in your own list, and ignoring that there can be multiple problems that can be solved at once (guns, mental health, car dependency, etc.) isn't the best. I don't think he's like objectively a bad person, he's just overconfident and IMO annoying. He does communicate science though, so props for that.
Thanks for the larger picture
Always happy to disappoint :-)
He's overly interested in kissing himself in a mirror. Nuff said.
Conservatives got mad that a black man was publicly pro-vaccination, started a smear campaign, and anti-intellectualism took over from there for the brainless masses.
He was also key to demoting Pluto from It's status as a planet, even though Pluto was
What the Lowell Observatory says...
But hey, NdGT didn't like it. So we all changed.
Pluto was always bullshit. it was clearly an outsider, and it's shares characteristics with tons of other bodies in the system. so is Pluto is a planet then the solar system has numerous planets and there's barely any point in knowing about them at that point.
tbh i think the only reason it was even "important" was because it was the only one discovered by an American. also it was predicted because of a faulty calculation of mass of Neptune, so it was a lucky guess more than an actual informed prediction.
Either Pluto is not a planet, or we live in a solar system with 200-1000 planets.
So either 8 or +200, but it will never be 9 again.
Pick a size. Get away from judgement calls. This big or bigger is a planet. Smaller is not. Done.
No weird rules. Make it a diameter of 2000 km. That's no more random than anything else. So we'd have 10 planets, with Eris and Pluto being the new ones. NO BIG DEAL. It's measurable. We see something new, we know what to do with it. None of this dwarf planet thing, which isn't a thing btw. We already had planetoids. Renaming for renaming's sake. It even sounds like the IAU isn't sure or unified about this.
That's not what makes a body a planet though...
What's the difference? Enlighten me!
Planets in general must be spherical objects (which excludes asteroids as they are too small to form spheres) that orbit a star (which excludes moons which orbit planets). The problem with this definition is it becomes hairy quickly. Buried in the asteroid belt is a large asteroid that meets that definition: Ceres. Ceres is round. It orbits the Sun. By that definition, it qualifies as a planet. Likewise, Pluto has several counterparts in its area of space that are round and orbit the Sun: Haumea, Makemake, and Eris come to mind. Remember that old saying "My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas"? Well, they lampshaded a big problem with that definition with the new pneumonic: "My very educated mother can't (Ceres) just serve us nine pizzas; Hundreds may eat."
Astronomers, seeing the problem with that definition, decided we needed to exclude all these new worlds. This would unfortunately exclude Pluto, but many astronomers were thinking that Pluto should have never made the cut in the first place. Pluto is weird. Unlike every other major planet in the Solar System, Pluto orbits outside the ecliptic. Its orbit doesn't align with the other planets, and for parts of Pluto's year, it's closer to the sun than Neptune. While Neptune's and Pluto's orbits don't intersect (if they did, Neptune would either fling Pluto out of the solar system or capture it, and we think Neptune has already captured another Pluto-like object in the form of Triton), Pluto does cross the sphere at Neptune's distance from the sun and orbits inside Neptune's distance for part of its orbit. And its orbit and characteristics matched other so-called Trans-Neptunian Objects pretty darn closely, and we'd already found something out there heavier than Pluto in similar situations (Eris). Any definition that includes Pluto would include potentially dozens or even HUNDREDS of other TNOs, and couldn't exclude Ceres.
So they made a definition for major planets which would cover the classical planets plus Uranus and Neptune. It wasn't enough that you be spherical. You ALSO had to have cleared your orbital. This covers the Major Eight clearly, while excluding a population of tiny worlds that could grow gargantuan if we allowed them to. While Pluto is still a planet, it's no longer a major planet like the classical 5 plus Uranus and Neptune. And excluding it makes it easier for us to keep up with.
But don't expect this is settled! We have some indications that there may be something out in the Outer Solar System that might set the debate again. There are several Kuiper Belt Objects that have orbits that suggest there's something out there 'shepparding' them and forcing them to assume set orbits that they'd not be in otherwise. Simulations suggest the possibility of a super-Earth or mini-Neptune (things not found in our Solar System but observed in others) orbiting the sun in a distant orbit. This silent, cold traveller would have a mass of between 5 and 10 Earth masses, and would be moving so slowly that it can't possibly clear its orbit like Earth or Jupiter can. Still, something between Earth's and Uranus's mass should probably be a bit more special than Pluto, so I suspect the definition will change again when and if we find this hypothetical large body in the outer solar system.
Pluto fails the last test. That's why it's a dwarf planet along with Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Ceres, among many other possible ones
I'm willing to continue.
When were these tests instituted? Was it the IAU?
Is the last test referencing a specific size?
Does Pluto have anything else in it's orbit? The other objects of similar size... What would cause a "planet" to clear it vs. a non-planet?
For example, suddenly there is another Saturn-sized object in Saturn's orbit. What guarantee is there that Saturn would clear it? Might it not clear Saturn??? After all, it's of similar size. Does this mean Saturn is not a planet?
Real questions.
Yes, this was at the IAU.
But you're clearly here for an argument so nothing I say will convince you. Go talk to them about it if you have a problem.
I'm not! I was really wondering like the physics of how an object is able to clear objects of similar size from its orbit.
I could understand objects of smaller size, but I just don't get how it does objects of the same size or similar size.
I am not an astrophysicist, but I imagine it happens during planetary formation. One center of mass gets big enough to disrupt smaller pieces of material, either pulling them into it or flinging them away. Eventually the debris in its sphere of influence gets (mostly) cleared out. Your hypothetical of Saturn just having a second planet in its orbit and clearing it out is not how it happened.
And if you're wondering what other object is in Pluto's orbit, I'd just point to its binary partner Charon. It's so massive that the center of gravity for the system is in space between the two.
Isn't that nearly true of the Earth and the Moon as well?
No, the barycenter of the Earth-Luna system is 5,000km from the center of the Earth, or about 1,300 km down.
The moon is also only about 1% of the mass of the Earth, which is huge compared to other moons in the solar system, while Charon is 11% the mass of Pluto.
Edited to add: All of this is publicly available information, you could have googled it if you wanted to learn instead of argue.
Did Google, didn't understand.
It's cool my friend, I didn't mean to bother you. You go out and have a good time from here on.
I just wish people would stop talking about Pluto like it fucking matters, or they care at all, what it's labeled as. I'm so sick of people pretending to be (or even worse, actually being) upset that they changed its classification.
It has to be one of the most irritating memes and it will just never die.
"Hurr durr, I was taught one thing in science class 25 years ago, so that means it is and will always be true." Clearly they missed the entire point of science.
Why the fuck would you get "nostalgic" for something so meaningless and banal? Do people think this is some kind of rare occurrence in science? Because I've got some news for you...
Thanks Neil!