It's Not Round If It's Flat - 5823
The "GG" of debate.
I know it’s Monday and you don’t have time for this, but you’ve already loaded this page, and well … let’s be honest the expense report sounds positively dreadful. Let’s dive in instead …
The Daily Rabbit Hole: Pillow Shams
“Many people don’t know the difference between a pillow sham and a pillowcase” - y’all, I am dying at this clearly-for-SEO article on mattressadvisor dot com.
Samuel Birley Rowbotham was not a name you expected to come across your desk or mobile device today, but here it is in all its infamy. SBR is the founder of Zetitic Astronomy, who I am absolutely positive chose the name tongue in cheek, as the entire basis of this astrological study is clearly from a heretic. You might better know Zetitic Astronomy under the name of the Internet’s favorite group: Flat Earthers. When the group began to gain media attention over the last five years, I wanted to find out who we had to blame. Thus SBR, and thus the absurd story about how he gained an audience in the 1850s.
Rowbotham was consumed by his own theory that the earth was flat after, I kid you not, looking at ditches for too long. Keeping his head in the sand, he turned his gift of being believable to the lecture circuit where he won over crowds of people (and sixpence per head) by simply being … charming. That, and the fact that once the intelligentsia reaches a point where they no longer have to debate something - this goes for any topic, and I’ll get to that in the last section - they stop thinking about how they would communicate it to the every-man or woman and lose credibility.
Basically, you can trace B.o.B. starting a gofundme to prove the earth is flat to a bunch of smart astrologists who didn’t know how to debate against a person who does not care about facts or reality.
Charlatans are gonna charlatan.
The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: Apartment vs. Flat
The English word “flat” was adopted from a Scottish word that was adopted from an English word. Language is a flat circle.
Also, it’s “flat” as in … the place I reside in is flat. It’s not more complicated than that.
It’s all in the acronym …
Sam Bankman-Fried, Samuel Birley Rowbotham … if you are interested in pulling off a giant sham that you are smart, make sure you get a great SB-something pseudonym and you’ll be off to a roaring start.
All jokes aside, the plainly obvious problem with giving the world unfettered access to all of the information in recorded history, is that some people have utterly no idea how to make sense of it all and are going to trust a guy that knows a gal that they trust, with a credential line that reads “won the spelling bee in second grade.” AI, AGI, CV, NLP, all these fancy acronyms for the “terror” that awaits us with misinformation - hey folks, it’s kinda always been a thing.
This is why I would like to promote the cause that we need a Scientific Bulletin Pro. The SB-P would be responsible for taking complex ideas and nuance and making it understandable and engaging. For example:
How did we get to the moon?
Scientists: “Well, physics. Essentially we did a lot of math using the Schmidt-Kalman filter and were able to calculate the velocity of…”
The People’s Response: Booo!!!
Scientific Bulletin Pro: “Y’all it was awesome, we lit some stuff on fire and it got us into space. And then we used the moon’s gravity to suck us down before using some more explosives to shoot us back.”
The People’s Response: *uproarious applause*
Boom. Conspiracy theorists everywhere now believe that we went to the moon. Happy Monday.