Wow... logic and reality are both out to lunch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtZpyj4vpnM

ROFL

I rather suspect she’s doing that for a school project or something, trying to put together a “position” for a debate perhaps. A difficult devil’s advocacy. Just a suspicion – no evidence, I’ve not been looking for evidence either for or against my theory.

Those in the know can conclusively state that the earth cannot be flat because if it was then cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now…

…the earth cannot be flat because if it was then cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now…

This is by far the most convincing evidence that I ever heard.

The gravity of a flat disc would pull everything together in a big heap in the middle, and it would be very difficult to push anything to the edge, never mind over it.

Unless it was spinning at just the right speed to counteract the gravity. Assuming the thickness and density of the disk were uniform, this balance would only be exactly right at the edge, and elsewhere things would be being thrown toward the edge, making it extra easy for cats to send things off into deep space.

Alternatively, the disk could be a bit thicker and or denser near the middle, and if it was designed exactly right gravity and centrifugal force (yes, that’s really a thing – in a rotating frame of reference) balanced exactly everywhere, cats could have great fun pushing things just over the edge, where they’d remain happily just underneath the edge – just beyond the equator, if you will.

An ellipsoid, like the Earth, but with a much larger ratio of equatorial to polar diameter.

The gravity

Didn’t she basically discount the entire principle of gravity? I don’t know what these flat earth people thinks makes stuff fall down, suffice to say that I think you’re on to a losing battle trying to argue with anything that resembles logic.

Like I implied, I don’t think she believed what she was saying at all. I think she was trying to put together a devil’s advocate position for a school debate – not a bad effort, considering what a difficult position it is to defend. Convincingly bonkers.

But my 2nd post was a response to Steve and Paul, not her.

It goes along with “the universe is only 6,000 years old – those dinosaur fossils you keep finding were put there by god to test our faith”, and “if evolution was real, why are there still chimpanzees around, why haven’t they all evolved into humans?”. Religion’s only purpose is to keep people like this as ignorant as possible and therefore easily controllable.

6,023 please! :-)

(Actually, the universe is only a few seconds old, created a few seconds ago complete with my memory of the purely imaginary previous nearly seventy years. No dinosaur fossils or chimpanzees at all, they’re just figments of my created memories of seeing them, and of seeing articles about them.)

There is an argument that the entirely of a person’s reality is purely their perception of it, therefore one must question the distinction between what is “real” and what is “imaginary”, and what do those terms even mean.
Do I exist because you have imagined my existence, causing me to become? Do any of us even exist, or is your participation on this forum (and the world in general) simply a product of your imagination because you actually have gone crazy from loneliness? You may indeed be in a sort of stasis on a small space ship, one of the last surviving people from a catastrophic war that has made Earth uninhabitable. But you’ve given up. You’re male, you’re alone, you’re not even sure if there’s enough air or food or fuel to go anywhere. You can even find the sun any more, it’s just a bunch of stars, few of which look like any earth created star chart.
So this? This is you retreating back to an imagined reality. Something that you can take comfort from. But none of it is real. It’s time to wake up now. There’s a warning light blinking. It’s been doing that for about half an hour, not that time really means anything anymore…

Sounds like George Berkley – and both Clive and Rick are paraphrasing.

Sorted the problem of having forgotten to write an item for the philosophy homework:- just speak to the room in general expounding the thought that I had a vivid imagination that thought up all these people in a class etc, etc.
Only person to get an A on the assignment, and that without pen to paper.

Returning to gravity for a moment, and ellipsoidal planets, may I recommend to you a classic of Sci-Fi (as opposed to Fant-Fi) Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. First published in 1954. I bought my copy in New York in 1962.

Actually, the universe is only a few seconds old

Now is all that there is. .. alles andere ist Menschenwerk. Sorry about that Leopold. Scary, eh?

Now is all that there is.

Well that goes without saying. Then either is no longer, or is yet to be.

(Although of course that falls foul of relativity, and hypercones of simultaneity…)

Returning to gravity for a moment, and ellipsoidal planets, may I recommend to you a classic of Sci-Fi (as opposed to Fant-Fi) Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. First published in 1954. I bought my copy in New York in 1962.

A nice little novel and the very first Sci-Fi book I have ever read. I must have been 10 or 11 years old at the time.

I must have been 10 or 11 years old at the time.

You must have been precocious :). The book is very much of its time. The real hero is science, the Mesklinite Barlennan, and science’s universality. It was a time of optimism and enlightenment. No sex at all.

You must have been precocious :).

Seems relatively normal to me. The librarians were used to me having books from the adult section when I was 8 or 9 and Science fiction (or SF – not Sci-Fi please¹) was a mainstay of the books available². The child adult distinction was similarly blurred with my two sisters as they came through.

¹ Not least because many authors referred to it as Speculative Fiction since it was often “what if…?”

Second paragraph… https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/9/topics/1067#posts-12260

Basically, children who value and enjoy reading will read and they will soon develop a desire for more substantial material than the typical “children’s book”. For me, it was Wyndham, but encompassed all sorts of things. When I was in early junior school.
I guess this has been addressed by the “young adult” genre that now exists?

I also, generally, enjoy “sci-fi” (call it what you want, everybody else will hear the theme tune to Star Trek¹ in their heads). Speculative fiction is fine, so long as it keeps within the laws of reality (so no FTL drives and no dinky little space craft that whoosh ² and bank into turns ³, etc). I’m a bit 50-50 with time travel, there’s always that annoying grandfather paradox to deal with, and I pretty much give up when “aliens” are basically humanoid in shape – why don’t we ever have an attack by an alien jellyfish?
[I do sort of follow Dr Who, but the difference here is that I don’t take it even remotely seriously – recent seasons were basically for watching Clara in a variety of tight fuzzy sweaters]

I quite like apocalyptic dystopia. One of these days The Guardian will read like the books I’ve read…

¹ I fail as a stereotypical nerd, I detest Star Trek.

² Pretty much every space opera and movie ever made (notable exception 2001) make this mistake. Great big epic blazing rockets propelling a ship a mile long and you’re doing an impressive pan along it, what you should hear is exactly nothing. Unless you’re in the plume of the ejecta from the business end of the rocket, in which case you have bigger problems than what you can or can’t hear!

³ Battlestar Galactica (original), Star Wars, etc etc, I’m looking at all of you. In space there isn’t any useful up or down so banking to follow an enemy is not only pointless, it wastes fuel. It’s a visual remnant of all those previous war movies where we get accustomed to how planes fly in an atmosphere. In space, on the other hand, it is likely that you’d have little nozzles around the nose cone, so you simply fire those for durations in order to push the craft to point the way you want it to go. As for banking, well I think my first question would be why a craft not intended for use in an atmosphere has wings at all. They’re not a whole lot of use in space…

For me, it was Wyndham, but encompassed all sorts of things. When I was in early junior school.

Ditto. I was late starting to read – at school we were being force-fed John and Mary, and Old Lob (!) the farmer, and it was boring as hell and I thought “what a waste of time this reading is.” And then my paternal grandmother bought me The Golden Book of Astronomy and my maternal grandfather gave me his telescope and there was no stopping me. Wyndham, Twain…

so long as it keeps within the laws of reality

Oh, this, absolutely!

little nozzles around the nose cone … why a craft not intended for use in an atmosphere has wings at all

Or a nose cone, for that matter.

I quite like apocalyptic dystopia.

Almost my genre – I’m not sure what to call my genre. Not sure it’s all the same genre. Hell, I should sell you some of my books. Hell no, I want to be read, and I don’t need the money (although some reviews would be nice, and I’m not averse to receiving payment!) so any ROOL folks are welcome to read them on screen for free if they like. Here’s a link to all their PDFs: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/000-books_r3U.html

Pawns is definitely Apocalyptic Dystopian; Going Forth is a sequel to Pawns, Post Apocalyptic but not quite dystopian; Exile and Birgom’s Diary are Post Apocalyptic but so far post- that the apocalypse has been forgotten. (Birgom’s Diary is not yet in print.)

The Reminiscences of Penny Lane is an autobiography of a fictional woman about my age, a fair bit of which (I’m not saying which bits) is from my own experience or that of people I know, “adjusted” to varying degrees from almost straight to barely recognizable.

(Fiction at the top left of that page also contains links to my short stories (html).)

at school we were being force-fed John and Mary, and Old Lob (!) the farmer, and it was boring as hell

There was no TV in the house until I was 7 (might have been 8) and books, newspapers, anything with writing was the thing. So:

“You’re supposed to read Steven”
“I am”
“Everyone else speaks when they read”
“My daddy doesn’t”

Switch scene to combined infant and junior school assembly with small child reading from the Old Testament stood on high platform to see book on lectern.

Six years later teachers trying to get child ‘out of shell’
Six months after that desperately trying to push child back in… :)

(so no FTL drives and no dinky little space craft that whoosh 2 and bank into turns 3, etc)

In one of the Star Wars sagas that I saw with my youngest son a few years ago, ships were bombing a giant spacecraft. Bombing!
That is, they let bombs fall on the craft. In space! And those were the first 5 minutes of the saga only…

I must have read most of John Wyndham, HG Wells, and a good start into Asimov and Clarke, as well as all of WE Johns (Biggles) by the time I was 7. I was into horror as well before I was 9. Saturday afternoon walks on my own to Beckenham Library to change books was part of my routine for years. I liked browsing encyclopaedias and dictionaries. We were learning French in Primary school in the early 60’s. What annoys me is that too many children now start school without being able to read, write, understand basic numbers, even arriving still in nappies and unable to use a knife and fork properly!

There was no TV in the house until I was 7

Nor in ours – I was 14 or 15 before my Granny moved in with hers. The whole family, apart from me, would crowd round her bed to watch. I was upstairs in my own bedroom, directly above hers, cursing the bloody noise from the TV and trying to read.

Before I learned to read, Meccano was my thing. I inherited my father’s quite decent set at an age when modern children are prevented from having anything they might swallow. As far as I know I didn’t swallow any nuts or bolts, but I still remember the process of developing sufficient dexterity to get nuts onto the end of bolts, and to put grub screws in.

Over the years the set grew a great deal, mainly by my picking up other people’s sets cheap when they got fed up with them. I eventually parted with all but the gears, giving it all to a charity. I’ve still got the gears, and occasionally use them for this or that project.

In one of the Star Wars sagas that I saw with my youngest son a few years ago, ships were bombing a giant spacecraft. Bombing!
That is, they let bombs fall on the craft. In space! And those were the first 5 minutes of the saga only…

Ah, but those were obviously bombs which were accelerated by magnets inside towards the enemy spacecraft. SF. It’s all about the technology.

Star Wars also pioneered a technology where you can easily hear big explosions in space. Great stuff! Brought us THX.

easily hear big explosions in space

It’s the electromagnetic pulse hitting your comms system…