Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Car Size #3167

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AXHMTUE Wordo: SIZES

• Science

  • Food for Thought - Disbelief in the Moon Landings

    There are a good contingent of people that do not believe that the United States actually landed on the Moon in 1969, and that the broadcasts were instead filmed from a soundstage on Earth. I wonder how many of these people subscribe to this theory because they have a sincere cosmological belief that the Moon is not something that can be physically landed on.

    Human cultures have come up with a lot of stories on what the Moon is, including beliefs that the Moon is simply another light in the sky like the sun and the stars, or beliefs that the Moon is a physical object but is much smaller than science has determined it to be. (After all, any culture that does not have access to a telescope really doesn't have much to go on). Human cultures also have a wide array of beliefs about the nature of the sky, or whether outer space is something that can actually be reached. A lot of times those beliefs don't have much effect on wider cosmology or everyday life, but sometimes they can correlate intensely, such as if you have an authority figure who holds this cosmological belief and you want to believe they're trustworthy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Doom That Came to Scrolling

      “Doomscrolling” originally specifically meant scrolling through bad news and only later was generalized to all compulsive scrolling, all kinds of scrolling where you afterwards, when to the sessions of sweet silent thought, summon up remembrance of things past and wonder why the heck you spent your precious hours on the dreck you just waded through.

      I do think this generalization of the word has merit, that it was driven by a growing realization that it’s not just sad and overwhelming news that make us feel this bad after scrolling. Partly because compulsive behavior almost always feel so much worse than intentional behavior but mostly because what’s out there really is depressing even if it’s the umpteenth cat video or true crimes thread.

      [...]

      In my local circle of friends I can’t be the one who quits reading news. In some constellations I’m the one most on top of things, in others we need to help each other keep our gullibility in check. Widening the network to more faraway friends I do have a friend in Malmö who does a good job at looking out when I need to take a break from news for a few weeks.

      But applying that mentality to the wider word is hubris. I’m never gonna do a better job than something like Skeptical Science.

    • ssl gone, again

      Can you take a look, please? The guests are getting nervous and I'm pretty sure I saw someone suspicious looking walk in with a "Not secure" sign.