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Mooning from NASA
There are stories that feedback doesn't pay attention to. There are over 8 billion people, many of them believe stupid things, and many of them have access to the Internet, a telephone, or a mailbox. There is simply not enough time to deal with the resulting stream of half-hearted thoughts. Feedback doesn't want to be that guy from the xkcd cartoon who can't go to bed because “someone is wrong on the internet“.
So we barely mentioned the fact that Kim Kardashian apparently believes NASA faked the 1969 moon landing. She said the same thing on Kardashiana long-running reality show in which she stars alongside her mother and sisters.
Kardashian appears to have misunderstood an interview with Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. In one moment, Aldrin says: “That didn't happen”meaning that a potentially scary incident did not occur during the trip. However, Kardashian apparently thought he meant the whole trip didn't happen. This is an extremely bold statement, not least because Aldrin has previously slammed the moon landing conspiracy theorist.
But we're not going to waste time teasing Kardashian misunderstandings. Instead, we are concerned with what followed. According to the BBC, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy “invited Kardashian to the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of the Artemis mission to the moon.”
Duffy may continue to regret this precedent: if you spread a stupid conspiracy theory through a prominent publication, it looks like you'll be given a tour of NASA headquarters. Well, Feedback has been wanting to visit Mission Control for a long time, and we think we can come up with some better ideas than “fake moon landing.”
Do you know why it took the New Horizons probe so long (nine years) to get to Pluto? That's because NASA secretly moved the planet further away from Earth to make it appear smaller. This allowed them to downgrade it from a planet to a dwarf planet.
Likewise, have you ever wondered why Martian Was it so true in life? Deep NASA (which is like the deep state, but more so) would have you think it's only because author Andy Weir did his research. In fact, it's because NASA secretly sent an astronaut to Mars for several years in the 1990s. The story is based on the video diaries he recorded before he was killed by a robot armed with a heat ray.
We are awaiting our NASA invitation in the mail.
Mid Saturday
We've previously covered the Scunthorpe issue: harmless words and phrases can contain strings of letters that could be perceived as offensive by automated moderation systems that don't understand the context (October 11). At least we thought we had exhausted it. But Peter Lloyd tells us about an early progenitor of this problem.
On a Saturday afternoon in the 1970s he writes: “I tuned in to BBC1 and waited Tribune begin”. For young readers and those outside the UK: Tribune was a sports program that aired all Saturday afternoon. Depending on your view of televised sports, this was either a blessing or, in those days when there were few channels, a curse.
“Suddenly, a single word appeared on the screen, filling the entire screen,” Peter writes. “I was shocked! Why does the BBC want porridge on my TV? After a short but noticeable delay, the picture zoomed out and the message 'SATURDAY ON BBC1' appeared.”
Imagine this!
If you haven't caught up yet, you have until Friday, December 5th to submit your work for the next issue of the magazine. Journal of Imaginary Research.
Feedback was not previously aware of this post and we spent some time trying to figure out what it was. “We publish imaginary research abstracts, the editors write. – We mean short works of fiction, designed in a format familiar to us, researchers and scientists. An abstract is a summary of a scientific article that gives us a brief overview of the research that was conducted.”
If Feedback gets it right, the idea is to write short pieces of fiction presented as fake abstracts of research papers. We looked at volume 10, the most recent contributionand some of the essays/stories are quite funny because they are good parodies of academic works.
We particularly enjoyed Edward Loveman's book, To Be in the Middle: A Sensory Autoethnography of the Otherworld, about “scientists who were able to achieve the ability to move between dimensions (transdimensionality).” Alas, Loveman reports, “such work was met with skepticism, cruelty, and disparagement—both within the academy and among the general public.”
However, he argues that it is in fact “a unique, ever-evolving, fluid connection to existence that transcends time.”
Likewise, Soyon Park's proposal is titled “Can research flourish without a research question?” At the same time, “a group of doctoral students” engage in “deep conversation over a cup of coffee,” revealing that “their struggle lay not in the question itself, but in the very act of questioning—a process that inherently implies and necessitates the search for an answer.”
Feedback suspects Journal of Imaginary Research may become a regular visitor to these pages. It's a shame it only comes out once a year.
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