MASHed conspiracies, Bird hangout

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

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Random Thoughts

Stuff I think about in the shower, typically

When I was a kid, M*A*S*H* was the biggest show on TV. A lot of the jokes still make me chuckle when I think of them now, decades later, though much of the show’s style doesn’t translate well to the 21st century. Still, it ran 11 seasons and over the hundreds of episodes made some wonderful and subtle points.

One scene pops into my head a lot. The show takes place during the Korean War, and in this particular episode a pilot is paying poverty-stricken Korean kids to collect war souvenirs for him to sell. A lot of the kids were going into dangerous places and wound up getting injured. The two lead doctor characters, Hawkeye and B.J., take the pilot to task for this, and at one point threaten to sideline him by declaring he’s too sick to fly.

The pilot acquiesces to the morally ambiguous use of extortion, but tells them there are a hundred other guys like him out there doing this same sort of thing. “What are you going to do,” he says to them sarcastically, “change the world?”

B.J. says, simply, “No. Just our little corner of it.”

I don’t remember how that line struck me when I first watched this scene, but the fact is I still mull over it even now. I was thinking about it again the morning I did an interview with SciManDan for his critical thinking podcast (iTunes, Spotify, direct link). We talked about debunking bad science and at one point I mentioned how it can be thankless, because grifters’ hoaxes and dangerous conspiratorial thinking will always be with us no matter how much we prove them wrong.

We talked about how one upside is that debunking them teaches you how to think; you need to dig down a little bit to see what the reality is under the claim, and then understand how to explain the issue to someone.

That’s important. Many times the person you’re talking to is a lost cause; they’re up to their amygdala in rejecting science for whatever reason and they’re unreachable, at least in the moment. But many times other people are listening, especially on social media, and they will learn from you and your example. They’ll learn not just what the specific issue is, but also what the underlying science or reality actually is.

That is the key. It may not be hugely important in general that they understand parallax to debunk UFO videos or that inertia is why a flag can appear to wave on the airless surface of the Moon, but your argument can show them how to investigate such claims, how to find good, trustworthy sources of information, and how to not simply believe what they’re told.

Yes, you may be banging your head against a wall trying to convince someone that eating sheep deworming medicine cannot possibly do anything about the COVID-19 virus, but you don’t know how many other people are learning from what you say. And they may go on to show others.

I have a decently large platform in social media, and even then I know I cannot possibly change the world. But I can change my little corner of it.

And my corner learns. And it talks to others. And that corner grows.

And, eventually, the world is changed.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[A combination of radio observations (blue) and X-rays (orange) show the expanding debris from the most recent galactic supernova, G1.9+0.3. I’ve always thought this looks like a roman laurel leaf headdress! From Monday’s article. Credit: X-ray: (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.); Radio: (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.)]

Monday 11 October, 2021: G1.9+0.3: The last galactic supernova

Tuesday 12 October, 2021: Astronomers find 17 red dwarf stars that may have aurorae triggered by orbiting Earth-sized planets

Wednesday 13 October, 2021: Asteroids, the Universe, and Everything: Meet 42 space rocks

Thursday 14 October, 2021: Tiny grains of alien material in meteorites point to origins in other stars

Friday 15 October, 2021: Earth’s solid inner core may be a little bit mushy

Colorado

Because my home state is pretty

Because you deserve it, here’s a photo of a great blue heron (left), an American white pelican (center), and two more pelicans just chilling in a pond not far from where I live.

[Big birds hanging out. Credit: Phil Plait]

Whenever I see a heron standing that way it reminds me of Marty Feldman’s character Igor (“It’s pronounced EYE-gore”) in Young Frankenstein.

Et alia

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