Apologies if it seems I'm just stoking a stereotype, but this comes from personal experience with family. For a demographic who generally are proud to be "old school", "not computer people", skeptical, distrustful of technology, self-reliant, and at least paid lip service to those ideals when raising their children, they sure do love being lied to and manipulated by the very enemies they claimed to be resistant to.
I'm also surprised how few people know about Tulip Mania[0]. Funny thing about bubbles is that mostly everyone seems to know its a bubble, but they think they will have a seat when the music stops.
I'm shooting from the depths of my memory, but I recall reading that one of the earliest government needs for computers was for the decennial census. At some point, it was requiring more than the 10 years to process the previous censuses (sp?) results.
Interesting read. This may be unfair to Louisiana based on this case, but I've heard the USA described as a federation of a bunch of states and some 3rd world countries.
“One of the best descriptions of this political culture came from A.J. Liebling, who called Louisiana "the westernmost of the Arab states" and observed that its politics "is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the Republic of Lebanon. Louisiana is part of the Hellenistic—Mediterranean littoral—sensual, seductive, speculative, devious."
Allow me to elaborate on the political culture. I lived in LA in the early 90s when the governors race was between a former KKK Leander and Edwin Edward’s who once said "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy”. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Louisiana_gubernatorial_e....
It’s a Republic of states that are Democratic.
Some states have cities with terrible poverty but never the case where the whole state can be categorized as such.
Frustratingly, I have my foot in both worlds to a degree. I'm interested enough in tech to pay attention and often lurk the tech bubble that is HN and hear about the raging dumpster fires from the folks who live and work in that domain. But I exist in a mostly non-tech world IRL where this exists among the other burning dumpster fires to the point that I can't care about another data hack, and i hate that I don't have the bandwidth to care. To a more acute degree, my mother was nearly wiped of half her life savings by "hackers"/fraudsters posing as employees of her bank. Being "hacked" is a part of life now, and outrage fatigue is real.
Give FlowLauncher[0] or Windows Powertoys Run[1] a shot.
There are some amazing tools like that (and Everything[2], which replaces Windows' inferior search) that really change how one interacts with Windows.
There are other tricks like putting scripts or shortcuts or executables in a directory referenced by your PATH variable, which can make the Win+R trick better too.
Thanks! Also useful for an old win10 machine I have, and probably shouldn't be using anymore, that no longer responds to clicking the start menu button...
Don't throw it away. Install windows 8, and the last offline version of office you can find. It makes for a great distraction free workstation and a monitor for your android (scrcpy).
Or, you can install and reinstall linux distros and learn the ropes.
You should be fine as long as you use a proper firewall device and access only manually withelisted websites, but it is always better to keep it offline. That said, it can become your next firewall device.
I built it circa 2012 or 2013 and still have the physical win8 disc. I considered futzing with linux on it. The extent of my linux experience is via SSH to a raspberry pi kludging some docker containers for this and that. SSH/linux terminal feels like fumbling in a dark room flipping random switches until something works.
>scrcpy
I also have a pixel 5a whose screen doesn't work, but I think functions otherwise. Would this allow me to interface with it?
I think the pixel 5a can be connected to tv through an hdmi cable. If so, plug that and a mouse to setup adb (toggle enable adb and toggle debug permissions, then accept adb host)
Back in the 90s doing substring match was probably deemed way too expensive and so just calling the executable name directly was as optimized as it got... and it's beautiful :)
My suspicion was they were burning excess propellant, rather than attitude adjustment while under the parachutes. Though who knows how much propellant remained. It could be quite a bit more than it appears was used.
Not just excess - excess and toxic. Hydrazine derivatives and nitrogen tetroxide, IIRC. They are hypergolic, too, so the easiest way to vent them is just to run the engines until empty. However, to prevent moving the craft too much, you do short bursts.
There are opposed thrusters, but I assume that in atmosphere and under parachute canopy it’s harder to make sure they are perfectly opposed.
Heating likely plays a role as well.
I am not a rocket engineer, but I have read How Apollo Flew to the Moon and Ignition!: an informal history of liquid rocket propellants, both of which cover these issues. Highly recommended.
The short bursts are just the period of the control cycles. Control cycle starts, loop sees error, commands thrust; next control cycle starts, loop sees error is nulled (or in deadband), commands no thrust.
Too much of our government requires/required its trustees to act in good faith. Clearly that was too vulnerable. And I realize it sounds naive to think that past trustees were acting in good faith, but there are relative degrees of that.
I haven't been actively looking for them, but a friend sent me something about the launch tower escape zipline/gondolas and how that somehow indicated something fraudulent. He is not a denier, but works with one and is always asking me to refute that person's claims.
Oh because the astronauts were “really” on the escape zip lines instead of in the rocket?
How would they do the zero gravity during the live streams? They have to actually be in space, not even the zero-G parabolic airplane sim can maintain zero gravity for as long as their live streams have been.
I’ve heard people claim you can’t leave Low Earth Orbit due to the Van Allen radiation belts, but most Apollo deniers still believe low earth orbit is possible and reasonable. If they did fake Artemis II, it would have to be that the astronauts actually launched into LEO, and just didn’t really leave.
If your friend is trying to "cure" the denier, then it might be helpful for them to learn some of the tactics for reaching/deprogramming cult members. One that might be helpful is "street epistemology".
That's a bit too much to ask of these folks, I'm afraid, but I did boil it down for him by saying that the real question is understanding why he is inclined to believe its a hoax, rather than trying to pile up evidence in front of him. I suppose that's what "street epistemology" is, though. Nice to have shorthand terms for these ideas.
I also included a thought experiment for him:
Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?
(I wonder if there is a sociological shorthand term for this?)
> Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?
"The participating flat Earthers all admitted that the midnight sun was a real phenomenon. The larger flat Earth community has largely rejected the results and accused the participants, including the flat Earthers, of having faked the expedition and of being part of a larger conspiracy to promote the spherical Earth model."
The Final Experiment (https://www.the-final-experiment.com/) essentially did this by inviting "prominent" flat earthers to Antarctica to witness 24 hours of daylight. Very few did, but they are now shunned by the true flat earthers.
Church/religion. Flat-earthers believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible which dictates that the earth is flat.
When I was doing my student teaching, one of the teachers in my department was a creationist, but he didn’t seem to have read Genesis 1 at all because when I asked him about the firmament in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, he had no idea what I was talking about. At least the flat-earthers know enough scripture to follow their dogma all the way to its absurd endpoint.
"Flat Earth"[0] is more like a cult[1]. One introduces a significant barrier to entry. New members learn the approved vocabulary/jargon that identifies "in group" and "out group" people. Outsiders tend to reject new members[2]. New members tend to stay due to the "sunken cost" fallacy. The high barrier to entry and cost of leaving (losing your community - because you will be shunned for doing so) prevents people from leaving or associating with people who have left.
2 - This is why religions such as Jehovah's Witnesses require members to proselytize (including going door-to-door) because outsiders are so adverse to the members that the other insiders remark things like "those outsiders are so depraved, that's why you can only be with 'true believers' like us".
> the real question is understanding why he is inclined to believe its a hoax, rather than trying to pile up evidence in front of him
This is one of the primary techniques of SE. People are open to answering questions and with some skill with Socratic questioning, you can get results. Dumping data just causes cult/hoax members to feel threatened because you're attacking some core beliefs and they will try very hard to avoid losing a sense of self value[0].
Notes:
0 - "What I believe is wrong" -> "I am wrong" -> "I am a bad person".
I hear similar from my own Mother. I don't know the extent of what she believes, because I don't want to ask, but there is a strong rejection of Leo among the American right. It seems as simple as challenging Trump to a degree, and retroactively finding justification for invalidating the pope. I suppose I could dip into her media diet and find out myself.
With my family members, it is useless for me to bring up the fact that Ratzinger/Benedict supervised the revised Catechism. They don’t believe in that categorically.
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