I knew someone was going to make my point for me better than I ever could have.

I have voted Democrat in every election since 2006. That was a mid-term. I voted for Obama twice, Clinton once, Biden once, and Harris once. I voted no on North Carolina’s bathroom bill in 2016. Is this the behavior of a “transphobic alt-right nazi?”

No. Voting Republican is, like 13% of LGBTQ voters did. I’ve done more for LGBTQ rights than 1 out of every 8 American queers. Actually, probably more than that, probably closer to 1 in 6 or 5, because that 13% is out of those who bothered to cast a ballot at all.

So you get to miss me with that slander.

“Wokeness.” Allow me to reiterate: Andy Weir writes stories about the peoples of the world setting their differences aside to work together to solve problems using science. Stories of mankind’s greatest triumphs, our finest hours, are those of cooperation and evidence-based understanding of reality. Anyone who is actually woke, actually enlightened, would be overjoyed at seeing folks on the right embrace those stories. An actual enlightened person would be trying to think of more ways to get more stories like that in front of the right’s eyes.

What I see out of the self-styled “Woke” is absolute language policing. To the same or even greater degree than The Right, The Left, particularly the “inclusivity” enclave, demands obedient conformity to in-group norms. You will be declared an outsider and most heinous enemy if you say the wrong things, say things the wrong way, or talk to the wrong people. I am not your ally, not because I hate you, but because you make it impossible.

Specifically what should be in the curriculum? Well, the way I see it, school gets more and more useless the older students get. Elementary school is mostly on the money because reading, writing and arithmetic. We probably need to shake out some of the whitewashing that’s done in social studies class; all the “And then the Indians showed the pilgrims how to plant a fish with the corn seeds to act as fertilizer” shit but I think you get it.

Throughout middle school, they started letting kids choose the electives they wanted to take. For me this started out as “do you want to take Spanish, Band, Orchestra, Chorus or ‘Career Studies’?” There was one period a day that we didn’t ALL share in common. We need to do more of that, cater to students’ interests better. I think high school should have majors like college does.

The best education I find is when the environment simulates or actually is real work. Auto shop class in which real maintenance and repair is done to real roadworthy vehicles, conducted in an environment that simulates a service station is vastly superior to “Here are five random cars the owners abandoned with the school as a tax write off. They were broken when they got here and nine classes before you broke them worse. Take the wheels off and put them back on I guess.” My high school carpentry shop teacher treated us like employees of a general contractor, and we built a house. We would go to the job site, divide into work teams and work on a section of the building, from girder beam to shingles. I came out of high school not only with a head full of theory, but I was ready to walk onto a job site and work because I knew the job.

Shop classes have been disappearing. Students who didn’t take those, who took AP classes and such…what did they emerge from high school ready to go do as an adult?

I’m also of a mind to reject the notion that, you spend the entirety of your childhood and adolescence on school, and maybe even early adulthood if you go to college, and then once you’re done that’s it, no more learning now you work. That’s insane. “I’m in school.” “I’m out of school.” “I’m going back to school.” This notion of everything having to be multi-year curricula that must be entirely completed to earn a certificate and those four semesters of chemistry and physics don’t count because you failed persuasive writing so no future for you…it’s psychotic.

says his movies do good because he doesn’t do politics.

He’s almost certainly right. I haven’t encountered any significant our side/their side political mud slinging in his works. His two biggest hits, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, both feature nature itself as the antagonist, and all of society, everyone everywhere, setting aside their differences to work on solving the problem using the most powerful, righteous tools available: Science and Engineering.

Now, what cohort would you expect to try to cancel the author of books like that? The dogmatic, anti-science, fascist right wing? Nope! It’s the assigned-gendergaseous-at-tumblr crowd, because he does something other than recite the colors of the pride flag.

Which of those two groups did you expect to be the most insular and shunning? Was it the skinheads or the bluehairs?

Debate me, I guess.

As per your instruction, I shall.

I am a certified flight instructor, I have studied the fundamentals of instruction and can speak with authority on the subject.

it seems that some people think learning is a net negative or neutral for whoever is doing the learning and that one should learn as little as possible.

Learning is an active process. There’s a reason for turn of phrases like “spend time” and “pay attention,” these actions aren’t free. Any act of learning comes with a real cost in time, energy and likely money. It also comes with an opportunity cost. The time and effort a student spends learning could always be spent doing something else; resting, playing, working, caring for family, or learning something else. It is possible for those costs to be so great as to be a genuine net negative for the student. Especially when the reality of formalized school comes into play.

One of Edward Thorndike’s six fundamental principles of learning is the Principle of Readiness. This ties into Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. As a teacher, you have to always ask yourself “Where on their pyramid does my lesson fit? Is everything below that on their pyramid of needs well taken care of?” Your students will not be willing to pay attention in algebra class if they’re hungry, thirsty, sleepy, freezing or scared, because their needs for homeostasis and security aren’t being met well enough for an intellectual lesson such as higher math.

Okay, we got the kids fed, rested and secured. Now they should pay attention right? Nope. That isn’t good enough. Where on their pyramid does this lesson fit? What need of theirs will learning this satisfy? Genuine curiosity about the universe and its workings are always always always at the stabby point of the very tippy top of the pyramid, you want to satisfy that need you’ve got to categorically solve every other need these kids can have from romance to personal prestige. Schools and universities love the image of the career scholar, the men with SI units named after them who conducted experiments for the good of humanity…the reality is the very few extremely privileged people who got to play that game were old money wealthy, they owned land and had servants if not slaves to take care of all their material needs.

When a child asks why they have to go to school, they’re told that school is where they learn the skills they need to survive as adults. though Elementary school, you can take this argument seriously. Learning how to add and subtract is necessary for the basic act of paying for things, reading is the most OP skill you can have, reading clocks and calendars is demonstrably important, etc. That argument starts falling apart when you’re preventing people from going out and earning money to live so they can generate standardized test scores in pre-calculus algebra, or being told not asked what the symbology of the blue curtains in some novel is.

Because here’s another thing about the principle of readiness: It is the teacher’s responsibility to inform the students of the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “Someday algebra will save your life” is meaningless; we live in a world with quiz game shows, literally any trivia knowledge can be life changing. You have to be specific and realistic. Otherwise your students aren’t going to spend the effort, they’ll merely go through the motions, like pretending to be sad at a great aunt’s husband’s funeral.

Especially on Lemmy I’ve seen the argument that education shouldn’t be mere job training, it should be about ultimate enlightenment. Except we need to achieve a world where everyone can afford rent before we can play that game, Tiffany. And we haven’t. Survival skills come before abstract beautiful truths and if we’re honest we’re doing a piss poor job of both.

America flew nine manned lunar orbit missions in the 60’s and 70’s. Apollo 8 didn’t carry a Lunar Module, CM only. 10 did a low pass in their lunar module, 11 and 12 landed, 13 had to abort, 14-17 landed. We gave the rest of the world a 50 year chance to come in tenth and nobody did so here we go again.

Canada gets to umm actually for the rest of time because there was a Canuck on Artemis 2, the rest of you are now jockeying for 11th place.

Rarely. And I’m a ham.

Also: The same party has both houses of Congress who pretty much abdicated their power to the Executive branch.

Humans have flown a total of ten manned missions that involved a Hohmann transfer: Apollo 8, Apollo 10-17, and Artemis 2. All ten flew to the Moon. On a typical Apollo mission, the outward bound coast leg is about 72 hours, between TLI and LOI, during which time they had to do the release-turn around-dock-extract maneuver with the lunar module and do at least one course correction.

We’ve been wasting tax payer dollars for more than half a century now designing and redesigning manned Mars missions that aren’t ever going to fly. Some of the various “artist’s conceptions” over the decades have included various centrifugal gravity solutions, be it the wagon wheel type or the bolas type or whatever. I don’t believe any actual hardware has even begun construction. Before you start worrying about that, you’ve got to 1. have a society healthy enough to fly manned deep space missions, and 2. figure out how to shield the crew from radiation first. Neither of which we have figured out at the moment.

Because the constant rotation complicates things a lot.

Specifically talking about the International Space Station, its main mission is a microgravity laboratory. We put it up there so we can learn about microgravity. Why go through all the expense of putting it up there and then spinning it to make gravity when we get it for free down here on the surface?

As for other craft? We have yet to develop manned spacecraft that can do the duration where it would be worth doing. Even the longer Apollo missions were in space for a whopping two weeks and 2/3 of the crew still landed, got out and stretched their legs. It hasn’t been worth the engineering hassle to do it.

And it is an engineering hassle, because…

1. The ship has to be designed to handle it. It’s under additional stresses, so it’s got to be built tougher to handle it. That’s added weight, and just typing that sentence made at least three rocket scientists cringe to death.

2. Humans actually aren’t great at living in a spin gravity environment. The smaller the radius of the spin, the worse it gets. For one thing, in a centrifuge, there’s a pretty steep gradient in centrifugal/centripetal/pedantic force, the farther toward the rim you are the greater the gravity. For very small distances that can be significant enough to cause problems on its own. But also, spinning humans isn’t good for their vestibular systems. Each of your inner ears has three semi-circular canals filled with fluid, and little hairs that can detect the movement of that fluid. This allows you to sense rotation around three axes, kind of like a gyroscope sensor. This evolved in an environment that rotates a 1 rotation per day, functionally stationary. Spin a human at several RPM and that constant rotation is enough to start throwing off balance, causing nausea etc. So the bigger the radius of the spin, and the slower, the better. That takes more weight, and there go three more rocket scientists.

3. It makes the spacecraft a pain to handle. You need to be able to orient spacecraft in space to point engines, windows, instruments, docking adapters etc. in various stable directions. A constant roll complicates that. “point in this direction and fire the engines” becomes a pain because, say you’re constantly rolling, and you need to change the direction your long axis points. What thrusters do you fire in what combination to steer the ship? Or do you stop the roll, maneuver/use your telescope/dock/whatever, then start rolling again? So now you’ve got to deal with gravity starting and stopping variously throughout the journey. Or, do you design the ship to have sections that do roll and sections that don’t? First, look up “gyroscopic precession” on Wikipedia. Second, wiring, plumbing etc. is a pain in the ass to handle via slip ring, let alone crew access. Third, that adds weight, which…I should probably stop saying that, rocket scientists aren’t cheap to train and that’s nine we’ve killed just in this list.

In conclusion, look what you made me do.

Could the same thing be said about the Apollo program in the 60’s?

Huh, sure enough. Isn’t that amazing.

Yes, because of some shit the company pulled I’m no longer interested in games made in Unity.

Oh we can rule out actual discourse on Lemmy, this platform’s already dead in the water. There’s too many ass burgers on here who will take an extremely literal and narrow interpretation of the series of words you typed ignoring any nuance or implication and assuming the examples you chose to cite are the only that exist. At least a few of them are probably employees of the Russian, North Korean or Chinese governments instructed to add truckloads of bad faith to every corner of the English speaking internet.

By what mechanism does the far side get more sunlight? Because it’s never sees…what would we call them from the Moon’s perspective? Solar eclipses? Terran eclipses? Every single New Moon the far side is fully sunlit, but on occasion on Full Moons the Moon flies through Earth’s shadow?

The far side can get darker than the near side. During the lunar night, the near side experiences earthshine, which is significantly brighter than the moonshine we get here on Earth (Earth is larger in the sky and has a higher albedo; bigger and shinier reflector than the Moon)

I propose we call the near side the dark side, because it has almost all of the maria - the dark basaltic lowlands. The far side of the moon is mostly relatively lighter grey highlands and so appears lighter than the near side.

Venus is difficult to photograph for the same reason as Titan, thick opaque atmosphere. We’ve got radar imagery of Venus, plus the Soviets landed some probes and took a few pictures of the actual hell that surface level Venus is.

We can actually get a pretty good look at Mars from here; This is a picture of Mars taken with Hubble. We have active missions in orbit and on the surface of Mars as well so we can look at it as close as we want.

Meanwhile, this is the best Hubble could do with Pluto. And that’s still inside our own solar system, we’re not getting any photos of the surface of Earth mass planets around other stars.

You’ve only ever seen photographs of one planet with oceans and landmasses, and that’s Earth. The only other celestial body that has a solid surface with liquid on it that we’ve taken pictures of is Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan has a thick opaque atmosphere so we don’t have true-to-life pictures of the surface from space. We’ve got images constructed from radar scans, and this amazing image taken from the surface by the Huygens probe that hitched a ride with Cassini. The hydrocarbon lakes of Titan look like…blobs on a circle.

Every other planetary surface you’ve seen is rocky dirt, icy dirt, straight-up ice, cratery dirt, or opaque gas clouds. Any “earth-like” planet you’ve ever seen is a fictional artist’s conception. And ain’t no human artist who knows shit about plate tectonics compared to the Earth herself, so they draw weird shit that ain’t quite right somehow.

What is visible isn’t actually the far side, they’re less than 90 degrees around to the “left.”

This feature circled in red is called Grimaldi crater:

It is visible from the Earth; here is the view of the Moon you’re probably used to seeing with Grimaldi again circled in red:

You’re an ill-informed English major. You instructed me to call you that, so I did.

The light source for this image is the Sun.

“The dark side of the moon” is a phrase that seems to have a strange effect on people; they seem to use that phrase to incorrectly mean the far side of the moon, and then that puts the idea in their heads that the far side is always dark. It isn’t; the far side is fixed, the dark side is constantly changing.

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, this means the moon’s rotational speed and its orbital period are the same, the moon rotates once on its axis for every one orbit of the Earth it performs, meaning it doesn’t (significantly) rotate when seen from Earth. No human saw the far side of the moon until the Soviets flew a satellite around it, and only 27 men and 1 woman have ever seen it with their own eyes. Until this week, those numbers were 24 and 0.

It is hidden from us but not from the Sun; we observe the Earth waxing and waning, being full and then half a month later being new. When the moon is new, the near side is in darkness and the far side is in light. On the Lunar surface, a day and night takes an entire month, while the continents and oceans of the Earth hanging still in space overhead whirl past nearly 30 times.

Finally…the image above isn’t the whole far side. About half of the near side is visible; the big dark patch to the right is the Ocean of Storms, most of the Sea of Rain is visible as well. Kepler and Copernicus crater are visible, Tycho is just out of shot, if you look closely you can just barely see one of Tycho’s rays across the Sea of Clouds. That one very dark patch just right of center is Grimaldi crater. All those features are visible from the Earth, in fact two of the Apollo landing sites are visible here, 12 and 14. The very large carter, the dark patch to the left of center of the image is Mare Orientale, which is just barely visible on the edge of the Moon from Earth, from our point of view it’s on the “side”. It’s eastern ridge is visible from Earth but we don’t really see the dark mare itself.

That’s not what “lame duck” means.

A lame duck is a politician who is currently in office but is not eligible for re-election due to term limits. A second-term president is the classic example. Being in power and yet guaranteed to soon not be alters the power dynamic and priorities of said politician.

Donald Trump is a lame duck; in his second of two terms.

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