xkcd

teft , in xkcd #2802: Fireflies

You should include the alt text when you post xkcd

Alt text: I feel bad for Earth 2 and their shadowflies.

Jakylla OP ,
@Jakylla@sh.itjust.works avatar

It is, “Title text” at the top of the body of the post ;)

teft ,

Ah, hiding in plain sight I see.

Jakylla OP ,
@Jakylla@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’ve edited the transcript into a Spoiler tag to improve the readability

Tandybaum , in xkcd #2802: Fireflies

My daughter has been out catching (and releasing) firefly’s the past week or two. It’s such an amazing little nod to doing something that probably every past generation of kids can relate to.

She probably has nearly nothing in common with her 5x great grandma but I bet they both caught fireflys.

Sc00ter ,

We took my 4 and 2 year old tent camping this weekend. They were amazed by the firefly show we got to witness.

If they’d actually sleep in a tent, we’d go again soon lol

Blackout , in xkcd #2802: Fireflies
@Blackout@kbin.social avatar

I keep my lawn long in the summer so they have a place. Neighbors spray their yards and get none while mine lights up like the night sky

sudo , in xkcd #2802: Fireflies
@sudo@lemmy.fmhy.ml avatar

Too bad loss of habitat, light pollution, and pesticides are threatening and endangering several species of fireflies.

exixx , in xkcd #2802: Fireflies

This reminds me of the song by Owl City. Owl City - Fireflies

Bricktamland29 , in xkcd #2803: Geohydrotypography

Two questions.

  1. How many total 12 points words is the surface of the Atlantic?
  2. How many words a second are we gaining due to rising sea levels?
RedditRefugee69 ,

Also what size font is depicted to scale here?

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

2 Ir, where the 1 Ir unit is the diameter of Ireland.

SaakoPaahtaa ,

And more importantly, since when were oceans this good at scrabble?

Tolstoshev , in xkcd #2803: Geohydrotypography

Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system.

Skua , in xkcd #2804: Marshmallow

This feels a lot like Randall played some Outer Wilds

Localhorst86 , in xkcd #2805: Global Atmospheric Circulation

imagine he had missed the shot…

gosling ,
@gosling@lemmy.world avatar

you could call that an airball

palordrolap , in xkcd #2805: Global Atmospheric Circulation

Of course Beret guy is immortal. (Or at least exceptionally long living.)

lowleveldata , in xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers

I think people are just afraid of injection in general. And someone took that small fear and turns it into conspiracies and what not.

sab ,
@sab@kbin.social avatar

"I'm terrified of needles, but I'm to proud to admit I'm afraid of a needle. Better come up with an excuse. Let's say it causes autism."

alvvayson ,

Fear + stupidity = conspiracy

Sadly, we have no cure for stupidity.

I guess the rest of us will need to figure out living in a world where we have conquered lions, bears, the Black Death and famine, but not yet the stupidity of our fellow countrymen.

Communist_Lemming ,
@Communist_Lemming@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

What about genocide as a cure?

abraham_linksys ,

Username checks out

mounderfod ,
@mounderfod@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

The cure for “stupidity” is education :) Sadly this is being neglected in many countries

e_t_ Admin ,

The cure for ignorance is education. Even PhD-holders can be stupid.

alvvayson ,

The number of highly educated idiots is too damn high.

ThrowawayPermanente ,

Read Freddie DeBoer

MyFairJulia ,
@MyFairJulia@lemmy.world avatar

As far as i know the fear of vaccines started growing because of Andrew Wakefield.

Andrew Wakefield developed a vaccine against measles, however the MMR vaccine was already on the market doing its job just fine. So how could he make sure that his vaccine was taken instead of the MMR?

He had to start lying. So he started to spread the notion that the MMR vaccine would cause autism. My memory hets fuzzy from here on but basically it was MMR vaccine causing autism because it would mess with gut bacteria and to prove that he was messing with data and his colleagues and until they realized what was happening the damage was already done. And over time the lie from Wakefield turned into the commonly known “vaccines cause autism”.

Hbomberguy has a very comprehensive video about it: youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc

fushuan ,

As a small correction from the video itself: it isn’t just that he wanted to sell the individual vaccines, it’s that the parents of the kids that underwent tests wanted the investigation to go through to sue the MMR vaccine company. It was all a sham from the beginning.

MyFairJulia ,
@MyFairJulia@lemmy.world avatar

All because of 🦀 MONEY 🦀

feedum_sneedson ,

What is crab money crab?

wanderingmagus ,
feedum_sneedson ,

It’s literally a reference to Spongebob? Maybe I am finally getting old.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I was already well into adulthood when Spongebob came out, so I’m guessing I’m already old.

echodot ,

He never even had to serve prison time for any of this.

He did have his medical license taken away, which was basically the band minimum they could have done, but really he should have faced prosecution.

tryptaminev ,
@tryptaminev@feddit.de avatar

Anti-Vaxx is more complicated than that. In Germany for instance it originates in the homeopathy and anthrosophy movements that are pseudo-science nonsense fueled by fearmongering against scientific medicine and science in general, sprinkler with other esoteric conspiracies and a good load of white supremacy.

So there is different sources and now it all mingles together because of the internet.

kitonthenet , in xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers

they reject it precisely because it's not ambiguous or confusing, for some of them that's because they want to be the other voice in the room, for others it's because it validates other beliefs they have (belief in the international jewish conspiracy, or a belief in god, or a belief that trump is god for some of them)

Umbra , in xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers

Except the risk of serious side effects from the vaccine is higher than from COVID, in healthy young individuals. But keep believing everything the authority figures tell you, I'm sure it will work out great. And btw, the vaccinated still got sick and transmitted the virus even when asymptomatic so yeah.

Jakylla OP ,
@Jakylla@sh.itjust.works avatar

Why should I trust you more than “the authority figures” ? What are your figures that I should trust ?

Why should I trust some unknown person on the internet that give me some facts without any evidence ?

Why shouldn’t I trust the data that has been gathered by global scientific communities, validated by experts, cross checked by pairs, some of them I’ve read and understood myself, and also relevant to my actual observations ?

Umbra ,

Because they're bought out frauds, their data is fraudulent.

DrQuint , in xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers

Darkwolf in the explain pages is a fucking retard. And he earned the slur. Antivaxxers are plague spreaders.

scriblemelego ,

Agreed but let’s not call people slurs if they “earned it” lmao. Would you call a black person the n word if they did something particularly bad?

DrQuint ,

I have no expectation behind wolf’s actual mental impairment the same way the N word would expect it, since it exclusively only targets black people. So no, I shouldn’t use it, but using it doesn’t justify any other slur the way you imply, either lighter or worse.

And with that said, I’ll use it anyways. Because, fuck it, I despise people like that, double down time. Someone should take anyone who makes antivaxxer media or argues antivaxxer rethoric and institutionalize them IN THE MORGUE.

hikaru755 ,

I’ll use it anyways. Because, fuck it, I despise people like that

The problem is not about the person you intend to insult “earning it” or not, the problem is that by your choice of insult, you’re implying that you also despise other mentally impaired people, no matter if they’ve done anything wrong.

feedum_sneedson ,

Does it imply hate, the term? Or just limited cognitive capacity?

feedum_sneedson ,

Well let’s not kill each other.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

You’ve clearly never experienced a special needs person get physically attacked by a gang while calling them that word. I sure did in high school. I never used that word again. After that I could see it’s just another N-word.

Dagwood222 , in xkcd #2806: Anti-Vaxxers

Pick and choose science.

Some one claimed that they knew climate change was a hoax because there have been Ice Ages in the past.

So, you believe the scientist who tells you there was an Ice Age 60,000 years ago but don’t believe the same person when they tell you that climate change is real.

TonyTonyChopper ,
@TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz avatar

They find it perfectly reasonable to do with the bible. So why not with news, science, politics, math

Polar ,

I told someone I don’t believe in their magical sky creature, I believe in science. They told me the “magical sky creature created science”, so then I asked why they are against science if their God created it?

Never got a response. Religion is just picking and choosing your way through life while using a magical sky creature as your scape goat.

jasondj ,

That’s so easy to answer though. They’ve been using the explanation for a while.

“God made science to test our faith”.

Dagwood222 ,

Yeah…God could make a bunch of rocks that look exactly like a skeleton, but random chance can’t make amino acides…

tryptaminev ,
@tryptaminev@feddit.de avatar

At least that is consistent with the “god gave us free will to test if we are good” bullshit.

uriel238 , (edited )
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Huh, my first thought is that there also have been extinction events in the past. The Permian-Triassic (known as the great dying because, well, almost everything died) was largely caused by methanogenic bacteria (algae? I’m rusty), so yes, biologically induced climate change.

In our case, we have industry to help us along, so we did in decades what a sea full of microbes took millenia. Still, they killed nearly everything.

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

Over the course of billions of years, there have been many extinctions and the environment has gone from one extreme to the other many times. Humans might not survive events like that, but life in general does. If you want to truly eradicate all like, you would need to drop the moon on earth and turn the whole planet into a lava inferno.

nottheengineer ,

Those people usually choose politics over science.

On the political side, governments forced the vaccine on people by taking away freedoms if they didn’t get it and they often did that before there were enough vaccines for everyone.

As someone with Asthma (who should theoretically get some kind of priority), I spent two months illegally meeting with my friends because I couldn’t get a vaccine while the politicians who decided on the rules could have legal meetups because they were the first ones to get the vaccine.

And on the priority? My brother got prioritized as a high-risk patient and got his vaccine before I did. The reason? He’s slightly overweight.

Anyways, my point is that a lot of covid antivaxxers didn’t actually care if the vaccine was any good or bad, they just cared about the politics surrounding it. And I agree with you, picking science over politics always the right call.

duviobaz ,
@duviobaz@lemmy.world avatar

Nonsense. Legitimate concerns, like yours, are none of the reasons why they do what they do

nottheengineer ,

No one wants to admit it of course, but the people I talked to about it fit the pattern very well.

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