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Flat-Earth Argument Results in Rap Battle (npr.org)
New submitter mjjochen writes: A little something to make you smile (or cry). NPR reports on astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson calling out rapper B.o.B. in a Twitter (& rap) argument over the status of the earth (are we round or flat?). Rapper B.o.B. references the usual conspiracy theories to support his case in his throwdown (music). Neil deGrasse Tyson responds (actually, his nephew does), on why B.o.B.'s points are not very well-informed (music). As Tyson puts it, "Duude — to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn't mean we all can't still like your music." Shall we start leeching the four humors from the body again to achieve balance? Hrm.
Please explain the existence of the North Pole. (Drops mic, walks away.)
there's mom & pop.... yo homeslice...
Obligatory rap reference.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Uh, we knew 5000 years ago the Earth was round. You think the Egyptians were morons?
This rapper is in on the conspiracy himself and doesn't know it. Help spread the word!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... /s
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Holy shit. I think that Slashdot may have hit a new all-time low with this submission. Everything about this submission is dumb and irrelevant.
Come on! Can't we get some relevant submissions onto the front page, rather than total shit like this submission? It's not like they don't exist. They're sitting there in the goddamn queue, while donkey shit like this submission ends up on the front page.
Seriously, why the fuck is Slashdot reporting about a flat-earth argument of all things? Why the fuck is Slashdot reporting about a goddamn rap battle over some flat-earth argument? The people involved aren't even remotely important in any way.
What a fucking stupid submission! It's utterly stupid in every single way!
Why is anyone paying attention to that goofball B.o.B. anyway? He's a boring rapper with weak rhymes as well as weak science. I mean, his stage name is an initialism for Battery Operated Boyfriend (i.e. a vibrating dildo). All this does is draw more attention to him and his shitty rap. No-one could possibly believe the flat earth theory these days anyway when you can easily fly or sail around the world.
Well you sure typed some words on the internet
Even flat-earthers and Terry A. Davis despise systemd and the rest of Poettering's shitcode.
you mean dat shit they say ain't all true?
I love a good conspiracy theory, I really do. I'm a big fan of the X-files... but... and I think this is a big reason why I only engage in them for entertainment purposes:
The Government cannot simultaneously be incompetent and engage in these "vast conspiracies", as the people who engage in the latter are always complaining about the former so often do. Just because a villain in a Bond flick can ensure the loyalty of silence of the hundreds or thousands of workers from Blofeld to the lowliest janitor in the underground complex does not mean that this is how the real world works. Even the Mafia can't (and isn't able to) do that.
There is no conspiracy to be uncovered here. Either the Earth is flat or it isn't. What would the alleged conspiracy even plan to achieve, flatten the Earth?
Also, this is a publicity stunt, now a previously obscure rapper is featured everywhere including slashdot, and you nerds fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
I did some intertube searches for this guy and 95% of the results have to do with this rap battle thinger. Why is this guy getting attention?
If you can really believe this idea in this day and age then humanity has major problems. Sadly I don't even think a round the world flight (which I've done) would cure them they'd probably think the pilot turned the flight around slowly?
Maybe he should change his name to B Square B :)
Summation 2
Tila Tequila was in the news 2-3 weeks ago with this theory. Now BoB shows up 10x more famous making the same claims. Neil DeGrasse Tyson just looks like a damn fool.
Without reading TFA, I have to point out that if Tyson tweeted that the rapper was "five centuries regressed in your reasoning" in order to indicate that five centuries ago people all thought that the earth was flat, then Tyson's statement is ironically also uninformed. There's a common myth that Columbus "discovered" that the earth was round. In fact people had believed that the earth was round for centuries before Columbus, but nobody had ever demonstrated this fact to mainland Europe by means of sailing. I'm not talking about the ancient Greeks, either. Even Dante (13th c.) believed that the earth was round, but he thought that the other side was just filled with empty water--apart from Purgatory, which was on an island there. I believe I've even seen references to the earth being round in Christian writings from the first millennium AD. The past is not so simple as people often paint it. It's not as though people were all stupid before until the glorious age of Enlightenment. Hence the kind of fallacy that causes someone to deny the roundness of the earth today is of an entirely different character and magnitude compared to the innocent ignorance of those who imagined the earth as flat in the past.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
This would be a much better story if this had been a proper rap battle and Neil deGrasse Tyson had dropped a real rap joint and done a video with girls with big round butts and guns and low-rider cars with hydraulics.
https://youtu.be/fJuapp9SORA
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since our reality is equivilant to a simulation where the earth is flat but we are made to believe it is a sphere. Actually It does not matter whether we are plugged in or part of the simulation, or if conspirators are doing a really good job making it appear as though the earth is a sphere. Hold on I think I just saw the flying spaghetti monster passing by.
> over the status of the earth are we round or flat?
Neither! The Earth is a hollow body and at its northern / southern poles there are entrances to let explorers descend into Walhalla, which is illuminated by its own miniature Sun.
As a submariner, one of the most important thing you can do is get ranges to other vessels. You do this by using their visible height and your height of eye, allowing you to calculate how much is hidden by the horizon. As the range decreases, you can watch the visible height increase, something you wouldn't see with a flat earth. This happens until the vessel is at the horizon, and you can see the entire thing (which happens at roughly 5100m for a 2 meter tall person, or 5600yd/3.16 miles for a 6 foot tall person). Perhaps flat-earthers just need to spend some time on a boat to get the real picture.
What difference does it make what a moronic, semi-literate rapper says about such things?
Has Jenny McCarthy been approached about endorsing this? I would love to see a floor fight at the Philadelphia convention this year as McCarthy, with whoever Baldwins and Kardashians she can bring along as co-protesters, noisily accuses the party front-runners of being pawns of Big Astronomy. With some native Hawaiian anti-astronomy protesters for ethnic color, this could become one of the coolest viral videos of all time.
Actually, I'd be delighted hear that we are going to start leeching all of the fluids out of the bodies of rap so-called musicians...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
This is not someone who actually believes what he is shit posting. B.o.B was relatively unknown in mainstream media, that is until he started posting crackpot memes and videos on twitter. Now he is a trending topic. Do you see how this works? Tila Tequila did the EXACT SAME THING last week. She fucking trolled all of her followers, and her name climbed up the trending list. It gets you publicity to do and say outlandish things. This is the new marketing.
Having said that, I would be really interested in their explanation of how it can be noon in Hawaii at the same time as it's the middle of the night in Paris. That's got to be a good one.
Simple it's the incredibly slow speed of light. That way when the sun rises over the rim it takes hours for the dawn to reach the hub. Of course now you have to add all us physicists to the conspiracy theory.
It's essentially an elaborate troll by anti-intellectuals.
It can be solved, simply, by taking someone up high enough that they can actually see the curvature of the planet in no unambiguous terms.
And all these purported flat-earthers have is "Nuh uh!".
So, again, that's not an argument.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I live in Kansas. All you have to do is look around and you can see the earth is flat.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The earth is neither flat nor round. It is spherical, however.
Or maybe they could do the right thing and commit suicide.
I have a condition that causes me to have high hematocrit levels in my blood. To treat it I give blood every 5 weeks.
n/t
B.o.B. stands for "Brainless, obtuse bonehead".
I just love these jackass geocentrists, so smug and self-assured, convinced that they and they alone know "the truth" while every scientist in the world is wrong.
This clown couldn't tell a Bunsen burner from a baseball bat, but somehow he's managed to suss it all out...uncover the hidden truth...and with a single stroke of his drippy dick, negate centuries of careful scientific research.
Never mind the fact that all modern physics contradicts him, and that time zones alone bring his "theory" into abject failure, if some cheeseball rapper with gold teeth and a backwards baseball cap says it, it MUST be true!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Rappers haven't solved the magnets thing yet.
Have gnu, will travel.
Is that unusual?
Most sea-fairing civilizations knew that the world was round, thousands of years BCE. Eratosthenes is particularly famous for accurately calculating the circumference of the planet in the 2nd century BCE. Not only did he calculate its circumference, but he also calculated the tilt on the axis and its distance to the sun.
The Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delight (1979)
Coolio - Fantastic Voyage - (1994)
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message (1982)
Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force - Planet Rock (1982)
N.W.A - Fuck the Police (1988)
Run-D.M.C. - It's Tricky (1986)
(not an exhaustive list)
That his name doesn't actually stand for anything. It's literally just the name Bob. Sounds like a rapper name some middle aged white guy would choose.
We've known for three thousand years that the earth is round (no, Columbus's detractors didn't think the earth was flat. They thought is was bigger than Columbus did--and they were right.).
"Shall we start leeching the four humors from the body again to achieve balance?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
actually... leeches have started to be used again in the western medical world because the removal of blood - especially blood which has heavy toxins or other dangerous pollutants - can have a beneficial effect (obviously), and leaches automatically inject anti-coagulants.
just because they didn't necessarily understand the exact science *doesn't* mean that over centuries of empirical observation doctors from older times weren't "on the right track".
much of what western medical doctors tell patients is "simplified to the point of being bullshit".... but, *very importantly*, is *reassuring* bullshit. calming the patient down (especially in stress-related illness) is actually a recognised branch of medicine, and has been for many centuries.
anyway... sorry, had to point that out.
musically it has always been the equivalent of flat earth thinking. Hell it makes NAS car and country and western look credible by comparison.
Not 5 centuries ...
The earth has been known to be round for at least 22 centuries.
Eratosthenes, proved it by measuring the circumference of the earth around 240 BC.
Actually, Neil DeGrasse Tyson's predecessor, Carl Sagan explains it very well in this Cosmos video .
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Whether something has been known for 5 or 22 centuries is completely irrelevant to whether or not it is correct.
I'm not going to listen through rap arguments, but the quoted quip about opponent being "five centuries regressed" in his reasoning is bullshit. Equally bullshit would've been dismissing Eratosthenes as a dead White slave-owner.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And a day later FIRE was announced. To me this was just a nice troll to bring B.o.B. to everybody's attention. Heard about this guy before this week? No? Nor did I.
Perl Programmer for hire
So how does orbital mechanics work with a flat earth? Or do flat earthers also deny that we have satellites orbiting in space?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My guess is BoB and NDT are trolling us. Funny stuff.
I can't understand why someone would post as AC and not take credit for the greatest /. comment response I've seen in years.
1. Make crappy "music" 2. Struggle to get famous (I've never heard of the guy until TMZ picked up his stupid comment) 3. Get famous for neglecting science and getting into a "battle" with someone who really is famous. 4. You become Infamous which to some is as cool as being famous. Why do so many people get famous for being stupid these days?
Plane + point-at-infinite = 2-sphere
Planes are flat
QED
Contact Epic Rap Battle, they need to make another with Neil deGrasse Tyson in.
Sir Isaac Newton vs Bill Nye. Epic Rap Battles of History Season 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yis7GzlXNM
I get ALL my political, cultural and social advice from people who make music and movies and TV shows. Why not science too? They totally schooled me to vote for Obama and all the weed initiatives and now they're telling me to "feel the bern". What could possibly go wrong?
maybe this:
“Why should we send people into space when we have kids in the U.S. that can’t read?” - Barack Obama
I believe there is a "Teach the controversy !" tee shirt for this somewhere.
Idiot Xians believe the Bible is infallible in detail, when the majority merely believes that it is a powerful, meaningful book that can lead to insight regarding both moral behavior and the history of the Jewish people and the Judeo-Christian faiths.
Idiot Buddhists worship Buddha as a deity, and idiot Jains don't understand the nature of atheistic religion, and idiot Jews think that all Xians are alike in their beliefs, and idiot atheists think that atheism is fundamentally incompatible with all religion. Idiot agnostics don't know what "agnostic" means (but they still come out the least idiotic in the idiot sweepstakes).
If you want the minimum number of idiots around you, join a Unitarian Universalist church. But sadly you'll find that "minimum number" does not actually equate to "zero."