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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.
Obligatory rap reference.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'd expect the flat-earthers to have a stock reply for that one. Much like the believers of other ridiculous things have their toolkit of responses to use to deflect the truth.
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.
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.
Actually, according to them the North Pole really isn't the issue. It's the South Pole that doesn't exist. Instead there's a wall of ice around Antarctica that's guarded by NASA employees to keep people from finding the truth (I'm not actually making that up, unfortunately).
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Well you sure typed some words on the internet
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 easy it's a combination of turtles with mirrors and sun blocker discs on their backs . . .
. . . all the way down.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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?
Well, there may be no NASA employees at exactly the south pole, there are certainly NASA
employees and contractors in Antarctica flying balloons...
http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/antar...
Maybe he should change his name to B Square B :)
Summation 2
Actually... only one turtle. And four elephants.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
If I remember my conspiracy lore correctly, the north pole is where the entrance to the hollow earth(inside which, depending on who you ask, the lost tribes of israel and/or the nazis that didn't end up on the moon or in south america, reside).
Now, what I'd love to see is the crackpot math that explains how GPS works on a flat earth.
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.
"Having actually been to the south pole, I can definitely say that there are NO NASA employees there."
Clearly you're involved.
And how do they know it's not the opposite, i.e. it's the North Pole that doesn't exist? Because Santa Claus lives there, obviously!
(inside which, depending on who you ask, the lost tribes of israel and/or the nazis that didn't end up on the moon or in south america, reside).
You denier! It's where the lizard people live. The need to be inside the earth to warm their cold blood, yes that makes sense.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Of course the Earth is flat. However it creates a field that warps time and space to give the illusion of being (roughly) spherical. The math is too complex to reproduce here, but I'm sure it is available somewhere on the internet.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
GPS is simple triangulation. Works just fine on a flat surface. Of course, the earth isn't *flat* like a piece of paper, it is flat like a pizza - generally flat but kinda bumpy in areas. We still have elevation changes otherwise there wouldn't be mountains and valleys.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
GPS actually works much better on a flat earth because you can use cartesian coordinates rather than those complicated spherical ones.
Uh, we knew 5000 years ago the Earth was round. You think the Egyptians were morons?
That reminds me of a school project I was involved*:
Two classes of different schools went out on the same day, hundreds of miles apart but on the same geographic length, placed a rod vertically on the ground and measured the angles of the resulting shadows at noon.
Given the distance between the two points (via google earth) and using a bit of (school-) geometry they then could calculate earth's circumference.
Considered earth's "potatoness" the results were not bad at all.
And that's precisely what they did a few thousand years ago.
*) I provided one of the rods, heh.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
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've browsed the flat earth society website a few times out of curiosity. The thing you need to remember is that they don't have any one accepted model of how a flat earth could work, probably because all of their models have massive flaws which are obvious to anyone not invested in it.
So you'll have multiple different mutually exclusive explanations for things such as time zones, these could range from the sun being a directional light and pointing at different places at different times, to the speed of light causing delays in when sunlight will reach different places.
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.
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?
Humanity has major problems Now that anti-government is turning to anti-all-science, I suspect that a sizable percentage of the US populous will gleefully return the country - if not the world - to the dark ages.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well, according to the very brad definition of music, me rhythmically slamming my dick to the desk could also be considered music. I know it's just a tiny level above rap but hey, nobody's perfect.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
*) I provided one of the rods, heh.
I hope you used protection.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The earth is flat.
The earth is round.
The earth is an oblate spheroid.
Within some error bar.
From http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth's oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.
The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.
Wow. Google Earth has been around a long time. Must have been hard using it with IP over smoke signal.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Who was guarding it prior to the 40s/50s?
Don't even try. By having been to the South Pole, you're part of the huge conspiracy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The earth is neither flat nor round. It is spherical, however.
I have a condition that causes me to have high hematocrit levels in my blood. To treat it I give blood every 5 weeks.
Oh man, I'd totally forgotten about the C-Rap genre, which includes pretty much every thing today.
Last rap song that was any good was pretty much Bust a Move. But that was out back in "the day" when the earth was still round.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm mostly wondering about how they keep the constellation in orbit. Did NASA just glue it to the sphere of fixed stars?
You are hereby invited to walk the distance of about 400 miles with a tape rule for the next project ;)
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
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...
South Pole, google operation High Jump and the conspiracy theories about it. Also Wernher von Braun went down there to get moon rocks. He actually did, but that's ammo for the we never went to the moon people.
Yeah, I mean the stuff up there goes in circles, so what's the big deal with some GPS birds :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Uh, we knew 5000 years ago the Earth was round. You think the Egyptians were morons?
There is no evidence that the Egyptians knew the earth was round. The Greeks figured it out by about 400BC, and also roughly calculated the size, but as far as we know, no one knew earlier than that.
Even if you believe the Earth is spherical (or whatever), the north pole is an imaginary point. It doesn't exist in the physical world, it's only part of a model, a model that depends on the earth not being flat and on the Earth rotating.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Government privatization has shifted the conspiracy over to contractors. But contractors like money so they have incentive to perpetuate the conspiracy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Nice straw man. Libertarians like myself are perfectly happy with science, but not overarching government.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Rappers haven't solved the magnets thing yet.
Have gnu, will travel.
Is that unusual?
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.
...my dick...it's just...tiny.... but hey, nobody's perfect.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
True enough... but the folks I knew flying baloons there for cos-ray experiments were not nasa employees...
That's not quite as interesting as NASA employees in cosplay experiments.
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.
Actually... only one turtle. And four elephants.
Thus, the north pole must be Cori Celesti ..
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
No need when I stick my rod in a potato (see above).
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Wouldn't GPS be a sextiangulation? You need 6 sats for a 3d fix.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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.
??? Pretty sure it is 3 sats... one for each plane (X, Y, Z) of course, with the selective degradation (is that still on?) more sats give you more accuracy since there will be a smaller window of overlap
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
3 sats gives you a 2d fix, it tells you where on the globe you are, and is extremely inaccurate (couple hundred feet). 6 sats gives you altitude as well which makes it accurate to a couple feet. More sats after 6 increases the accuracy of the fix, but it depends on the receiver if it can use more than 6 at a time. I used to do repair work on 12 channel GPS receivers, so there are receivers that handle well more than 6 sats at one time.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
with the selective degradation (is that still on?)
No, Clinton had it turned off in May 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was called Selective Availability, though that name never made much sense to me.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I can't understand why someone would post as AC and not take credit for the greatest /. comment response I've seen in years.
Saying "the Egyptians" or "the Greeks" is misleading at best and incorrect at worst. I can't be assed to find the name of the (greek) philosopher who worked out that the earth was a sphere (not round, that would be a pizza). He is, nowadays, mostly remembered for estimating the diameter of the earth using trigonometry (angle of shadow in wells at noon, one I think in Alexandria, the other maybe in Greece).
The funny thing is that he considered that to be weak evidence for the earth being a sphere. Why? Because it was just math, not real. He had other, "better", reasons for the earth being a sphere, such as there were elephants in India and in Africa. Since one lay to the east and the other to the south, the earth *must* be a sphere for the apparently two separate continents to be a single continent.
But sailors have long known that the earth is a sphere. Why? Because you can see the curvature. You can also see things "fall below the horizon". You can get a similar experience in any wide open place, but water really drives home the point about the horizon being curved. Columbus was (rightly) ridiculed, not because he asserted the earth was a sphere (which those who cared knew), but that he claimed it was very small and that you could take a shortcut to India by going west. And was he ever wrong (not just larger, but the presence of an inconvenient continent to preclude a direct sail).
There are baby turtles too. Remember the big bang theory.
Nonsense, the lizard people as everyone knows live in Buckingham Palace.
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?
Nice straw man. Libertarians like myself are perfectly happy with science, but not overarching government.
Like yourself? Straw man? Libertarians? dafuq? Where'd I mention Libertarians?
Okay opera ghost, since you went there - Nice No True Scotsman argument!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
People as stupid as this "B.o.B." loser just need to die. It's like he's never been overseas or even been on an airplane.
The ancient Egyptians could tell the Earth is round by measuring shadows. This guy is less educated than people from thousands of years ago. That's just pathetic.
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
This rapper guy is obviously trolling to get publicity. Any model of flat-earth would dissect either the Pacific or the Atlantic, which would make some trans-ocean flights impossible in the time they are done.
Having actually been to the south pole, I can definitely say that there are NO NASA employees there.
That just proves you're part of the conspiracy.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That's a easy one. Timezones. The sun is the same, but the timezone is different. You see, the earth MUST be flat.
How do they explain GPS and other man-made satellites?
Actually, according to them the North Pole really isn't the issue. It's the South Pole that doesn't exist. Instead there's a wall of ice around Antarctica that's guarded by NASA employees to keep people from finding the truth (I'm not actually making that up, unfortunately).
But they are. Flat Earth Society was founded by physicists to make fun of creationists, it is a parody of creationism. Unfortunately Poe's Law applies to some people and they end up believing in the parody.
No its not. The earth is rotating and the north pole is one of the two points on the surface that are on the rotation axis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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."
The physically do not exist, merely an abstraction.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire