Worth saying that 'dude with the powerwasher to be done cleaning up the launchpad' actually doesn't apply here; the ground support equipment got pretty badly damaged. Sure glad they got another pad close to completion and the Vandenberg AFB pad operational, because it's looking like LC40 (the one here) actually got pretty much totaled between the explosion wrecking the transporter-erector and the fire ruining the structural integrity of the concrete and softening the rebar.
Jewish people, of course, don't believe that Satan is an evil being, and properly refer to him as "the Satan" (since that's how the text is actually written), a being that works directly under God's supervision as something like a prosecuting attorney.
A prosecuting attorney, you say? I dunno, the fundies might be right on this one. You ever look at what Federal prosecuting attorneys do in America? I don't believe in evil as a concept, but they sure makes me second guess myself.
Yeah, dying of easily-vaccinated diseases, small cuts that get infected, and bad colds sounds great! Let's ditch this western civilization stuff and move back into huts made out of mud, feces, and straw right now!
Why spend our days in comfortable, air conditioned homes discussing intellectual matters over a world-spanning network of computers with such broad-spanning implications on everyone's lives that only fifty years ago would be only the talk of crazy people? Right now, we could instead live without these odious western 'challenges' with a natural life of being bitten dozens of times by mosquitoes while huddling around the fire, with miserable heat and godawful humidity, sunburnt and exhausted from the day's possibly fruitless hunt.
My favorite part is of this is getting to enjoy a slow, painful death to infection at 30 because you slipped and cut yourself on an unfortunately placed stick or rock - if not the sharpened rock on a stick (that's not too western, is it?) you, hopefully/maybe, get to kill your dinner with.
Yeah, the west has a high cancer rate. Know why? Because the less developed world tends to have hazards greater than the mechanical imperfections of our own bodies. Hard to get a high cancer rate when you die before it can start.
Think for a moment why the village elder - so to speak - is either a tiny council or in the singular, while in the West we outright need infrastructure to handle our masses of elderly.
It's worth noting adaptive optics for a camera isn't the same as trying to focus a laser beam onto a tiny point thousands of kilometers away. The shape of the earth's atmosphere is somewhat forgiving anyways, from outside-looking-in. It refracts light to a point instead of diffracting outward, for one thing. Then, there's the matter of just looking at light bounced off the sun instead of trying to take a laser designed to melt things. Here, you have the problem of trying to focusing your infrared doom beam onto a point using onboard optics, without melting things where you don't want them melted. ie: your onboard optics.
Wow, you found mathematically perfect lenses that do not have any surface imperfections?
A manufacturer that can guarantee zero alignment error (even down to the nanoradian!), and a crack team that can design for absolutely no thermal expansion/contraction problems?
A lens form for vanishingly-near-zero aberration (Certainly, someone of your intellectual caliber would, after all, know lasers have variations from their stated value due to manufacturing flaws), and constructed from a material that has near perfect transmittance in the given wavelength of laser?
Please, do tell me how you will manage to correct for the small but nonzero amount of atmosphere at high altitude, which would also introduce diffraction that would have to be corrected for in real time to hit the target with that 'microns wide' beam while also attenuating the amount of light from scattering and absorption.
I'd also love your opinion on spacecraft thermal management, and how you'll put this umpteen-kilowatt laser in orbit and fire it without melting the laser discharge tube, the metal holding the tube, the optics focusing the beam onto a microns-thin point that'll put even more thermal stress on the spacecraft's optics than the target's own, and also how you'll fire it without melting the rest of the spacecraft. Furthermore, I'd like to hear how this thermal management solution, laser, optics package, and spacecraft bus will be small and light enough to fit on a small, lightweight military booster that can be launched on a moment's notice without providing warning to enemy state actors to attract cruise missiles or other ballistic bombardment.
Please try to keep up, here. I'm genuinely curious.
Lucky us, it's not poison in the conventional sense. The injection is an agar medium that encourages the growth of pathogenic bacteria, in doing so artificially inducing lethal illness which kills the starfish by bacterial consumption, without introducing any harmful toxins into the ocean. I dug up the paper here, it's actually what my first concern was, bioamplification of the toxin from decomposers to higher-order predators. While COTS seem susceptible to the disease, with other nearby healthy ones, left uninjected, sometimes also becoming infected. Bonus points, another species they tested fared well. (They do note further research necessary, though.)
The Chinese Room only makes sense so far as there's a guy manipulating the input and output, who has office hours and goes home to his wife and kids after a long day's work of processing unintelligible Chinese. When there isn't a guy manipulating said input and output - when it's a machine within a larger machine, capable of its own sustenance when provided an input of energy as any other living being, the argument falls apart. I do feel we're a bit premature to start discussing the topic of AI rights and what's the difference between term and murder, but any machine that can demonstrate intelligence and agency, and can be reasoned and communicated with, has to be considered perhaps not exactly "human," but a person of some sort in the sense of the law, entitled to rights and protections as any other.
Regardless if it's the familiar doped silicon buried in a unimpressive beige box, or the machine we all too often forget is no more 'magical' than a CPU; a pile of boring wet matter with a smattering of weird chemistry, the brain. The Chinese room is at best misdirection, because it replaces an internal organ in which the mind of a being resides with an office like any other - cable bills, taxes, or Chinese, it's irrelevant. Unless, of course, you wish to imply that humans too don't display intelligence or the ability to experience because the individual neurons don't.
(Besides, corporations are people too, so wouldn't offices also be, in America?)
I hope you never drove on public roads, went to public schools, visited public parks, flushed your toilet into a public sewer, or filled said toilet with water from the public water supply. And if you want public health, safety standards, transportation, sanitation, or anything resembling civilization, that's something you should pay for with your own bank account! There's zero authorization to make me a slave to your common, collective good that benefits everyone, because... because...
He's used to make my comment sound like maniacal rambling? Why, it already does! (Muphry's law strikes again...)
I'll admit I was kind of fuming after reading the petition, especially because that dumbass tried to pull a CSI with over-zoomed images that can be anything. So yeah. Totally cocked the grammar up, but eh. Would be nice if Slashdot had an edit feature, and if retroactively changing posts for argument's sake is a concern, just leave "this post was edited on Feb. 31st, 20XX" or whatever on the bottom and add a Wiki-style history feature to see what the previous form/s were.
If this idiotic shitstain spent more than five hard seconds looking at the processed press release images, forgetting to take his meds, and crying conspiracy, he would've discovered that the Mars Exploration Rover site on JPL actually releases every single raw image the second it gets downlinked from Mars, including photos that deny claims of not taking micrographs, and also ignorant of basic traits of the MERs (well, MER now - RIP Spirit), such as the relatively low resolution of its sensors compared to modern standards, the microscopic imager just having a resolution of 1024x1024 and a working area of 3.1cm square at operating distance, and because it doesn't have an light on it like MSL/Curiosity's MAHLI, isn't as good at taking photos of things on the ground, like a little rock on the surface of mars.
In fact, there's even hazcam images of the arm being swung into place, denying that the rover never got close, and that it's actually just the really small rock it is. Before arm placement, and after.
God, I hate it when people bring this up. A bacteriophage does NOT infect eukaryotic cells, and more importantly their route of infection is tailored to exploiting bacteria. One of the most common model bacteriophages, T4, is in fact reliant on gram-negative anatomy by searching for lipopolysaccharides and porins to bind to.
So how to regulate it? Well, how to even regulate humans creating tailored cats to catch rodents on their trading vessels, that would then evolve is tricky... Then again, considering cats are the new overlords of the internet, that's a bad example.
Do you really not get the irony of mentioning the civil rights movement while speaking about "patience, compromise, and steady change?" Do you know why there was this relatively sudden burst of demonstrations, protests, marches, and so on and so forth? Because for the past fifty years since the Atlanta compromise, gradualism was mainly used by the government as an excuse to do nothing about existing issues with no real plans on the agenda for integration. From 1895 until the 1950s, "patience, compromise, and steady change" did jack shit and only served to retard progress. That's why there even was a civil rights movement. People didn't feel like spending generations as second class citizens, waiting patiently for their great-grandkids to have a future they won't be around for and can't say for certain will even come around. There is no way to have slow, steady change on an order less than many generations, because thoughts and cultural memes get entrenched and passed from parent to child, and the only thing that'll force them out is conflict.
What you're talking about are all symptoms of a dysfunctional society and a refusal of the new social strata, and your examples are riddled with holes and victim blaming, especially because Bradley Manning couldn't've released his information piecemeal because between the volume of data and the constant threat of feds busting down your door, and regardless of what the law says there's nothing right about fifty years in jail for a few minutes in a closet unless you're taking someone's life, and then constant legal issues to the point where you kill yourself just to escape. While you're saying to stop vilifying opponents who well earned their reputations and stop glorifying leaks, what's really being said, be it your intent or not, is to just shut up, bend over, and hope it'll be over quicker this time. Change doesn't come from people lining up and merely wishing things were different, and attitudes like those don't make it happen at all. Stop blaming the victims and look who's really making people into martyrs.
You'd've been S.O.L. if I was your kid - even when I was real little, I'd find myself staying up late into the night and consistently waking up past 10AM.
Except that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor are only the same in that they have the same Joe Sixpack/media stigma attached to both of them. Here, let me use an analogy.
Not building a nuclear reactor in Japan because of the previous use of the atomic bomb due to concerns of insensitivity is roughly the same as the United States of America not building the Saturn V because the use of rocket propelled grenades against troops in Vietnam. Completely different devices for completely different ends.
You seemed to forget the entire point of XKCD's what-if series is, in fact, taking childish daydreams and running with it. It's a bit odd, anyways, that a person who (begin rant) thinks a COTS laptop, in a shielded cabin in a magnetosphere-shielded environment using a tiny node size is every bit as radiation-hardened as a RAD750 with a 150nm node size to reduce susceptibility to smaller particles, with latchup-proof logic, parity-checked memory, etc etc. (end rant) is behaving as a physics expert to begin with.
Actually, a power tool is precisely the model to go after, really.
I insert the safety key and press the on button. The motor turns on and it just works. Dangerous? Mildly to extremely depending on the tool. But it Just Works and that's what matters whether it's some skilled artisan who has turned more bowls on his 25,000 dollar lathe and hand-sharpened every tool he's forged himself or something absurd like that or an underpaid illegal immigrant sticking screws into a wall frame with a handheld drill/screw gun. It just works - pull trigger switch, motor turns, screw goes in. Obtuse things like spitting out errors that are purely a number just doesn't make sense in this era of 64-bit monster rigs that can churn out well-encoded, efficiently compressed video at or above the native framerate - can't we spare a couple bytes to stick a descriptive error string after looking up the error in a stored table? It isn't like we're dealing with featherweight embedded computers with barely enough space to stick a primitive FORTH in. Maybe I just need to turn in my geek card in, or something. I don't know.
I agree, if the kid ends up with a record from this, finding a job might be difficult. He may feel that society has turned on him and there is no where to go and decide the acquire a weapon and take it out on everyone.
If he gets a record for a silly drawing, having some resistors and TO-223s in a breadboard hooked to a couple AA batteries, and being smart, finding a job will be difficult and will feel that society has turned on him because it has turned on him for absolute nonsense, and hell - everyone already thinks I'm some crazy terrorist, and I don't have a future that doesn't ask if they'd like fries with it too, why not hit up the local Ryder and rent a nice big truck and run off to a farming supply shop? Heard there's a sale on the fertilizer.
Do you know how a city water system works? that's a marvelous creation. Do you understand the metallurgy used to create a nail? do you know the variety of chemical choices the can be made when making gas? The vast majority of marvelous thing that you use you don't really care how they work in any real detail.
I don't know everything - anyone with an ounce of sense would say they don't, but frankly, I simply detest that sort of thought, that blase and complacent ignorance of the world that seems pervasive nowadays. I don't know the metallurgy in a nail, nor do I completely grok of the workings of the municipal water network in my city nor even its power grid, and only dimly aware of anything about the specifics of petrochemical refining. But you know what?
The world's only as boring as you let it be. Reading about those sorts of subjects over a lunch or while bored in the evening is the kind of thing I do. Even in the USA, a person can get a surprisingly good survey of the sciences and some trades with its broken educational system, but the problem isn't simply lack of availability, it's, again, this willful ignorance of many things. There is this growing urge to literally refuse to learn about the basics of things that deeply influence their life. I'm not an expert in a lot of fields, but at least I'm not enough of an ignorant mule to act like none of this matters.
[...W]hat kind of dumbass thinks that zero-g would enable a fish to "swim" thru air?
The same kind of dumbass that considers that impulse is impulse, regardless of it's under 0G, 1G, or 42G of gravitational pull.
What microgravity doesn't do is make air thicker, but what microgravity/does/ do is make mass just mass, and not weight.
Which means a fish could indeed, swim in air. In the absence of gravity to hold things down, one could simply flap their arms in the air to propel themselves forward, if slowly.
Likewise, so could a fish flap its fins and propel itself slowly through air, in the absence of gravity to cancel out the tiny force imparted on flapping fins against air.
Slashdot Mirror
Worth saying that 'dude with the powerwasher to be done cleaning up the launchpad' actually doesn't apply here; the ground support equipment got pretty badly damaged. Sure glad they got another pad close to completion and the Vandenberg AFB pad operational, because it's looking like LC40 (the one here) actually got pretty much totaled between the explosion wrecking the transporter-erector and the fire ruining the structural integrity of the concrete and softening the rebar.
Jewish people, of course, don't believe that Satan is an evil being, and properly refer to him as "the Satan" (since that's how the text is actually written), a being that works directly under God's supervision as something like a prosecuting attorney.
A prosecuting attorney, you say? I dunno, the fundies might be right on this one. You ever look at what Federal prosecuting attorneys do in America? I don't believe in evil as a concept, but they sure makes me second guess myself.
Yeah, dying of easily-vaccinated diseases, small cuts that get infected, and bad colds sounds great! Let's ditch this western civilization stuff and move back into huts made out of mud, feces, and straw right now!
Why spend our days in comfortable, air conditioned homes discussing intellectual matters over a world-spanning network of computers with such broad-spanning implications on everyone's lives that only fifty years ago would be only the talk of crazy people? Right now, we could instead live without these odious western 'challenges' with a natural life of being bitten dozens of times by mosquitoes while huddling around the fire, with miserable heat and godawful humidity, sunburnt and exhausted from the day's possibly fruitless hunt.
My favorite part is of this is getting to enjoy a slow, painful death to infection at 30 because you slipped and cut yourself on an unfortunately placed stick or rock - if not the sharpened rock on a stick (that's not too western, is it?) you, hopefully/maybe, get to kill your dinner with.
Yeah, the west has a high cancer rate. Know why?
Because the less developed world tends to have hazards greater than the mechanical imperfections of our own bodies. Hard to get a high cancer rate when you die before it can start.
Think for a moment why the village elder - so to speak - is either a tiny council or in the singular, while in the West we outright need infrastructure to handle our masses of elderly.
Trying to focus your infrared doom beam, even.
It's worth noting adaptive optics for a camera isn't the same as trying to focus a laser beam onto a tiny point thousands of kilometers away. The shape of the earth's atmosphere is somewhat forgiving anyways, from outside-looking-in. It refracts light to a point instead of diffracting outward, for one thing. Then, there's the matter of just looking at light bounced off the sun instead of trying to take a laser designed to melt things. Here, you have the problem of trying to focusing your infrared doom beam onto a point using onboard optics, without melting things where you don't want them melted. ie: your onboard optics.
Wow, you found mathematically perfect lenses that do not have any surface imperfections?
A manufacturer that can guarantee zero alignment error (even down to the nanoradian!), and a crack team that can design for absolutely no thermal expansion/contraction problems?
A lens form for vanishingly-near-zero aberration (Certainly, someone of your intellectual caliber would, after all, know lasers have variations from their stated value due to manufacturing flaws), and constructed from a material that has near perfect transmittance in the given wavelength of laser?
Please, do tell me how you will manage to correct for the small but nonzero amount of atmosphere at high altitude, which would also introduce diffraction that would have to be corrected for in real time to hit the target with that 'microns wide' beam while also attenuating the amount of light from scattering and absorption.
I'd also love your opinion on spacecraft thermal management, and how you'll put this umpteen-kilowatt laser in orbit and fire it without melting the laser discharge tube, the metal holding the tube, the optics focusing the beam onto a microns-thin point that'll put even more thermal stress on the spacecraft's optics than the target's own, and also how you'll fire it without melting the rest of the spacecraft. Furthermore, I'd like to hear how this thermal management solution, laser, optics package, and spacecraft bus will be small and light enough to fit on a small, lightweight military booster that can be launched on a moment's notice without providing warning to enemy state actors to attract cruise missiles or other ballistic bombardment.
Please try to keep up, here. I'm genuinely curious.
Lucky us, it's not poison in the conventional sense. The injection is an agar medium that encourages the growth of pathogenic bacteria, in doing so artificially inducing lethal illness which kills the starfish by bacterial consumption, without introducing any harmful toxins into the ocean. I dug up the paper here, it's actually what my first concern was, bioamplification of the toxin from decomposers to higher-order predators. While COTS seem susceptible to the disease, with other nearby healthy ones, left uninjected, sometimes also becoming infected. Bonus points, another species they tested fared well. (They do note further research necessary, though.)
And yet, separate black schools that would grant the exact same education...
Oh, wait.
we just think that your fairy tale pure communism can't exist
The Chinese Room only makes sense so far as there's a guy manipulating the input and output, who has office hours and goes home to his wife and kids after a long day's work of processing unintelligible Chinese. When there isn't a guy manipulating said input and output - when it's a machine within a larger machine, capable of its own sustenance when provided an input of energy as any other living being, the argument falls apart. I do feel we're a bit premature to start discussing the topic of AI rights and what's the difference between term and murder, but any machine that can demonstrate intelligence and agency, and can be reasoned and communicated with, has to be considered perhaps not exactly "human," but a person of some sort in the sense of the law, entitled to rights and protections as any other.
Regardless if it's the familiar doped silicon buried in a unimpressive beige box, or the machine we all too often forget is no more 'magical' than a CPU; a pile of boring wet matter with a smattering of weird chemistry, the brain. The Chinese room is at best misdirection, because it replaces an internal organ in which the mind of a being resides with an office like any other - cable bills, taxes, or Chinese, it's irrelevant. Unless, of course, you wish to imply that humans too don't display intelligence or the ability to experience because the individual neurons don't.
(Besides, corporations are people too, so wouldn't offices also be, in America?)
I hope you never drove on public roads, went to public schools, visited public parks, flushed your toilet into a public sewer, or filled said toilet with water from the public water supply. And if you want public health, safety standards, transportation, sanitation, or anything resembling civilization, that's something you should pay for with your own bank account! There's zero authorization to make me a slave to your common, collective good that benefits everyone, because... because...
He's used to make my comment sound like maniacal rambling? Why, it already does! (Muphry's law strikes again...)
I'll admit I was kind of fuming after reading the petition, especially because that dumbass tried to pull a CSI with over-zoomed images that can be anything. So yeah. Totally cocked the grammar up, but eh. Would be nice if Slashdot had an edit feature, and if retroactively changing posts for argument's sake is a concern, just leave "this post was edited on Feb. 31st, 20XX" or whatever on the bottom and add a Wiki-style history feature to see what the previous form/s were.
If this idiotic shitstain spent more than five hard seconds looking at the processed press release images, forgetting to take his meds, and crying conspiracy, he would've discovered that the Mars Exploration Rover site on JPL actually releases every single raw image the second it gets downlinked from Mars, including photos that deny claims of not taking micrographs, and also ignorant of basic traits of the MERs (well, MER now - RIP Spirit), such as the relatively low resolution of its sensors compared to modern standards, the microscopic imager just having a resolution of 1024x1024 and a working area of 3.1cm square at operating distance, and because it doesn't have an light on it like MSL/Curiosity's MAHLI, isn't as good at taking photos of things on the ground, like a little rock on the surface of mars.
In fact, there's even hazcam images of the arm being swung into place, denying that the rover never got close, and that it's actually just the really small rock it is.
Before arm placement, and after.
Anyways - oh look, close up, in focus images of a mushroom. Not. I hope this fuck gets laughed out and never returns.
Wrong. It's actually very common if you don't live in the right place.
God, I hate it when people bring this up. A bacteriophage does NOT infect eukaryotic cells, and more importantly their route of infection is tailored to exploiting bacteria. One of the most common model bacteriophages, T4, is in fact reliant on gram-negative anatomy by searching for lipopolysaccharides and porins to bind to.
So how to regulate it? Well, how to even regulate humans creating tailored cats to catch rodents on their trading vessels, that would then evolve is tricky...
Then again, considering cats are the new overlords of the internet, that's a bad example.
Do you really not get the irony of mentioning the civil rights movement while speaking about "patience, compromise, and steady change?" Do you know why there was this relatively sudden burst of demonstrations, protests, marches, and so on and so forth? Because for the past fifty years since the Atlanta compromise, gradualism was mainly used by the government as an excuse to do nothing about existing issues with no real plans on the agenda for integration. From 1895 until the 1950s, "patience, compromise, and steady change" did jack shit and only served to retard progress. That's why there even was a civil rights movement. People didn't feel like spending generations as second class citizens, waiting patiently for their great-grandkids to have a future they won't be around for and can't say for certain will even come around. There is no way to have slow, steady change on an order less than many generations, because thoughts and cultural memes get entrenched and passed from parent to child, and the only thing that'll force them out is conflict.
What you're talking about are all symptoms of a dysfunctional society and a refusal of the new social strata, and your examples are riddled with holes and victim blaming, especially because Bradley Manning couldn't've released his information piecemeal because between the volume of data and the constant threat of feds busting down your door, and regardless of what the law says there's nothing right about fifty years in jail for a few minutes in a closet unless you're taking someone's life, and then constant legal issues to the point where you kill yourself just to escape. While you're saying to stop vilifying opponents who well earned their reputations and stop glorifying leaks, what's really being said, be it your intent or not, is to just shut up, bend over, and hope it'll be over quicker this time. Change doesn't come from people lining up and merely wishing things were different, and attitudes like those don't make it happen at all. Stop blaming the victims and look who's really making people into martyrs.
Looks like someone never tried an iOS upgrade on an older iDevice...
You'd've been S.O.L. if I was your kid - even when I was real little, I'd find myself staying up late into the night and consistently waking up past 10AM.
Except that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor are only the same in that they have the same Joe Sixpack/media stigma attached to both of them. Here, let me use an analogy.
Not building a nuclear reactor in Japan because of the previous use of the atomic bomb due to concerns of insensitivity is roughly the same as the United States of America not building the Saturn V because the use of rocket propelled grenades against troops in Vietnam. Completely different devices for completely different ends.
But, I thought in this modern era of human resources, employees were the assets seized!
Congratulations!
You seemed to forget the entire point of XKCD's what-if series is, in fact, taking childish daydreams and running with it. It's a bit odd, anyways, that a person who (begin rant) thinks a COTS laptop, in a shielded cabin in a magnetosphere-shielded environment using a tiny node size is every bit as radiation-hardened as a RAD750 with a 150nm node size to reduce susceptibility to smaller particles, with latchup-proof logic, parity-checked memory, etc etc. (end rant) is behaving as a physics expert to begin with.
Actually, a power tool is precisely the model to go after, really.
I insert the safety key and press the on button. The motor turns on and it just works. Dangerous? Mildly to extremely depending on the tool. But it Just Works and that's what matters whether it's some skilled artisan who has turned more bowls on his 25,000 dollar lathe and hand-sharpened every tool he's forged himself or something absurd like that or an underpaid illegal immigrant sticking screws into a wall frame with a handheld drill/screw gun. It just works - pull trigger switch, motor turns, screw goes in. Obtuse things like spitting out errors that are purely a number just doesn't make sense in this era of 64-bit monster rigs that can churn out well-encoded, efficiently compressed video at or above the native framerate - can't we spare a couple bytes to stick a descriptive error string after looking up the error in a stored table? It isn't like we're dealing with featherweight embedded computers with barely enough space to stick a primitive FORTH in. Maybe I just need to turn in my geek card in, or something. I don't know.
I agree, if the kid ends up with a record from this, finding a job might be difficult. He may feel that society has turned on him and there is no where to go and decide the acquire a weapon and take it out on everyone.
If he gets a record for a silly drawing, having some resistors and TO-223s in a breadboard hooked to a couple AA batteries, and being smart, finding a job will be difficult and will feel that society has turned on him because it has turned on him for absolute nonsense, and hell - everyone already thinks I'm some crazy terrorist, and I don't have a future that doesn't ask if they'd like fries with it too, why not hit up the local Ryder and rent a nice big truck and run off to a farming supply shop? Heard there's a sale on the fertilizer.
A bone to pick, if you would:
Do you know how a city water system works? that's a marvelous creation. Do you understand the metallurgy used to create a nail? do you know the variety of chemical choices the can be made when making gas?
The vast majority of marvelous thing that you use you don't really care how they work in any real detail.
I don't know everything - anyone with an ounce of sense would say they don't, but frankly, I simply detest that sort of thought, that blase and complacent ignorance of the world that seems pervasive nowadays. I don't know the metallurgy in a nail, nor do I completely grok of the workings of the municipal water network in my city nor even its power grid, and only dimly aware of anything about the specifics of petrochemical refining. But you know what?
The world's only as boring as you let it be. Reading about those sorts of subjects over a lunch or while bored in the evening is the kind of thing I do. Even in the USA, a person can get a surprisingly good survey of the sciences and some trades with its broken educational system, but the problem isn't simply lack of availability, it's, again, this willful ignorance of many things. There is this growing urge to literally refuse to learn about the basics of things that deeply influence their life. I'm not an expert in a lot of fields, but at least I'm not enough of an ignorant mule to act like none of this matters.
[...W]hat kind of dumbass thinks that zero-g would enable a fish to "swim" thru air?
The same kind of dumbass that considers that impulse is impulse, regardless of it's under 0G, 1G, or 42G of gravitational pull.
What microgravity doesn't do is make air thicker, but what microgravity /does/ do is make mass just mass, and not weight.
Which means a fish could indeed, swim in air. In the absence of gravity to hold things down, one could simply flap their arms in the air to propel themselves forward, if slowly.
Likewise, so could a fish flap its fins and propel itself slowly through air, in the absence of gravity to cancel out the tiny force imparted on flapping fins against air.