Would have been funny if it was original. Just randomly wasting peoples time with copy-pasta is not cool.

Outer Wilds has taught me these dudes are larger than my space ship.

I’ve seen the same or even worse. Pallets of stuff would be received, all wrapped up tight in an ungodly amount of plastic. The pallet would be unwrapped, plastic discarded and the contents scanned to confirm the correct items and number of items were present on the pallet. After each item was scanned and it’s serial number recorded, someone would go to validate the items. When validated and found to be correct, the items were again stacked on a pallet and wrapped by another ungodly amount of plastic. The terrible thing was, as I was outside of the distribution chain, I had a view on the bigger picture. Items would often go through several of these places, each doing the exact same. The amounts of plastic each item consumed in the process was huge. But it was necessary, errors were found often, so the steps needed to be done. And the pallets could often get wet, nobody would accept soggy cardboard, so it needed to be wrapped.

The issue is plastic is basically free and extremely good at what it does. A more permanent solution like encasing the goods in some other material, like wood or metal would be more expensive and do a worse job. It’s similar to asbestos, where the solution is so good, nothing else can compete. It took a mighty effort and strict laws to mostly abandon asbestos. I fear humanity has lost its will to live and won’t have it in us to ban single-use plastic.

Some places did use metal trollies instead of pallets, but the pallets were never really a problem. They were almost always made from sustainable woods, be re-used often, till they just about fell apart. After which they were sent out for recycling, either back into a refurbished pallet, or a stamped recycled wood pallet or other recycled wood product.

Fun fact, the Moon actually has a very low albedo, meaning it’s actually not all that reflective. The surface differs a bit, depending on the composition. But overall it’s quite close to a dark asphalt.

Our eyes (or more our brains) are very good at high dynamic range and discerning details. That’s why a Moon rising may look huge, bright and beautiful. But when you try and take a picture, it looks terrible.

Now this isn’t to say the moon isn’t actually bright when standing upon it. The Moon is at the same distance more or less to the Sun as the Earth and the lack of atmosphere causes the contrast to be higher. We all know standing outside on a bright day will be pretty damned bright. Even when looking at a darker surface like a road, it can be bright out. Thus we wear sunglasses, as did the astronauts, just integrated into their visors. And our eyes adjust to let in less light, as to not blind us.

And our cameras need to be set differently, to prevent the picture from being blown out. Usually automatically, but with fancy or old cameras manually. The astronauts did the same, making it very hard to estimate how bright the surface actually is. If we were to lock our camera on Earth, taking a picture of the bright Moon in the night sky. Then go to the Moon’s surface and take another picture with the same settings, the brightness would be the same. However the picture would be a pretty terrible one.

Humans are terrible at estimating things like brightness, because our eyes and brains adjust to the light level. This is required to make us better at seeing the world and thus surviving, but not as good at being scientific measuring devices. Thus we’ve used our tools to create actual scientific measuring devices and have mapped the albedo of the Moon. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s all perfectly consistent, who would have thought?

This is the thing about all these Facebook conspiracies. They are often based on actual real mismatches. Things that make you go: “Hmmm that IS weird!”. But then instead of doing the research and finding out the answer (which usually takes about 5 mins of searching), they abuse the confusion to promote their bullshit theories. Sometimes it will be just straight up lies, but sometimes it’s actually an interesting thing that lies beneath.

I’ve also noticed a lot of them can also be easily defeated when they claim stuff, that it only supports their case if it were always the case. Like for example flat earth because no plane routes that travel between certain places on the southern hemisphere. That would be a strong point for them, except 1 min of googling shows there are actually active plane routes that would be impossible on a flat earth. With live tracking available and people posting on social media getting on and off these planes. Or for example the Earth only being 6000 years old because dino bones are plastic in museums. Sure if all dino bones were plastic, that would be a strong point. But in a lot of cases there are a lot of actual bones. Augmented with plastic to show a full skeleton, where only a partial one was dug up. Which is often plainly stated next to the bones, if those idiots could read of course. Or the skull being hung at the top made from plastic, with the real actual skull in a display next to it, so people can look at it closely.

Flat earth is so dumb, it can be disproven in a billion different ways in very little time. I’m not convinced anyone actually believes that crap. They also do basically nothing to disprove the round(ish) Earth model, they just say it’s nonsense because they say it is. And invent crazy dumb shit for their own “theories” that aren’t even internally consistent.

One of the most important ones that a lot of people use every day are the huge advancements that have been made in creating modern chips. It might not be something new and exciting, but it actually involves very groundbreaking work and huge breakthroughs. Not just the crazy machines that ASML makes, thought to be breaking the laws of physics just years ago. But also advancements in manufacturing, being able to create super advanced 3D structures and large scale manufacturing at a very high level, yet with a surprising consistency in quality and low cost. Not just for ever bigger, more efficient and faster chips, but also things like MEMS at tiny sizes and low cost.

Often it’s taken for granted what we have. People saying stuff to the sentiment that this isn’t the future, everything is boring, we haven’t got flying cars or people living on Mars. But the fact we all got this ultra powerful computer, with a high resolution high framerate self emitting screen, no active cooling, a bunch of sensors, lots of memory and storage and hyper connected to all sorts of networks, all powered by a high capacity high power low wear battery should be mind blowing. And not just that, but it fits in our pockets and they are so cheap everyone has at least one. Just because we’ve chosen to spec our tech tree into the small stuff instead of the large stuff, doesn’t mean we haven’t come a long way.

I think people look at the past at new “inventions” and think that’s the way progress is. New revolutionary stuff. It’s why people often invest in crowd funding of obvious scam products. They want something that changes the game. In reality it’s a lot of little steps that create a big change over time. And imho this has always been the case. We always hear about the Wright brothers “inventing” the airplane. Like they had some magic sauce and thought of something nobody else thought of before. Then made it and bam the world was changed. In reality they didn’t invent anything, they developed it. They made prototypes and iterative refinements. And they were far from the only ones working on the exact same concept. If they didn’t finish first, someone else would have within the same time frame. But the romantic story of two American blokes with the right stuff changing the world all on their own just sounds good.

So let’s also celebrate the thousands of smaller breakthroughs that got us where we are today.

Your mom’s so fat, she pushes the barycenter of the solar system outside of the diameter of the Sun

Wow that’s crazy! I’ve also gotten an XP key burned into my brain, but it’s a different one. I had no idea there were multiple people memorised:

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

It used to have it’s own Wikipedia page, but now it’s just a mention on this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_licensing#Leaked_keys