Every day I think we’re slipping further into a new dark age, mostly when I read the new outrages from the Bush administration. But that’s on top of the dumbing down of our society and the lack of understanding of the simplest things.
Here’s a new low:
You can blame NASA for the peculiar weather
By BRUCE D. CALLANDERI have resisted commenting on this summer’s weather in hopes that it would straighten itself out. Since that no longer seems possible, however, I feel compelled to offer some advice on the subject.
… From watching space launches on television, you have seen how much force it takes to get even an unmanned space vehicle off the ground. It takes even more if there are five or six heavy people aboard in those space suits and bulky shoes. They have been using women more often lately, but even so, it takes a lot of power to overcome the earth’s gravity.
If it takes that much power to raise a rocket, then according to Newton, the same amount of force is being exerted on the earth. Considering the earth’s bulk, one lift-off may not have much effect, but think how many launches there are from Cape Kennedy every year and assume that each launch pushes the planet a few feet out of its normal orbit. In the course of a decade, that could amount to a major displacement, enough to have a major effect on the earth’s climate.
To test the theory about landing on other planets, the only thing to do is to stop sending out those probes until we see if the weather returns to normal. If it doesn’t, the problem probably is the launches themselves.
Someone please tell me that this is satire. Please. (via Fark)
Update, August 28: Solomon helpfully points out the disclaimer that this was satire, as I had thought. But it’s interesting that this points out yet another problem: like in the dark ages, people are willing to believe almost anything without checking the facts or bothering to question it. These days especially, with the advent of such rapid communication, there’s a tendency to simply believe whatever comes along.
Despite what the right wing and others would have you believe, questioning what you’re told is not a sin.
Jeez, and he doesn’t even mention all the space probes that use the Earth to ‘slingshot’ along their way. Every one must be slowing our orbit!
And that guy doesn’t even have his place names correct. It’s the ‘Kennedy Space Center’ at ‘Cape Canaveral.’ It was renamed ‘Cape Kennedy’ by the Feds in 1963, but changed back by Florida in 1973.
“…I know we have distant readers of the Cheboygan Daily Tribune. I receive e-mails from folks not only in Florida and Michigan, but all over the world who read our paper online.
“On Wednesday I was spammed with e-mail from readers all over the world. They were writing to complain about columnist Bruce D. Callander’s Editorial Page column of that day (You can blame NASA for the peculiar weather).
“I wondered why all of the sudden people were reading the Tribune online in general, and Bruce’s column in particular, on our Web site.
“Well, it turns out that Google put his column under the science/technology section of the search engine’s Web site. And then a Web site called http://www.fark.com picked up the column. Both ran it without a disclaimer stating that it was an editorial column written by a humor columnist….”
(http://www.cheboygannews.com/articles/2004/08/27/news/opinion/opinion2.txt)