Apparently tidal force is considered a “secondary effect” of gravity.
Tidal waves of depression are killing me * for seeing a perfectly good pit of [del]Oh really[/del] O’Reilly going to waste in the Pit 
But that is why I like this place, we can make a well deserved roast but suddenly an astronomy discussion will ensue. 
- Another Douglas Adams reference.
Guess I should have attributed it. It wasn’t my intent to claim credit – I assumed it was already well known.
I wasn’t accusing you of plagiarism or anything, just explaining where it had come from for those who didn’t know. As it turns out, my attribution wasn’t entirely correct. It was Douglas Adams, but it apparently wasn’t from a Hitchhiker book.
I was in an intro Astro class in college when the girl from Minnesota stood up and said “Wait. You’re telling me that the water actually rises and falls twice a day?” The teacher managed not to laugh.
No, but Io does. The tidal forces from Jupiter constantly knead Io and keep its core quite hot, and for this reason massive lava flows are fairly frequent (in geological timespans, I mean).
Just because that’s “commonly understood” doesn’t mean that the common understanding is correct.
The force of Jupiter’s tidal force on Io is almost 20,000 times strong than what the Earth feels due to the Moon. On Io, the "ground tides’ of the solid surface (and molten interior) are five times higher than the highest tide on Earth. Earth has ground tides too, but they’re only 20cm high.
Meh. The same thing happened when Ann Coulter claimed Canada sent troops to Vietnam. If you squint and prevaricate and are inclined to be definitionally generous, it’s possible to argue she was correct. However, it’s also obvious that these narrow definitions of “correct” were not what she had in mind.
It’s in the Salmon of Doubt- his posthumous book, which has some of his speeches and half-written drafts in. Not quite a Hitchhikers, but still, a Douglas Adams book.
Note that tidal effects are proportional to distance cubed, not squared. That’s why our Lunar tides are bigger than our Solar tides.
So Bill seems to be attempting, in his odd manner of speaking (which I like to call “felafelling”), to articulate the strong anthropic principle. Or maybe he really just can’t grasp basic science, and is using the principle Marc Maron describes as: “I don’t understand it! It must be magic!”
One of O’Reilly’s amusing cranky-old-man characterstics is that he never lets his own lack of knowledge prevent him from acting like the voice of authority, even when he’s talking to a legitimate expert on the subject. I remember him arguing with John McCain about whether torture is effective.
Perhaps his finest hour was when he gave a backwards account of the 1944 massacre at Malmedy – Bill insisted that it was U.S. GIs who’d killed unarmed SS soldiers, instead of the other way around. Who was Bill talking to? General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Commander, who probably has a pretty good grasp of military history.
There’s something hilarious about an elderly blowhard being so wrong with such conviction.
When someone uses the bits science can’t explain at the moment to “prove” the existence of God, this is sometimes referred to as “The God of the Gaps”. Bill O’Reilly is using a version of this fallacy we might call The God of the Gaps for Stupid People.
Only at the dope can some lunatic be pitted for stating the moon is a creation of God, and in response, we get 2 pages on the physical properties of orbits. Great fun though.
Thank you! I knew there was a specific name for what I was thinking of; couldn’t remember it. (And “The God of the Gaps” sounds like it could have been the title of a pulp story in Weird Tales, c. 1933.)
And in which the debate about the physics is more heated and personal than about the metaphysics.
I think this is a very candid look into how you approach discussions and debates here. If there is some criticism against one of “your guys”, no matter how ridiculously wrong your guy is, you’re willing to throw yourself against the wall, hoping to find that some small crack emerges.
Yeah…Bricker really went to the wall defending O’Reilly there. 
Did you actually read that post to the end, or kinda stop halfway through?
It’s interesting to me that he seems oblivious to how moronic this makes him look.
He looks so smug and satisfied with himself, as if there was actually someone there who couldn’t answer his questions. Like the fact that there’s no one there to answer means they can’t, and he’s won the argument.
But he’s really not. He is a pretty smart guy with advanced degrees from good universities. He just knows which side his bread is buttered on, and he caters to his audience. How long would he have a conservative following if said the earth was millions of years old or that the bible may just be a metaphor?
He is evil, not stupid. That makes it worse.
That must be where I saw it.
A few of my sister’s retired military friends do this constantly. I would state that they are all Republicans, but for the uncomfortable fact that I sometimes do it myself.