Yet my idea for an UL that cell phone use during pregnancy causes autism gets no traction…
I once worked with a mechanical engineer, home schooled, and graduate of BYU, who didn’t believe in planets. Jupiter, Mars, etc were all just common popular culture based on fiction and literature. Sci-fi novels, Star Trek, and the like. Stars were real, “you can see those”, but not planets. His wasn’t some sort of deliberate flat-earther denial either, he had literally never consumed anything factual while also understanding it as such.
This makes me sad. I can believe it, mind you, but I am very sad about it.
[Wheel catches]
Hey, I heard that too!
I also happen to make a special case you can put your phone in to make it safe.
[cheap Mormon joke] But without planets what will he have to rule over when he dies? I was going to convert so I’d get in on the planet prize, too. Or is that the Scientologists? [/cheap Mormon and Scientology joke]
Those visible moving lights in the sky we call “planets” (distinguished from stars because we can see them move, which is where the word “planet” comes from – astēr planētēs, “wandering star”) – what did he say they are?
Really slow aircraft.
My bet says he’d never watched the night sky consistently enough or long enough (if at all) to be able to detect planets changing position among the “fixed” stars. Of course, you can’t really see a planet moving noticeably over the course of a few minutes or even hours, so the only way to get a visual sense of its motion is to come back and look at it night after night, or more likely month after month.
I imagine if you dragged this guy outside at night and showed him Mars or Jupiter, he’d just insist it was a star. How he would react if you made him look through binoculars or a telescope so he could see that the disk of a planet looks significantly different from a star, I’m not sure.
Heh. That’s pretty funny because in general that is the sort of person who’s going to inherit the USA, when the rest of you have stopped having children. The idiot. Not the tiny babies.
Yep. He knew about satellites and had no problem seeing them move across the sky. It isn’t that this guy was stupid, he had raw intelligence. He was just brought up spoon fed a dogmatic education and never had the impetus to question anything outside his little box.
Example #2. This same guy thought that there was only one nuclear weapon on the planet, a doomsday bomb held by the USA, that was preventing another world war. I told him about the actual ‘nuclear club’ of countries, and the thousands of nukes in possession, and gave him a wikipedia link which, to his credit, he read enough to get gears in his head turning.
Did you point out the “random article” button on Wiki? Or were you taking it slowly?
I think I’ve told this story before. I had a friend who lived in Alaska for three and a half years while her husband was stationed in Fairbanks.
When they moved on, to Texas, she went to the Texas DMV to get a Texas driver’s license. The clerk told her about all the tests she’d have to take, including a driving test, and she would have to provide all sorts of documentation on her ownership of the car, yadda yadda yadda.
All she thought she’d have to to is provide proof of insurance, fill out a couple of forms, and so on.
When she asked why she had so many hoops to jump through the clerk explained, “We don’t take driver’s licences from foreign countries.” She could not make the clerk believe Alaska was a US state. She got the supervisor, who also seemed suspicious of Alaska’s status as a state, but didn’t want any hassle, so let it go through with no more problems.
Well, Texas isn’t really a US state either.
Those people must’ve been confused when Sarah Palin rose to ascendency…
No, we are talking about Texas. It is the biggest state in the union, there is no “Alaska”, that place is just el Dorado, Brigadoon, R’lyeh or something like that.
I’m a Texan, and yes, Texas really IS the biggest state in the union, because if Alaska had the heat of Texas, it would shrivel to the size of Rhode Island. 
Except it’s really cold there. It’s already shriveled. 
“Satan made me see that.”
Water expands when it freezes. Body parts, on the other hand…
I’m actually wondering what the guy thinks he’s standing on. Is the Earth a star also?