That made me laugh out loud in the airport.
Dark matter is one of the big mysteries today, no invisible moon required.
In fairness, @Dr.Strangelove’s comment was in the context of the initial discovery of gravity and planets and basic stuff like that. So rather more primitive science than we enjoy today.
Kurzgesagt has an animated entire history of the earth in an hour (1.5 million years per second). The collision with Theia and the resulting incandescent blob is at about 40 seconds in. Dunno how accurate the width is.
There’s a long history in science of finding various anomalies and realizing that there’s been something there all along. Neutrinos would be another example. I do wonder if a black moon would have actually accelerated science, being an anomaly that you can’t explain without some pretty advanced physics. I could argue it both ways, though. There’s no shortage of mysterious stuff that people just threw their hands up at.
“‘Tin pest’ makes more sense to me. Tin just doesn’t want to be locked down in a shape like that. I get it. But why would any metal want to grow hair??”
Googling “tin pest”, it looks like it only happens at low temperatures, so frequent contact with boiling water would probably prevent it. That’s good. You wouldn’t want tin pest in a teapot.
If you got it though, it’d be no big deal.
Well played Good Sir!
This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.
Took me a bit to realize that “mittens” doesn’t mean “fingerless gloves”, here.
“Echo Chamber” really is one of those phrases you forget actually mean something beyond a metaphor.
Sorry, I’m going to have to have that one explained to me.
I think that “Mittens” is the name of a cat; i.e. the social media they’re watching has a lot of cat videos.
And a fishing expedition is a metaphor for a non-specific search for damaging information about someone (like a politician). Or… an actual fishing trip.
I’d rather go cherry-picking.
More pleasant than nit-picking, that’s for sure. Especially if you eat the results.
Wasn’t “Mittens” a slur / pejorative nickname for Mitt Romney? Him falling in a laundry hamper would be loud.
And make a suitable second line connected to the political meaning of “fishing expedition” in the first line.
I think it has to be a cat. The whole point of the joke is that Munroe’s social media feed is entirely apolitical (consisting of things like cute cats falling over), and so a “social media echo chamber” must, perforce, have a different meaning for him.
Of course it’s a cat. Nothing else even occurred to me as a possibility.
Same here. Aided by the fact that my school’s “Early Reader” (“See Jane. See Jane run!”) books starred a puppy named Tip and a kitten named Mitten.
“Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn’t enough–maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.”