Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Mooning NASA
There are some stories Feedback doesn’t bother with. There are more than 8 billion humans, many of them believe silly things, and many of them have access to the internet, a phone or a letterbox. There just isn’t enough time to deal with the resulting slew of mulched half-thoughts. Feedback doesn’t want to be that guy in the xkcd cartoon who can’t go to bed because “someone is wrong on the internet“.
So we almost didn’t mention the fact that Kim Kardashian apparently believes that NASA faked the 1969 moon landing. She said as much on The Kardashians, the long-running reality television show in which she stars with her mother and sisters.
Kardashian seems to have misunderstood an interview with Buzz Aldrin, the second person on the moon. At one point, Aldrin says “it didn’t happen”, meaning that a potentially scary incident during the trip didn’t take place. However, Kardashian evidently decided that he meant the whole trip didn’t happen. This is an extremely bold claim, not least because Aldrin has previously punched a moon landing conspiracy theorist.
But we aren’t going to waste time teasing about Kardashian’s lack of understanding. Instead, we are preoccupied with what followed. According to the BBC, NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, “invited Kardashian to the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of the Artemis mission to the moon”.
Duffy may go on to regret this precedent: if you spout a foolish conspiracy theory via a prominent outlet, it seems you get a guided tour of NASA HQ. Well, Feedback has long wanted to visit Mission Control, and we think we can come up with some better ideas than “moon landing faked”.
Do you know why the New Horizons probe took so long (nine years) to get to Pluto? It’s because NASA secretly moved the planet further away from Earth to make it look smaller. This enabled them to downgrade it from a planet to a dwarf planet.
Likewise, have you ever wondered why The Martian was so true to life? Deep NASA (which is like the deep state, but more so) wants you to think it’s just because author Andy Weir did his research. Actually, it’s because NASA secretly had an astronaut stranded on Mars for several years in the 1990s. The story is based on the video diaries he recorded before being killed by a robot armed with a heat ray.
We expect our NASA invite in the post.
The middle of Saturday
We’ve previously exhausted the topic of the Scunthorpe problem: innocuous words and phrases can contain letter strings that may be seen as offensive by automated moderation systems that don’t understand context (11 October). At least, we thought we had exhausted it. But Peter Lloyd tells us of an early progenitor of the issue.
On a Saturday afternoon in the 1970s, he writes, “I had tuned in to BBC1 and was waiting for Grandstand to start.” For younger readers and those outside the UK: Grandstand was a sports programme that aired all Saturday afternoon. Depending on your attitude to televised sport, it was either a blessing or, in those days of hardly any channels, a curse.
“Suddenly the screen showed a single word filling the whole screen,” writes Peter. “I was shocked! Why would the BBC want my TV to display TURD? After a short but discernible delay the image zoomed out to show ‘SATURDAY ON BBC1’ “.
Imagine that!
In case you weren’t already in the know, you have until Friday 5 December to submit your work for the next issue of the Journal of Imaginary Research.
Feedback was previously unaware of this publication, and we have spent some time trying to figure out what it is. “We publish imaginary research abstracts,” the editors write. “We mean short works of fiction, that take a format that is familiar to us as researchers and academics. An abstract is the summary of an academic paper, that gives us a succinct overview of the research that has been done.”
If Feedback is reading this correctly, the idea is to write pieces of short fiction, presented in the form of fake abstracts of research papers. We had a look at volume 10, the most recent instalment, and some of the abstracts/stories are rather fun, because they’re such good parodies of academic writing.
We particularly liked Edward Loveman’s “Being in-between: A sensory autoethnography of otherworldly life”, about “academics who have been able to achieve the ability to move in-between dimensions (transdimensionality)”. Alas, Loveman reports, “such work has been met with scepticism, cruelty, and belittlement – both within the academy and wider public”.
However, he argues that it actually represents “a unique, ever-evolving, fluid connection with existence that transcends temporalities”.
Likewise, Soyon Park’s offering is called “Can research flourish without a research question?” In this, a “group of doctoral students” engage in an “in-depth venting session over coffee”, revealing that “their struggle was not with the question itself but with the act of questioning—a process that inherently implies and necessitates seeking an answer”.
Feedback suspects the Journal of Imaginary Research might become a regular in these pages. It’s just a pity it only comes out once a year.
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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
