• 87 Posts
  • 614 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: September 1st, 2023
  • folaht@lemmy.mltoShitty Ask Lemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the worst way to choose a leader?
    0·
    19 days ago

    I would argue father-to-son leader distribution done by Louis the Pious in the 9th century AD,
    resulting into the kingdom split into three seperate nations.
    So instead of agnatic primogeniture, which means “the oldest son becomes the new king when the king dies”,
    you get “All my sons become kings when the I die and they get to split up the empire as if it’s a farm.”

    Second worst is to appoint a leader after an election that wasn’t even on the ballot
    and would be the last person I would have chosen. I’m looking at you, EU and Ursula von der Leyen.

  • folaht@lemmy.mltoShitty Ask Lemmy@lemmy.ml•What fact is simply false?
    0·
    20 days ago

    [serious] For history, apart from all the anti-communist ones about democracy coming from the
    “slave-owners on stolen land that wants to be free”
    that are so numerous and so upside down,
    it’s hard to pick them out, but I’ll take two that apply to their own country and continent.

    “No taxation without representation” is a “fact” that like everything about the US,
    is upside down. It should be called “No representation without taxation”
    if the Usonians were honest about themselves, but they are not.
    You see, the British decided that since the Usonians pretend
    to like not paying taxes so much, that they told the Usonians
    that they were going to join in on their culture
    and thus never pay any tariffs from now on,
    because, you know, that’s a tax.
    The Usonians decided in return to dump all British tea into river,
    are always posers and in fact love taxes.

    America being named after Amerigo Vespucci. “America” likely does not refer to Albericus Vespucius,
    as that’s name that “Amerigo Vespucci” used for himself during his lifetime.
    What likely happened is that a 16th century German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller made a guess where the name came from and that got copied ever since.
    It’s far more likely to be named after a gold-rich mountain range in Nicaragua,
    mixed with Spanish word adjective for “rich”, the “-rica” part of America,
    like Costa Rica.
    The ‘Amerrisque’ mountain range itself means “land where the wind often blows”.
    So America means “rich land where the wind often blows”.
    [/serious]

    [serious] Before I go “off the rails”, I’ll go with a physics one that’s luckily just a little less controversial.

    It’s the “airplane goes up because of the shape of the wing
    causing one side to move faster” equal transit-time explanation.

    Most importantly is the indirect way the wing hits the air particles.
    The amount of air particles hitting the wing randomly is very high,
    and this amount is slightly lower underneath the wing than above it,
    causing the wing to want to go up the same way a piece of wood does in water,
    while gravity pulls harder on it,
    But the faster you move the wing horizontally,
    the larger area of air particles per second hitting it underneath and above become,
    thus causing the wing to go upwards more.
    The direct ‘bullet air particles’ is a bonus.

    On top of that, the “lateen sail goes faster because of equal transit-time of wind around the sail” is also wrong.
    The real reason is that a sailboat is on water and when the boat is sailing halfway into the wind,
    a lot of that wind wants to tip over the boat.
    But the wind pushes the boat sideways and the boat keels,
    the foil (or substitute) underneath the boat acts as a second sail that pushes against the water
    and the water pushes back on the keel, the keel then gets squeezed on both sides and moves forward,
    pushing the boat forward.
    [/serious]

    [serious]
    Here I’ll go “off the rails” into Alice in Wonderland, so take it with a grain of salt if you will.

    I think a lot of what is accepted about physics today as fact,
    just doesn’t work how people think it works,
    and that physics today still dabbles quite a lot into the supernatural via reification,
    even though people make the pretense that it isn’t.
    Reality is 100% material and thus all laws and theories of physics
    should abide by that, of which many, especially the most famous ones do not.

    Probably one of the biggest “fact” out there today is Newton’s law of universal gravitation
    and by extension Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

    The problem with that “fact” is that “things fall down, see?”
    doesn’t prove the law, was never contested,
    and in fact was the very thing that people used
    to argue why Newton’s law of universal gravitation was false,
    as “up” and “down” were laws of physics upon themselves,
    before Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

    Since gravitation is about pulling things together and we already have an understanding what ‘pull’ is,
    which is just ‘push’ via a chain of connected objects, one can use Occam’s razor and
    say that gravity works via a chain of connected objects that are somehow invisible,
    thus eliminating the need for this law.

    Now one might argue that we already have Einstein’s general theory of relativity for that,
    but that theory is even more wrong.
    It uses Maxwell’s equations which has the very same issue as Newton’s law of universal gravitation,
    but for electromagnetism.
    Like gravity, magnets also pull, therefore the same argument,
    of that being a push from the same chain of invisible connected objects, applies. [/serious]