a note to followers who are living in affected areas in texas, mexico, florida, and the caribbean: please stay safe and please message me if you need to talk or need resources. i will try my best to help in any way i can. i love you and i am thinking of you ❤️
Mythbusters fire a soccer ball at 50mph out of a cannon on a truck driving at 50mph in the opposite direction.
while this looks cool and all, what, were people expecting something different?
Velocities are vectors. They’re cumulative. If you are moving at 50 mph and toss something 50mph relative to your speed in the opposite direction, of course they’re gonna cancel out.
I’m not going to be able to beat that image response, but I do want to speak to the “how do you people not know this?” attitude that I see a fair bit, especially on Tumblr. I tried to get at this a little in my recent post about black holes.
Knowledge isn’t, and shouldn’t ever be, an insiders-only club. Everyone starts in a place of not knowing how things work. It might be obvious to someone who’s taken a physics class or two that velocity is a vector, but not everyone has had that opportunity. Hell, not everyone knows what a vector is. Looking down your nose at people who don’t (yet) understand something is elitist and discouraging, not welcoming.
Every time you post an all-caps rant at people who don’t understand physics, every time you call people names for not understanding something, every time you cock your eyebrow and say, “How do you not know this already?” or “Of course it’s like this, duh,” you’re saying there’s something wrong or mockable about a state of ignorance, when it’s a state we all experience. I have a degree in sociology and could probably excitedly talk theory for hours—but there was a time when I didn’t even know what sociology was.
What might seem utterly obvious for you is not for other people. Rather than mocking, ridiculing, or just being snarky, seize that opportunity. Nurture that sense of wonder and discovery around you instead of crushing it underfoot.
As someone who majored in rocket science, I will personally come to your house and track mud into it and eat all your food and spill coffee on your couches if you mock someone for not knowing physics. Im convinced you don’t really know or care about physics until you’re excited to help others learn it. Or at least excited to see someone else learning something new. If physics knowledge is just a way for you to one-up someone, you’re not putting that knowledge to good use anyway and you should just stop and get out. Don’t do that.
Passions are for sharing!
I’m a nuclear chemist and even though I’m pretty dregged after doing my PhD, if someone doesn’t know something in my area of expertise? Damn right their getting an impromptu seminar.
And also, audience is a key thing.
Mythbusters is great cos they teach and challenge what “everyone knows” and they do it in a way that’s accessible for me, with loads of scientific knowledge (but I’ve never done much on vectors tbh!) to someone who’s last science experience was a boring school lesson.
TLDR; if you love it, you’ll get it out there at any chance and you won’t be upset if someone doesn’t already know.
you guys realize that not accepting an apology is an option that people have, right? & that taking this option dznt automatically make someone an asshole? i know it’s shocking, but you can, like, not forgive ppl and be totally justified in doing so. i too was surprised when i first learned this, but if you think abt it, it makes a lot of sense!
also like if someone won’t take “I don’t forgive you” as an answer and starts guilt tripping you to forgive them, they have shown their true colours
LMAOOO. All right Ima try and explain this succinctly as possible. Basically this random-ass ‘young adult’ book, ‘Handbook for Mortals,’ hit the NYT Bestseller List on the #1 Spot for the Hardcover Young Adult Category this morning. Only problem is that literally NO ONE had ever heard of this book before, like nada marketing, publicity, etc. Zilch. It was supposedly published by a company, GeekNation who only announced their publishing arm back in July.
To hit the Bestseller list, the book would have had to sold at least 5,000~ copies within the first week, but a few people were quick to point out a major discrepancy where the book was literally out of stock everywhere in all major retailers, like legit you couldn’t find it on B&N, Amazon, and so on.
YA Twitter basically crowd-sourced an investigation where a few anonymous booksellers revealed that they had gotten calls first asking if they were NYT-reporting bookstores, and then received bulk orders of the book but not caring when the books arrived. Soooo essentially what happened was that this book scammed it’s way on to the top of the NYT Bestseller List by figuring out which bookstores reported sales to the NYT (to determine what hits the bestsellers list, the NYT’s methodology takes a sample from various bookstores, and this supposedly changes every week). They then ordered thousands of copies of the book from those stores and only those stores – and by doing so, this was all a scheme in the hopes of driving the book to the top of the bestseller list.
The main impetus for hitting the bestseller list was for getting a better chance to have a movie adaptation of the book made with a label like ‘#1 NYT Bestselling Book!’ which would have made it more appealing to potential investors. Butttt all of this was discovered and the NYT sent out a revision where they removed the book on the list a few hours ago.
Someone also compared an excerpt of the book to an excerpt from ‘My Immortal,’ so now there’s a conspiracy theory that the author, Lani Sarem, is actually the author behind that fanfic. She’s also a former music manager who worked with bands like Blues Traveler, and the official Blues Traveler account weighed in and claimed that she was fired for ‘pulling these kind of stunts.’
This doesn’t even cover half the craziness. Some of my other favorite parts:
– The cover wasn’t even revealed until the beginning of August
– The ONLY chatter on Twitter before this was a little blog tour they’d put together, but nothing else
– The distribution company behind this is the same people who distributed Milo Yadablahblah
– Whoever was behind this knew August was the best time to push a book onto the list (as opposed to September, which is bananas)
– Whoever was behind this knew the EXACTLY how many books to order form each store (the number that alerts NYT to start giving you a hard time is like 80 books at indies, so they went around and ordered 79 each.)
– But they were dumb enough to wildly over-order (they ordered over 18,000, over double what it would’ve taken)
– Also dumb enough to straight-up tell the booksellers “This is for an event but it’s okay if it doesn’t arrive”
– The book only has ONE blurb. One.
– No trade reviews. No blurbs from other authors within the community
– The ONE blurb is from an “international bestselling author”
– No. She’s a self-pub romance author who’s besties with LS
– You find all that out in the foreword (who puts a foreword on a YA novel???)
– Also the main character is 25 and there isn’t a single teen in this supposed YA novel
– Also also the cover may have been plagiarized
– Also also also the book knocked The Hate U Give to #2 and Everything, Everything off the list entirely, so people were maaaaaaaad
– And finally, when confronted with all this, the author tried to pull a “#KeepYAKind uwu” in her response to PW.
IT GOT WEIRDER
I’m getting a lot of this new stuff from Kayleigh Donaldson over at Punjabi.com, which was the first site to really pay attention to what was going down, and she’s kept at it even after the list was fixed.
Tara Gilesbie, author of My Immortal, has emerged to clarify that she is not Lani Sarem.
If you haven’t taken the time to sit down and read through the ridiculousness of this story, please do it. Everything about this story is 100% entertaining and wacky shenanigans.
Also, Jenny Trout is recapping the novel (because she loves us), so if you want to read the story without buying the book and get some well-written snark in addition, there’s your link to it.
Read the Jenny Trout article if you read nothing else, it’s hilarious and breaks it down perfectly!
Delicious Fish 