Mostly it’s just people discussing whether flour should be measured by mass or volume. Jokes about using some mcburgers per football field -esque satirical units, some joke about using moles instead. Some comment about a funny misspelling in the meme. Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage.

I think you’re taking the trollface in the meme a bit too literally. It’s annoying and unnecessary, and can cause mistakes that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Ahem, the Mars Climate Orbiter is a good example of a particularly costly one.

Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage. It’s merely annoying having to accommodate the outdated quirks of one country. You having to do the opposite is quite reasonable on the other hand, because you’re not accommodating the conventions of one country, but those of the rest of the world.

Fair point. Rephrase: largest English speaking country by internet footprint, global influence or some similar measure.

Thank you for the correction kind sir. My deepest apologies sir. English isn’t my native language. Would you perhaps care to elaborate on the claim made in your previous comment, so that this here conversation may have some substance beyond mere grammar.

Oh I understand it pretty well. I just take no pride in that. If I don’t remember something I can always look it up. Doesn’t mean it’s not impractical nonsense.

Bear in mind that there are multiple countries where English is the largest language and metric is used, and that English is the modern lingua franca. It just so happens that the largest english speaking country has some weird ways to measure things. As such those weird measurements and associated conversions are often forced on anyone who wants to look for a recipe in English, be that their native language or not.

I’m sorry but who are you referring to? I’m sure there’s idiots in every country, but that is quite an outlandish generalization to make if we’re still talking about entire continents.

Oh no. I just want to be rid of the imperial system. I would have no issue with it if it wasn’t a part of my life. Unfortunately I work in a field where imperial units are used world wide (apart from China and Russia for historical reasons). Because of this, I use some of those units myself every day at work. I understand some of them but take no pride in it. The only reason that the imperial system is still used so much is purely by convention. It is inferior to the metric system in every aspect. I do not feel superior to people who use imperial units because as stated above, I am one of them. People who I feel superior to are the ones who delude themselves into thinking that this somehow isn’t purely because of convention. I dislike them because they are forced upon me by international conventions. OP appears to dislike them because recipes written in English force those units into their life.

There is no pride in understanding a nonsensical system of measurements.

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot

• Iain M. Banks

Undeniable DPRK W

A per capita map would also be nice.

They’re right on this one. This picture here is pretty illuminating about the sizes of the views that Hubble captures:

Image source with additional reading. Zooming into an object a couple of meters in size on the surface of the Moon is in a completely different ballpark.

I’m no astronomer or astrophotographer, but this picture of the moon clocks in at around 320 meter angular resolution. That being said, a lot of post-processing goes into a shot like that, so some detail may be lost due to that. The atmosphere of the Earth is pretty difficult to deal with as its disturbances cause fuzziness and shimmering. Stacking multiple frames can help, but it’s still never perfect. Earth based telescopes sometimes shoot a laser up along their line of sight to get an idea of how the atmosphere is messing with them.

For comparison, The Hubble space telescope gets around 90 m angular resolution for objects at the distance of the Moon.

To build on this: The technology to fake it didn’t exist back then.

You’d need either the biggest space telescope ever that doesn’t yet exist, or a lunar orbiter. The latter is how other space agencies have taken pictures of the landing sites.

I did a two minute internet search and every result says that the Hubble doesn’t have the angular resolution for this. It could resolve a football field on the moon, but not anything smaller.

It was made to look at nebulae and galaxies, and those are a lot bigger, even in apparent size.

Focal distance doesn’t matter when the aperture is so infinitesimally small compared to the distances. All space telescopes are focused to infinity no matter what they’re observing up there.

I agree with your first paragraph, but not your edit. People just get attached to their comments. Nobody wants to see their (at least in their opinion) meticulously thought out debunk slamdunk of a comment ending up hidden or deleted. Even more so if making said comment took time and research for sources etc.

I’d say the correlation is pretty good even when accounting for population densities.

That is a good point.

Except that that might explain the slightly different alias on that line. Maybe it’s a message just like the rest, sent for the sake of the meme, and the alias just happened to get typed incorrectly…

The twitter user is an actual commercial pilot, and ACARS messages do look like that. Not sure what’s up with SKW2438/SKY2438 but otherwise it seems legit. I think faking it would be harder than actually doing this.

Edit: Here’s a picture of a much longer message in a more professional, non furry rp context: