Saturday Giggle --- Flat Earth Society

Long ago, I briefly knew a guy who was a full-on genuine member of the Flat Earth Society. His explanation for why planes can travel around the world and end up where they started is that "it's like following a circle around a flat disc". I never could get an explanation out of him for what happens if another plane flies in a direction initially at 90 deg to the first.

But there are worse things in life. His wife was a full-on schizophrenic who "actually saw" woodland fairies and sprites when walking in a nature reserve. One of their friends could "talk to animals" and... (wait for it...) hear them talking back in plain English.

Yet, for the most part, they all carried on lives that would appear superficially normal to a casual observer.

 

Probably means you would have a hard time explaining mathematical dimensions to him.

 

Probably confabulated with the age of the universe.

 

When I was younger I thought the idea of Flat Earthers was just a fun joke and that they did not exist in reality. Oh, how I miss the naivety of my youth .

ooohkay...

 

Actually, that’s not too crazy Some years back, a paper was published in the journal Nano Letters discussing how nanorods of gold were fabricated in a really interesting “chopstick” formation. The chemistry blog Chembark noticed something really funny about the microscope images that were within the paper—only to reveal the nanorods were photoshopped into the “chopstick” structures. When you look at the images, it’s really badly done Photoshop work, too (actually some were saying that it's so bad, it was probably done on MS paint). It was really quite unbelievable considering that Nano Letters is a very well recognized journal and the paper about the gold nanorods was peer reviewed.



Read the blog post and watch the Sixty Symbols video (I love Sixty Symbols, btw)!
http://blog.chembark.com/2013/08/14/some-very-suspicious-tem-images-in-nano-letters/

 

I had that honour as well and he said the very same thing about dinosaur bones. On the other hand he provided amusement of a level not easily found outside of the circle of professional (and top notch) comedians, so in some small and obscure way my life was enriched.

 

Just goes to show that there is "someone for everyone" in the world.

 

But in the context of "misinformation" it's dead on.

 

The earth is a flat plane on the back of a turtle, I don't see how anyone could dispute that. You can even see the turtle if you take enough drugs.

 

I thought it was supported by 4 elephants that rode on its shell, no?

 

Right. Then there are two serpents that twine around the shell. Their bodies keep the dirt from sliding off.

I used to live in Bali, where there are thousands of models of this. But no, it's just symbolic, they don't really believe it.

 

If it were harmless, I'd agree. But it's not: such people tend to validate and deepen each other's psychopathy. Eventually reality intervenes and their worlds implode, leading to severe mental breakdowns and hospitalization. I've had the misfortune of observing this process a few times at (reasonably) close range. Not pretty.

Like most illnesses, schizophrenia and associated delusions need to be treated when still in the mild stage. Easy to say...

 

Today i met a pilot for Alaska Airlines. I have been debating with my son on the flat earth theory for years. So i asked this pilot if he thinks the earth is flat and he laughed at me and said that it would be impossible to land an airplane on a spinning ball, "Impossible!" he said and this guy has been flying 737s in and out of southeast Alaska for the last 15 years. I just wonder what you guys have to say about that. This guy wasn't a schizophrenic, or married to one or delusional.

 

Could be he thought you were the flat-earther, and humored you to get on with his life.
A possibility is that he is right now he's telling a story of meeting someone who wanted to talk to him about the earth being flat.