Feedback is 51¶ŻÂțâs 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 doesnât 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 isnât enough time to deal with the resulting slew of mulched half-thoughts. Feedback doesnât want to be that guy in the xkcd cartoon who canât go to bed because ââ.
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So we almost didnât 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, , meaning that a potentially scary incident during the trip didnât take place. However, Kardashian evidently decided that he meant the whole trip didnât happen. This is an extremely bold claim, not least because Aldrin has previously punched a moon landing conspiracy theorist.
But we arenât going to waste time teasing about Kardashianâs lack of understanding. Instead, we are preoccupied with what followed. According to the BBC, NASAâs acting administrator, Sean Duffy, âinvited Kardashian to the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of the Artemis mission to the moonâ.
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 âmoon landing fakedâ.
Do you know why the New Horizons probe took so long (nine years) to get to Pluto? Itâs 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 itâs just because author Andy Weir did his research. Actually, itâs 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
Weâve 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 donât 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, âI had tuned in to BBC1 and was waiting for Grandstand to start.â 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.
âSuddenly the screen showed a single word filling the whole screen,â writes Peter. âI was shocked! Why would the BBC want my TV to display TURD? After a short but discernible delay the image zoomed out to show âSATURDAY ON BBC1â â.
Imagine that!
In case you werenât already in the know, you have until Friday 5 December to submit your work for the next issue of the .
Feedback was previously unaware of this publication, and we have spent some time trying to figure out what it is. âWe publish imaginary research abstracts,â the editors write. âWe 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.â
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 , and some of the abstracts/stories are rather fun, because theyâre such good parodies of academic writing.
We particularly liked Edward Lovemanâs âBeing in-between: A sensory autoethnography of otherworldly lifeâ, about âacademics who have been able to achieve the ability to move in-between dimensions (transdimensionality)â. Alas, Loveman reports, âsuch work has been met with scepticism, cruelty, and belittlement â both within the academy and wider publicâ.
However, he argues that it actually represents âa unique, ever-evolving, fluid connection with existence that transcends temporalitiesâ.
Likewise, Soyon Parkâs offering is called âCan research flourish without a research question?â In this, a âgroup of doctoral studentsâ engage in an âin-depth venting session over coffeeâ, revealing that âtheir struggle was not with the question itself but with the act of questioningâa process that inherently implies and necessitates seeking an answerâ.
Feedback suspects the Journal of Imaginary Research might become a regular in these pages. Itâs just a pity it only comes out once a year.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weekâs and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
