this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 147 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Similar with Y2K


it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."

[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 47 points 8 months ago (2 children)

All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We've known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn't been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They're harmless

[–] Killing_Spark@feddit.de 26 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really

[–] hedidwot@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

WTF?

Unless that was sarcasm that I missed... 100's of weapons have been tested on US soil..

[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] hedidwot@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 8 months ago

Not sure what you mean.

The US was inhabited last I checked.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I can't remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.

Like the preventative measures we're so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.

[–] Matombo@feddit.de 26 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's called the prevention paradox: It's when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn't severe in the first place.

[–] IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee 23 points 8 months ago

Case in point: Measles. It was a thing when I was a kid. Then it wasn't. Now my kids have to deal with Measles because we can't teach scientific literacy.

[–] cqthca@reddthat.com 2 points 8 months ago

that waste of effort cold war... /s

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

“Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening

Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 18 points 8 months ago

Elon musk isn't a scientist, he's a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.

[–] Scrof@sopuli.xyz 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well considering Elon situation I wouldn't blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying "you expected for it to blow up" is something no real scientist would've said unless they were making a bomb.

[–] CybranM@feddit.nu 7 points 8 months ago

How is Starship dumb exactly? Making a new thing at any extreme of our current capability is going to be hard and its not unexpected when something goes wrong. What would be dumb is if they put human lives on the line

[–] neidu2@feddit.nl 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I wasn't working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it'd most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.

Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.

[–] Tranus@programming.dev 5 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 29 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The issue wasn't using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.

I'm going to assume you aren't old enough to remember, but the "only two digits to represent the year" issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 21 points 8 months ago

I remember paper forms having "19__" in the year field. Good times

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[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 25 points 8 months ago

You're thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn't need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it's always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn't know if it's 1900 or 2000.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 15 points 8 months ago

With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900...

Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You've got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.

[–] Matombo@feddit.de 6 points 8 months ago

Oh boy you heavily underestimate the amount and level of bad decision in legacy protokoll. Read up in the toppic. the Date was for a loong time stored as 6 decimal numbers.

[–] bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago

Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.

[–] Pandantic@midwest.social 64 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There were goddamn Nickelodeon phone-a-thons where you pledged to not use cfc products. This shit was serious.

Edit: I just remembered ,they talked about how bad the sun was for kids in Australia, or something.

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 41 points 8 months ago

This has since been determined to have tack on benefits in the fight against the climate crisis as well, it's halved the potential growth in global average temperatures by 2100, which cannot be overstated in just how fantastic that is.

We went from everyone being baked alive and having 20 kinds of skin cancer to boot to merely dealing with catastrophic climate change and society changing people migrations the likes of which haven't been documented since the successive eras of steppe invasions into Europe, China, India, and the Middle East.

Out of the fire and into the frying pan.

[–] Underwaterbob@lemm.ee 27 points 8 months ago

And didn't they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 25 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Imagine that... Believing what scientists say? Who does that?

Grinds teeth and silently screams inside his head

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[–] root_beer@midwest.social 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Like he even read the response

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago

The problem is not if he reads the response, it's that the followers won't or if they do, will just fight it.

[–] dditty@lemm.ee 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Matt Walsh be like "What is an Ozone?"

[–] Hexarei@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

It's that one band the numa numa guy got famous for dancing to: https://youtu.be/YnopHCL1Jk8?si=Eaky3c_aYaKBjN0j

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Conservatives aren't used to the concept of "Problems go away when you do something about them."

They are stuck in the mindset of "The problem will always be with us, so just shame those suffering from it and isolate them so we don't catch their problem."

[–] bumphot@lemy.lol 3 points 8 months ago

To be honest, this is not just conservatives.

[–] rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Tell me you are dumb without telling me you are dumb

[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 11 points 8 months ago (13 children)

Right? Stupid science bitch making up things like "chlorofluorocarbons" and "global cooperation."

[–] cqthca@reddthat.com 5 points 8 months ago

the science bitch that invented CFCs also invented Tetra Ethyl Lead fuel additive, "leaded gasoline" was also cleaned up,.. mainly.

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[–] Mobile@leminal.space 3 points 8 months ago

Respectfully, the word should be stupid. Not dumb.They surely did not have a lack of words. They're stupid lol

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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 9 points 8 months ago

There are no stupid takes, just stupid people.

[–] dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Turns out, that the hole in the ozone layer didn't get repaired. In fact, it's larger than it's ever been and above the Antarctic. Antarctica is currently experiencing a mass die-off of animals. We didn't do shit. This is pure climate change copium.

[–] cobra89 13 points 8 months ago

We definitely did something. It just would have been a lot worse if we didn't. In fact so bad that BBC says the planet would have been "uninhabitable."

According to some models, the Montreal Protocol and its amendments have helped prevent up to two million cases of skin cancer yearly and avoided millions of cataract cases worldwide.

Had the world not banned CFCs, we would now find ourselves nearing massive ozone depletion. "By 2050, it's pretty well-established we would have had ozone hole-like conditions over the whole planet, and the planet would have become uninhabitable," says Solomon.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole

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[–] Toes@ani.social 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Misleading post, it seems to imply that it helped significantly.

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