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French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

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Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#101

Post by s1artibartfast »

unethical_ban wrote: post #55
carlmr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>believe the expert According to his tweet it wasn't so much fake news, but appeal to authority he wanted to make people aware of. https://nitter.rako.space/EtienneKlein/status/15537792036524...

Appealing to authority is not wholly awful. In an instance of a low-risk decision (whether to trust an authority) it seems shitty for him to try to make this a lesson on it. If an Astronomer posts something to a bunch of people who know nothing about space and just like cool pictures, why taunt them with how they can't tell a zoomed-in chunk of fat from a sunspot?

Alternatively, don't believe everything you read.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#102

Post by rrauenza »

Perceval wrote: post #9

This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo. Whereas we have long known that the moon is made of cheese. I think Klein is floating a test balloon to gauge the public's willingness to consume the 'celestial charcuterie' theory of the heavens.

I've always subscribed to the theory that galaxies are actually big pans of paella. Dark matter is simply the saffron, both rare and mysterious.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#103

Post by s1artibartfast »

drc500free wrote: post #61
carlmr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>believe the expert According to his tweet it wasn't so much fake news, but appeal to authority he wanted to make people aware of. https://nitter.rako.space/EtienneKlein/status/15537792036524...

How does he think dissemination of scientific knowledge actually works? 99.99% of people don't have the education to truly verify breakthrough scientific work. It's a lot of pageantry and ethical training to make the appeal to authority more valid, but it will always at its core be appeal to authority.

Hopefully people involved in the real dissemination of scientific knowledge can read more than 144 characters. He indicated in the same tweet thread what it really was.

The fact that people can refence just one part of the thread and have it go viral out of context is pretty symbolic of our modern times.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#104

Post by s1artibartfast »

sp332 wrote: post #73
dalbasal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK if it's that smug. It was just a prank/troll. Possibly, it got a bit more circulation than expected or was less obvious than expected. It feels kind of like a "ha! on your toes" style that translates poorly from personal into online media.

As a prank, it's fine. But they tried to make it a lesson about fake news, which is not very useful.

I mean, it is a pretty good example of how fake news works.

He said in the same thread it was fake. Tons of people retweeted the image without the greater context, and it still carried the authority of having been said by a renowned scientist.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#105

Post by COGlory »

croes wrote: post #53
franciscop wrote: post #3

Cmon we've been joking with exactly this picture for years now on the internet. The other really popular joke one is the pancake that, specially in B&W, looks like a moon! https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pancake-that-resemb...

These aren't the times for such jokes. Many people take this as proof of lying experts that ridicule the non experts. You can make these jokes in your peer group but outsiders of these group may feel degraded.

This is especially the time for jokes. And the more anyone argues it isn't, the more it becomes so.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#106

Post by s1artibartfast »

GravitasFailure wrote: post #98
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what your saying is that it would cook itself as it collapses and somewhere in the process there'd be a point where the sausage is perfectly toasted?

Well, the water in it would first heat and turn to steam as the Chorizo collapses in on itself, which would eventually result in a steam explosion and a Chorizo Mass Ejection. That might disrupt the cooking process a bit, but you may also get some perfectly-cooked Chorizo launched your way.

I don't think a steam explosion would be enough for a mass meat ejection. Stars regularly undergo fusion and that isn't enough for mass ejection unless it it becomes a runaway process in the case of Stellar death

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#107

Post by s1artibartfast »

poulpy123 wrote: post #50
bad416f1f5a2 wrote: post #4

> A photo tweeted by a famous French physicist supposedly of Proxima Centauri by the James Webb Space Telescope was actually a slice of chorizo. > … > Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online While I respect the position that people should always check sources, “person famous in their field posts a lie about something well within their field, then tut…

I'm pretty sure it was an a posteriori explanation for a joke that went wrong because journalists can't recognize a slice of chorizo

I don't think it's fair to say that the joke went wrong. It certainly showed how gullible people are

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#108

Post by s1artibartfast »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #41
nsxwolf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes you feel any better, it's essentially impossible to convince a moon landing hoax believer they are wrong.

TBH, I think extreme skeptics (e.g., flat-earthers) play a useful role in public discourse. They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them. I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots o…

I think there's a similar lesson to be had about the limits of trying to control what everyone believes.

X percent of people believe the earth is flat and XX% percent believe that aliens that abduct humans.

Some people have a huge issue with this.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#109

Post by kadoban »

coldcode wrote: post #66
Someone wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not that much smaller? The density of meat is close to 1gm/cm³, that of the sun about 1.41gm/cm³, but the sun is relatively small for a star and larger stars are less dense. I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a food expert, but sausages have lots of carbon and contain a reasonable amount of water and thus, oxygen, so I don’t see young stars match them chemically. Maybe, some really old ones will, fairly short be…

With the pressure coming from the inside of the star from burning fuel, I think this meat-star would implode since it is just meat. Unless of course sausages under pressure emit energy. How much sausage would it take to start a thermonuclear process?

What exactly happens would probably depend on what type of star it would turn into, give the elemental makeup of meat.

I'm assuming that pressure would cause temperatures in the middle to rise high enough to break everything down to its constituent elements, and then some sort of fusion would start, eventually breaking down the entire thing.

I bet it would be a _very_ messy process, as things explode and implode, burn and outgas. Eventually things would probably settle into a fairly unremarkable star, except with very odd proportions of various elements.

Re: French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo

#110

Post by bee_rider »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #81
Ensorceled wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not "obviously and visibly a slice of chorizo" to me ... google pictures of venus and it's not clear that this photo is in any way clearly a fake to a lay person.

A lay person will know chorizo much better than celestial bodies, at least in Europe. Of course there will always be someone to say they don't know what chorizo looks like but that's life... Otherwise we cannot do anything. Anyway, it's odd that people would argue on this instead of just laughing it off as "well played", but people argue over everything these days...

It must just be a cultural difference, as in the US all our meats are reduced to a fine pink homogenized sludge before being made into anything. Those lumps of fat or whatever -- unacceptable, and what is that a pepper seed? Too spicy!

(Just kidding. Well, mostly kidding).

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