Fun Facts I & II, and a bit of Political Ranting

The actual full moon is smaller than a dime held at arm's length.  All those photos showing an enormous moon rising over a landscape are.... well, they're fake.

I realize that this fact isn't so fun.  We like to be thrilled and awed, and small pictures of a little moon don't do that.  Awe-inspiring fake pictures do.  But truth matters to me.  More than awe, even.

Along those lines, I once got in major trouble over this:

Why?  Because an acquaintance thought it was real.  Snopes said otherwise, and I just gave her the link.  She actually unfriended me on facebook and stopped talking to me after that.  I mean, woah!

I seem to keep running into this, and it confuses me anew every time.  As a scientist, I'm trained to reassess my world view when empirical facts contradict it.  It's hard to be taken seriously if you insist that the moon is made of cheese when a sample of the moon comes back showing distinctly non-cheese elements.

But in personal lives, people seem to cling to the wildest notions, and with a fury approaching manic obsession.  As if the core of their existence depends upon that thing being true.  This happens in politics all the time, as most of us here in the USA have witnessed (again) in the last few weeks.  And as I well know, it happens very easily in personal lives.

For that former acquaintance of mine, I think that she felt really badly about the general direction that her life was taking, especially in her workplace, which was dominated by a couple of drunken asshole guys.  Misogynists, in fact.  She compensated by clinging to things like that video, which purported to show a girl doing something effortlessly that the Big Strong Baseball Man couldn't.  And me coming along and shooting it down -- well, that just made me part of the problem.  Multiply that by 10 years and I suppose that she had had enough.  Which is okay for me, since we were never close.

But back in my world, I have to wonder if it's really worth celebrating something that is false.  Give me reality, any day.  Give me the first female Speaker of the House and the first black President passing historic legislation that 100 years of white men could not -- THAT is inspiring.   Not that I'm denigrating white men -- I am one, after all.  More that I'm celebrating our collective spirit and abilities.

Say what you will about the recent bill, but seriously, you have to recognize the awesomeness of this historic moment.  It says far more about us as a country and a culture than anything else.  I'm sure that politicians will fuck things up again as usual as quickly as possible, but we have still now seen an aggressive and competent woman out-maneuver a house full of men who swore that they would defeat her, and a black man prove that he can out-politic and play the long game better than anyone else.  If this doesn't prove once and for all that we, as humans, are all generally equal in abilities and natural talent, I don't know what would.

Image from here.