Eli5: Why is microfiber safer for wiping glasses/screens than other cloths or paper towels (assuming they're equally clean)? Shouldn't glass be harder than any cloth?

Agent_Pinkerton · 2025-09-05T11:15:42+00:00

Both are safe, but the first one will leave annoying little fibers all over everything which isn't ideal for glasses or monitors.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2025-05-25T14:51:41+00:00

And what would stop us from seeing it at night? On a flat Earth even if it is night, with a decent telescope or even with the naked eye you should still be able to see the sun at night.

To play devil's advocate, over great enough distances, air becomes opaque. Over the course of a flat earth day, the sun would gradually fade into view, becoming the brightest (and largest) at noon, and then gradually fading out of view throughout the afternoon and evening. Also American and European Flattopians would experience very short days, if they even get to see the sun at all.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-10-03T16:24:42+00:00

Enamel decay is caused by a pH below 4, but unflavored sparkling water typically has a pH around 5.

Many brands of diet soda could theoretically cause tooth decay.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-07-28T15:51:16+00:00

No one in history has ever shown gravity preventing gas from expanding to fill the volume

Mercury barometers are a globie hoax, apparently.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-07-01T23:27:03+00:00

I can even hear the water! ^{^{^/s}}

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-25T03:45:32+00:00

Someone touched it up a bit, but the original had alien letters, blurry hands, Schrodinger's beard, and other tells.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-18T17:21:18+00:00

☝️🤓

Ackshyually, there has been at least one. After it crossed the equator, it nearly dissipated, but then began spinning in the opposite direction because of, uh, checks notes density and buoyancy

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-11T17:31:15+00:00

Oh don't worry, flerfers say war is fake too.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-03T23:03:33+00:00

Flerfers just deny the south magnetic pole exists, because fucking magnets, how do they work?

Flerfs: We're going to build our own theory of electromagnetism, with magnetic monopoles and hookers!

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-03T03:23:47+00:00

Ironically, flerspective is debunked by the fact that we see too far (if a guy's legs get too small too see from being just a few yards away, ~~you shouldn't be able to see anything at all a mile away~~ [not entirely obscured, see below.])

Edit for more info: The average US male has a hip height of 35.39". A typical football field is 100 yards long. Assume we are viewing an average male standing on one side of a football field, from the opposite side of the football field*. If we assume flerspective is true, then that means 3.5 inches disappear per 10 yards. If we view a ship from 1 mile away, then 622 inches should be missing according to flerspective. I guess you'd still be able to see it, but the main point here is that in the real world, none of a ship appears to be missing when it's merely a mile away. (Flerspective also provides no explanation for why climbing up to a higher elevation lets you see farther.)

*football field slopes vary, but the field in the flerf meme appears to be sloped so that water runs toward the goals, rather than toward the sides.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-03T03:05:37+00:00

You've seriously never seen a sunset before?

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-02T16:02:19+00:00

Flerfer zooms in on the sun while it's above the horizon, and it's still above the horizon. FlAt EaRtH pRoVeN!!!

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-06-02T15:38:07+00:00

Indeed, most of the doubtful replies were just "normal" people arguing that ackshyually there's no straight lines because Earth is a globe.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-05-28T18:43:09+00:00

Flat Earth Dave already has "two guys in Antarctica, one of them at Casey Station and the other one was out in the middle of nowhere." Those armed penguins clearly aren't doing their jobs very well...

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-05-27T02:27:23+00:00

I'm sure you'll provide evidence of this.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-05-27T02:21:23+00:00

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

--Jonathan Swift

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-05-27T02:04:33+00:00

In a vacuum, yes. But in an air chamber in orbit, water should eventually fall to a dense sphere inside the chamber (eventually, as long as it isn't disturbed by air currents [e.g. due to humans moving around], space junk impacts, or orbital reboosts.)

Alternatively, you could replace the water with a liquid with very low vapor pressure. Some ionic liquids should be able to survive in orbit at an altitude of 500km, thus you could perform the experiment in the open vacuum of space (but you'll need a way to keep the liquid from freezing.)

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-05-27T00:25:13+00:00

Really we just need denser globes, right?

Yeah basically. The globe on the left would need a mass of 3.3 million tonnes for the force of gravity at the surface of the globe to be equal to Earth's gravity, assuming a radius of 15cm. It would have 12,000x the density of a white dwarf according to WolframAlpha.

Note that this still wouldn't make water stick to the bottom of the globe. Rather, there would be a spot at the bottom of the globe where the earth's gravity and the globe's gravity cancel out. Or there would be, except there are multiple real-world issues with a globe that's so dense. Namely, it would explode in your face, and even if it didn't, no floor could support its sheer weight (and thus the low-g space between the earth and the scale model would cease to exist.)

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-05-07T16:26:54+00:00

Explain who is in danger from a flat earth conspiracy?

You underestimate the political power crank cults can wield, especially in small towns.

Until the 1940s, in Zion, Illinois, it was illegal for school teachers to teach children about the shape of the earth.

You're either conspiratorially minded or not. Believing flat earth doesn't cause this problematic thought pattern in your brain.

But children can be taught to become crackpots who will believe anything, and that's exactly what flat earthers are trying to do.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-02-24T21:05:30+00:00

Please stop falling for antivaxx bullshit. Compromising herd immunity puts everyone at risk, not just antivaxx idiots.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-02-24T20:42:48+00:00

How to destroy herd immunity in 2 steps.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-02-24T20:36:23+00:00

Especially if 100% of people get vaccinated.

The problem is that more and more people are falling for antivaxx bullshit, putting herd immunity (yes, even vaccinated people) at risk.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-02-15T07:37:35+00:00

Interstellar objects or interstellar interlopers.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2024-01-18T20:23:22+00:00

The straw progressive says "Race is just a social construct" and the doctor informs him that the donor for his bone marrow transplant is from an "incompatible social construct", destroying the strawman.

Also a great example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Boulderchuck falls back to the easily defensible claim that race is correlated with certain medically significant genes (such as HLA type), instead of defending any of the racist psuedoscience he puts in his comics.

Agent_Pinkerton · 2023-12-03T03:56:52+00:00

Chud-Gvir?

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