We. Are. Doomed.

[misjavanlaatum@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cstross I feel dirty, but I lowkey want this book. Something like this is most likely transient: it will only be around for a short while.

[petealexharris@mastodon.scot]

@cstross
This offends me to the point where I view it as a malicious attack on childhood.

[yojimbo@masto.hackers.town]

@cmdrSprocket @ariels @cstross That probably explains why my legs are still hairy, dammit

[cmdrsprocket@mathstodon.xyz]

@yojimbo @ariels @cstross Werewolf vibes?

[yojimbo@masto.hackers.town]

@cmdrSprocket @ariels @cstross Only when it's that time of the month ...

[yojimbo@masto.hackers.town]

@cmdrSprocket @ariels @cstross Could be spiderman of course ...

[catsalad@infosec.exchange]

@cstross Tripod kitty is a thing of nightmares!!

[kaito02@mastodon.social]

@cstross Any book nerds still willing to defend reading?

[fossfor@mastodon.art]

@cstross 🫣

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@kaito02 You know what I do for a living, right?

[5cifigirl@starbase80.wtf]

@cstross

Wtf

[davidtheeviloverlord@mastodon.social]

@catsalad @cstross

"Your Mad Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

[arne_mertz@mastodon.social]

@cstross if you make the categories small enough, everything is #1
"#1 best selling encyclopedia for kids generated by a slop bot on virtual meth"

[kookie@toot.cat]

@cstross Absolute nightmare fuel. I can only hope those reviews are bot-ed too

[megalodonnelly@mastodon.social]

@drgoon @cstross what in the world. Why are there 100,000 versions of this book for different demographics by different "authors"?

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cstross "we educated him wrong. as a joke."

[jdebp@mastodonapp.uk]

@HollieK72

If you do a quick search, you'll find that there are a couple of hundred '100000 Whys' books on Amazon U.K. and over twice that many on Amazon U.S.A.; all under different authors. Most of the authors are as fake as the books.

@draNgNon found another, and its customer reviews have people reporting that the book sample has a different author to the Amazon listing, & what they actually received was a B&W photocopy of a book.

One bizarre factoid that I have noticed is that they all seem to try to answer the question of why space is dark. I've nowhere near read them all, but I've seen several that all give the same wrong answer that there is no atmosphere in space. I have seen exactly *one* of these titles that comes anywhere near the right answer to Olbers' Paradox, although still missing the mark, published by a Wunder Press.

https://amazon.co.uk/100-000-Whys-Questions-Amazing/dp/B0H2L5BJD1/

I chuckled when I read its answer to 'why does the Moon change the shape' on page 3 (q.v.).

@cstross @lcamtuf
#astronomy

[ehay2k@mastodon.social]

@HollieK72 @cstross

I think the other 99K or so Whys come from questions about the veracity of the content. e.g. "Why did they say the front and back of the cat were the same?"

[jackpearse@nrw.social]

@cstross

It’s urgently time to shut down this version of the Internet since ist is no „Inter“net anymore.

It is even worse than #Idiocracy
I truly expected sth. like idiocracy to come up over a long time.

But I never ever expected it to become so bad.

[ariels@hachyderm.io]

@cstross I stupidly looked at another #astronomy #fact from this book.
The diagram clearly shows that it is always summer in the northern hemisphere and always summer in the southern hemisphere. Also that sunlight does not arrive at the Earth in a straight line from the Sun.
(I assume angular momentum is preserved by something doing something to the moon. Or perhaps that's explained in the chapter about Venus.)
The economics are truly intriguing:
1. Violate copyrights to build a #slop_machine.
2. Pour everything possible into the blender.
3. Produce incorrect diagrams.
3a. You could literally steal a correct diagram!
3b. Or you could literally use a correct non-copyrighted diagram! NASA have a bunch.