He could have posted something about how the universe doesn’t fit our preconceived ideas and how this day is an example of that and that this means you should dig deeper to get to the truth because it’s usually a lot more complex than what it seems.
But no, Neil woke up and chose dumbassery
That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. He likes to poke holes at commonly accepted things in an attempt to make people think about stuff that they don’t normally think about and make them ask why more often. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, it just comes across as annoying to a lot of people.
“In English, we don’t have a word for spicy” - Neil touchgrass Tyson at a linguistics conference.
I’m starting to suspect that being good at astrophysics doesn’t mean you’re automatically the best at everything else too.
Piquant
Is that a real quote? I’m starting to think Neil is actually hilarious and we’re all missing the joke
I think it was some panel about conlangs? (the inventor of Dothraki was there too). I wish I could find it again.
He haa talked on podcasts before how he enjoys trolling on twitter, I can’t say for sure the OP image is trolling or him being a dork
“I was just trolling” - a 12 year old after he realizes he just said something stupid.
As if trolling isn’t a real thing that people do?
No, but I had to google it to make sure
Should call it jerk day.
Every day is jerk day for me ^because ^I ^love ^well-seasoned ^food.
Right now is pork roll day for me because of your username
Every day is jerk day for me for a very different reason
(Unrelated note: Lemmy’s lack of support for ascending superscripts annoys me.)
Every day is jerk day for me because im a huge asshole
We love u anyway x
Hey. The jerk store called, they’re out of you!
Actually how do you do superscript at all I could never get it to work for me :(
Unlike Reddit, where you only needed a carat at the beginning of the word, with Lemmy you need one at both the beginning and end of each word
^like^ ^this^
.yay
I can get down with this.
Like, seriously Neil.
Axschualllllly… We leap during the night.
STFU Neil.
But, don’t we just like wait a day for the orbit to catch up with our slightly to short calendar?!
Even the smartest of us can have our dumb moments
He has lots of dumb moments since he often uses pedantry to try to sound smart. My motto is nobody likes a pedant, even other pedants.
Once I started to see more of him in unscripted interactions, I lost all respect for him.
He’s so pedantic and has a lot less substance than you’d think… He knows a lot about astrophysics, but his explanations are a lot more shallow than similar science communicators
Turns out, it was the voice - the way he speaks with this sense of wonder really draws you in. Seeing him talk to other scientists, he just AMOGs them into their place without really understanding what they’re saying… But their scientists, so many of them just sit there confused about why he’s being so pedantic about something they didn’t say
This guy is like the anti-Bill Nye. He doesn’t want to share his joy of science with you, he doesn’t want to educate, he just wants to correct you with some stupid ass analogy. Insufferable. No one asked, Neil.
He’s the anti-Carl Sagan more than anything.
I remember seeing some clip where he schooled a batista about some whipped cream that’s melted. Niel, they are just trying to get through their day while not making enough money. They don’t need a thermodynamics lessons in the middle of the shift.
I know it’s autocorrect or a typo but it’s amusing to imagine Neil DeGrasse Tyson schooling the deceased Cuban dictator on melted whipped cream
Should have given him the batista bomb.
It’s amazing how far this guy got as a complete hack. The way people turned on him wasn’t triggered by some dark secret being revealed. Everybody just had their own moment of thinking “wait a second, is this person actually a huge dipshit? Oh my god he is.” I never saw conversations about it or any kind of viral anti NDT sentiment spreading around. It’s just a conclusion everyone reached by themselves. It’s like he had some kind of spell on everyone and ran out of mana around 2015 or so.
Bill Nye is the anti Bill Nye. AMA Hall Of Shame member.
Wut did bill do?
He is extremely rude IRL, which pissed off a bunch of people who later talked about it online.
He defended gay people’s right to exist, which pissed of a bunch of conservatives who later talked about it online.
Pissed off conservatives by saying gender is complicated.
Lmao go bill ig
I know someone who got to interview him once. He spent the whole time complaining about how he never wanted to be a celebrity and just wanted to do the science part of the job and that he hated having to do interviews and talk to the public.
They wound up obviously having no good material from the interview and didn’t have anything to run. It was a very “don’t meet your heroes” moment for my friend.
But yeah, according to himself, he DOESN’T want to share science or educate. It’s a burden to him.
Maybe he’s trying to do some deadpan humor. I say obvious shit like this to my daughter all the time. Like the thing he’s “correcting” here is that metaphors shouldn’t be taken literally. It’s so obvious that I have to conclude there’s a high chance he’s just trying to do a self-parody here.
He does this specific thing way to often for it to be a joke. Also the mirror thing
If he gets a kick out of it and people think he’s serious each time, why not do it more often? IMO that’s a great way to deal with some people vocally not liking you: lean into it to fuck with them.
Like with this one, what would it even look like to someone who believed in literal leap days? It’s a position I have trouble even imagining. Are there even people who hold this position that he’s correcting? Would he have any reason to believe anyone needs this correction?
Assuming that this is the only manifestation of this sort of behavior, sure. It could be a dry sense of humor playing off of taking common turns of speech literally. But he’s been repeatedly shown to be a wholly unpleasant, needlessly pedantic asshole with a superiority complex in his public and personal life. Peoples intolerance of his tweets aren’t only informed by those tweets, they’re also shaped by years of insufferable drivel coming out of his mouth, said seriously and with intent.
I love dry humor and wordplay. This isn’t either of those things. He actually thinks people are that stupid and need a lesson on leap years. His reason is as follows: I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson and I’m better than everyone. People don’t know what I know and I’m going to bless them with my genius in 180 characters or less. Please clap.
Yeah, I’m not trying to say he is definitely joking. But it is something I’d do if I were in his position, so I can’t discount the possibility that he is trolling with some of these.
remember when the Daily Show in the old Jon Stewart days tried to push him as a correspondent for awhile? It was completely intolerable, the man does not understand comedy at all.
Let’s launch all nukes at one place and make 30 February a real thing.
On it, boss 🫡
Probably would knock us onto an unstable orbit so you can either have lots more days or just a couple of years
Not if we will launch at specyfic time and specyfic location to match Earth’s velocity vector. Launching it when Earth is in the apohelium will make the orbit perfect circle with 366 days orbital period. This will solve the leap day and probably climate change. I’m just thinking about using the nukes to speed up the Earth, not destroying in the process.
Good thinking but won’t it just delay climate change for future generations to deal with?
If future generations will stop producing greenhouse gases Earth will be a little colder than it’s now
I feel like in the future, a highly valued skill for anyone in a public facing role is gonna be learning to get off of Twitter/Microblogs.
How many people have ruined their own reputations by just giving the internet a constant stream of their inane thoughts? Regardless of if they deserve it or not.
Umm, ackshully, Niel, it’s called that because it makes each day on the calendar “leap” forward a day as a result.
Lurch
Tyson is an incredibly unpleasant person though. It’s hard to see past his shitty personality.
No no no, calendar is stopping, so March 1 can be a day later. We’re not jumping, we’re waiting for some time to pass before resuming counting.