BrerChicken

Can you call it an observation if the lens you are using may be faulty?

If you use many lenses you can assure yourself that they are not all faulty in the same way. This is why we can safely say that dark matter is observed fact, because we observe it in so many different ways.

The mass is definitely detectable–it’s just not visible. And it’s detectable in several different ways that all match, that’s the key here. This is definitely an observation.

I think it CAN be harmful to some dogs though!

It’s an interesting idea, but it assumes that physical forces are getting WEAKER over time, and that’s a pretty big assumption. It’s not very parsimonious.

By being a life-long learner! Seriously, learning is an active thing, it’s not something we have to be sitting in a room to receive. So as we read and learn more, we realize that some of the things we learned are different from what we thought. It’s something we should all be doing as we learn and reflect.

I’m not going to argue with astronomers about how they define planets. I do my job, they do theirs!

You wouldn’t call a person a dwarf, period. So don’t do that. If you ever meet a little person, they’ll probably refer to themselves as a little person. You should just follow their lead

A dwarf planet is not a category of planets. It is a category of sub-planetary objects. This is how the term “dwarf planet” was adopted by the IAU in 2006. It did used to mean “type of planet”, but there are just too many of them, and they’re really too different from planets, so it literally does not mean that anymore. At least to astronomers.

I think you’re getting confused with dark energy. There is very little debate about dark matter–it’s an observation that many many many people have made.

Dark energy is the name for whatever is causing the explanation expansion rate of the universe to increase. There’s quite a bit of debate about whether the expansion rate even IS increasing. And the amount of increase is different according to how you try to observe it. So yeah, there’s a lot of debate about whether dark energy is actually a thing, but there is very little debate on whether there’s more matter than we’re able to observe, something that we call dark matter but which we don’t really understand. Similar names, but totally different concepts!

Some classics:

• lactic acid buildup makes your muscles hurt after a workout
• blood that’s returning to the heart and lungs is blue, blood that’s leaving your heart to go do it’s thing is red
• sugar makes kids hyper

All three of those things have been thoroughly debunked, and are demonstrably false, and yet we teach them all the time. Sometimes it’s even SCIENCE TEACHERS that are repeating these things, and sometimes it’s right in the textbook!

An even better idea: make your OWN list! Don’t expect someone else to tell you the truth if you’re not working to search for it yourself!

I second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is one of my favorite Heinlein books. There’s an awesome AI in that book named Mike, and think about him all the time when I’m talking to my Google assistant. Manuel was nice to Mike, and I want to follow in his example.

Can we talk more about your aversion to libraries? You can get great digital and audio books, and I don’t see a big difference getting a digital book from the library versus downloading one from PG. Is it an app issue?